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When I was asked to serve as MIT’s president,
I knew I was accepting the reins of an institution with a long and profoundly
fruitful relationship with the federal government. During World War II,
MIT’s first Dean of Engineering, Vannevar Bush helped President
Franklin Roosevelt see how supporting the nation’s research universities
would spur innovations that would help win the war and ultimately drive
the economy in peace time. Washington sustained this support for MIT
and for research universities across the country through 50 remarkable
years.
Then in the summer of 1990, just before I took office, MIT lost an important
national laboratory —one it had operated for decades —to a state
university with no track record in this field. Opinion on campus was that the
competing institution had won through raw power politics in Congress. This assumption
was not correct, but it made many of us wonder how MIT might strengthen its voice
in Washington.
The Institute had done a great deal collectively to foster trust and understanding
between the federal government and the world of research since the early post-war
years. Our faculty served on key advisory panels throughout the executive branch,
and our administrative leaders had established a strong and highly respected
reputation in Washington.
But by 1990, the climate in our nation’s capital had changed. Congress
had increased responsibility for setting the research agenda, while intense turnover
had obscured its institutional memory of the value of investing in scientific
research and advanced education. At the same time, with the Cold War mercifully
over, many in Congress had lost their enthusiasm for supporting science, which
they had seen as a more or less direct investment in military security. Economic
and social factors were at play, too. There was anger that MIT continued to interact
with Japanese companies, some of which were then trouncing US manufacturers,
and skeptics pointed to serious allegations (ultimately proved false) that Stanford
and other institutions had misused certain indirect costs associated with federal
grants and contracts.
On the other side of the coin, the voice of research universities in Washington
had devolved into a cacophony of special-interest pleading and promotion of pet
projects by individual institutions. Increasingly, projects and facilities were
awarded through “academic pork barrel” earmarks in federal budgets
rather than any semblance of peer review.
I decided then and there that MIT’s president had a natural bully pulpit —and
that I would use it by visiting Washington one day a month to talk with Congressmen,
high-level staff members, and executive branch officials and staff. The topic
would not be MIT or our projects, but rather the profound importance of federally
funded research in providing for the nation’s future health, economy, security,
and quality of life. It was also a chance to promote the long-held MIT principle
of making research awards on the basis of merit, established through fair, objective
peer review.
Shortly thereafter, we were fortunate to hire the most knowledgeable and respected
federal relations person in the university community, Jack Crowley, who immediately
opened a permanent Washington office for MIT.
One of the first fruits of our labors came when the new Clinton administration
developed its first budget. We learned that they were planning to set a flat
indirect cost rate that would apply to every institution. I drafted a letter
to President Clinton explaining why this policy would do great if unintended
harm to the nation’s research universities. But how to get this message
under the nose of a brand-new president? My assistant, Laura Mersky, started
phoning around the White House to find a fax number that might possibly reach
the president. Somehow a secretary in the press office, undoubtedly new on the
job, answered the phone and said, in effect, “Well, here’s the fax
number (senior advisor) George Stephanopoulos uses; it goes straight to the President’s
desk.” Bingo!
The letter was faxed, and a week or two later I received a reply from President
Clinton saying that a uniform indirect cost rate would not be adopted. Was there
a direct cause and effect? I’ll never know. But it surely illustrates the
maxim that the greatest victories in Washington are the things that don’t
happen.
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