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Big grants, small potatoes

By Katie Toth, Opinions Editor

 

On Oct. 25, the Resource Recovery Fund Board, an arms-length provincial crown corporation, announced the RRFB Student Grant Program. This grant finances student projects that research and develop ways to identify “new opportunities for problematic materials currently in the waste stream,” according to a recent media release.

The board manages the Resource Recovery Fund, a Department of the Environment fund devoted to reducing, reusing, recycling and recovering resources. The board has set aside finances to encourage and support those academics whose work in waste recovery will “create some real opportunities for the business community,” as Bill Ring notes. Ring is the Chief Executive Officer of the Resource Recovery Fund Board, and he hopes that this program will “support universities and students.”

I respect the RRFB for creating student research opportunities with a sustainable focus. However, I’m concerned about what it means in the wake of Tim O’Neill’s *Report on the University System in Nova Scotia*, which emphasizes a series of recommendations on how to streamline expenses in the system.

As these grants are made available, the Department of Education is simultaneously considering O’Neill’s proposed cuts to postsecondary education. It looks like we’re moving into a supply-and-demand framework for our universities.

Tim O’Neill’s ninth recommendation in his report is to “encourage more research, technology transfer, and commercialization.” While O’Neill does not suggest that grants be earmarked for applied research, the RRFB’s programme does seem to have similar end goals.

If general university funding is cut while these hand-picked funding schemes for commercially viable projects proliferate, researchers must constantly chase the next commercial opportunity rather than pioneering academic (and applicable) ideas. How can a university give its researchers the background they need when there are no tenured faculty participating in the community or keeping up-to-date on contemporary scholarship?

Project-related grants can also pressure students to steer their work toward results that appease their funding sources. That’s when corporate funding for specific projects becomes another problem. A recent survey of researchers in the United States found that 15.5 per cent of respondents had changed the research design, methodology or results due to pressure from a funding source, according to a Canadian Federation of Students 2009 membership advisory on whistleblowers.

That same advisory notes that 40 scientists wrote a collective letter to the journal **Science**, in which they said that matched funding requirements (in which university funding is expected to be matched by a corporate sponsor) were “eschewing scientific excellence” by forcing researchers to constantly commercialize their work. This pressure will increase if strings-attached grants are the only growing source of research funding.

When we we create programs that focus on the bottom line, we create shoddy science.

Yes, research should be applicable to the economic sector and real life situations as a whole. However, research has traditionally found its practical application in unexpected places. Look at the production of aspartame, for example.

O’Neill does not make a recommendation as to whether policy makers should mandate universities to engage in applied or theoretical research. He does take the time to suggest that taxpayers may well have a right “to expect more tangible benefits from this research than the satisfying of academic curiosity.”

Unfortunately, O’Neill seems to think that the reason professors and faculty struggle for academic freedom is so they can smoke a pipe in the drawing room while looking at old dinosaur bones together. That’s simply not the case.

Academics want to follow “the paths towards which their curiosity and experience lead them” not only because they have some sort of hard-on for esoteric knowledge, but because the kind of creativity that breeds good, accurate research is often stifled when researchers must work to make their project more commercial.

When we aim for market applicability rather than quality,  the market receives a mediocre product. Nobody wins.

I asked Bill Ring where he was finding room for student research in the Resource Recovery Fund’s budget.

“It’s always a problem,” Ring responded with a laugh. “But we identified that this was something we should start budgeting for, and … we bit the bullet on it.” An arm’s-length operating corporation managing waste: long-term viability?

I support the work of the RRFB and their decision to make academic work which pertains to their mandate a budget priority. They’ve created an exciting opportunity for intelligent, ambitious young minds.

But our minds deserve more. We deserve the kind of stable postsecondary funding that allows us to complete our undergraduate degrees or follow our academic pursuits.

Nova Scotia’s Department of the Environment can put aside a few hundred thousand dollars to hire student research. So why can’t the Department of Education put aside the kind of real money that will make research and education sustainable? Then, and only then, can we research garbage to our hearts’ content.

These sorts of private grants must be a layer of icing on a well-made cake. Otherwise, education might look pretty, but it will be stale, tasteless and impossible to digest.

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