Concerned that social and behavioral sciences research will be targeted for cuts in federal funding, the Association of American Universities (AAU), comprising 62 research universities in the United States and Canada, including Cornell, released a statement Sept. 17 to member institutions on the importance of the federal investment in such research.

“We make this statement now because of a number of disturbing actions indicating that some in Congress seek to relegate such research to a second-class status in federal research funding by imposing restrictions on it, or worse, barring federal funding of such research entirely,” said the AAU’s executive committee. The AAU’s president is Cornell President Emeritus Hunter R. Rawlings III, and Cornell President David Skorton serves on its executive committee.

These actions include new conditions on funding political science studies by the National Science Foundation (NSF), a dropped provision that would have barred economic health research by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Congressional questions to the NSF regarding the value of specific social science grants and requesting background information regarding the merit review process by which specific grants were selected.

“We understand that there are significant constraints on the discretionary funds that support research and education, and we strongly believe that taxpayer dollars used to fund research should be spent wisely,” the statement said. “Indeed, AAU has long supported merit-based allocation of federal research funds as the surest means of supporting the best science.”

The statement said “actions by Congress to defund or stigmatize entire disciplines of research would severely cripple, in principle and practice, the federal government’s historically productive commitment to the funding of basic research across all disciplines.” These disciplines include anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, linguistics, sociology and others.

 Social and behavioral sciences funded by NSF, NIH, the Department of Defense and other federal agencies, the statement said, “directly support their missions by advancing fundamental new understanding of business and the economy, of human development and behavior, of groups and organizations, of other nations and cultures, and of our democracy and how it can be strengthened. This research has been important to addressing the nation’s most pressing challenges in areas such as national security, education, commerce, health, energy, crime and public safety, and transportation.”

The AAU statement cites natural disaster preparedness; kidney transplant exchanges; market-based tools for the Federal Communications Commission; tools to educate military personnel on nonverbal communication, critical for troops working with non-English speakers; and longitudinal data in science, innovation, income and other economic indicators, political participation, health, violence and social networks, as examples of social science research that strengthened public safety.

“Insights and innovations from the social and behavioral sciences are no less valuable than discoveries in the physical and life sciences,” the AAU statement said. “Moreover, interdisciplinary research engaging the social and behavioral sciences is producing new knowledge and understanding that would not have emerged from research within single disciplines. In fact, many innovations and new technologies, such as touch screen tablets and mobile phones, rely upon knowledge and discoveries from the physical and life sciences combined with insights from the social and behavioral sciences.”

The statement concludes by noting that federal research agencies have been successful through Congressional funding of “fundamental research across all disciplines based on proven merit-review processes and refraining from a political process of picking winners and losers among grants or disciplines. We urge Congress and the administration to provide robust funding for federal research agencies without inappropriate restrictions so that they can continue to fulfill their missions of supporting the full range of scientific research across all disciplines.”