Academic Science Policy in the Clinton Administration

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9321505 Slaughter This research project will examine and monitor the ways that currently developing science and technology policy shapes academic science. For the past fifty years, defense and related agencies and independent agencies concerned with basic research have accounted for a large portion of budgets for academic science. If the current Administration pursues a civilian technology policy, these funding arrangements will change. The objectives of this project are to measure and attempt to explain change with regard to: ideologies of science, budgets and types of science projects, sites for academic science, alliances and coalitions that support academic science. The project will focus on the following three questions: Whose voices and interests will be present and represented in debates surrounding federal science and technology policy? What impact will changes in science policy at the national level --specifically enactment of a technology policy that reshapes the defense conversion and biotechnology agendas -- have on channels (agencies and processes by which money is distributed), levels (international, national, state, local), sectors (industry, university, federal labs), and sites (concrete geographical locations) where science is done? Do discourse and spatial analyses suggest that an institutional class embracing private and public sectors and Democratic and Republican parties has emerged and developed a coherent science and technology policy? The project will monitor documents produced by forum groups concerned with science policy in the defense conversion and biotechnology areas, congressional committee hearings, and legislation, as well as materials from the executive branch, DOD, NIH, and NSF, and perform discourse analysis to understand what new narratives and ideologies of science are emerging. It will track organizational changes in science agencies, budget changes and award allocations to universities, university-industry partners hips, and corporations, and perform time-series data analysis of changes to see who benefits from change, should change occur. The project will gather data about linkages between organizational and institutional actors who share similar science policy ideologies to see if a new science policy coalition or class-wide consensus on defense conversion and biotechnology is developing, and how it intersects with policy agendas related to civilian technology policy. ***