ITHACA, N.Y. -- Science is central to research universities, but what are the implications of its growing importance and costs, and who should pay for it? A national conference convened by a Cornell University-based higher education group looks at those issues next Tuesday and Wednesday, May 20 and 21.

The conference, "Science and the University," is sponsored by the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute (CHERI). Most sessions will take place in 115 Ives Hall on the Cornell campus and are free and open to the public.

Harold Shapiro, former president of Princeton University and an adviser to two presidents, George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton, is the keynote speaker at a by-invitation-only dinner Tuesday evening at the university's Johnson Museum. Under Clinton, a committee chaired by Shapiro gave the green light to stem cell research, later blocked by President George W. Bush.

CHERI was founded in 1998 by Ronald Ehrenberg, the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell, to provide a forum for research on issues shaping higher education. Ehrenberg, a former Cornell vice president, said, "The evidence is that universities are increasingly paying for science research out of their own pockets." While the federal government, which benefits from science research, once fully supported the administrative and infrastructure costs of research on campuses across the country, that's no longer the case, he noted. Who pays and where the dollars are coming from are among the questions that conference participants will strive to answer.

"The startup costs for an assistant professor in the sciences today, which usually includes a laboratory, equipment and research assistance, is now estimated at about a half million dollars," noted Stephen Sass, professor of materials science and engineering at Cornell, "with the figure rising to as high as $1 million to $2 million and more for some recent hires with already established reputations."

Sass will moderate the May 21 morning session on the costs and benefits of science. That session, which runs from 8:45 to noon, includes the results of a study on who actually bears the cost of science at universities by Ehrenberg, George Jakobson, a professor of labor economics at

Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and Michael Rizzo, a doctoral candidate at the school. It will be followed by a presentation and discussion among economists and public policy analysts on the shift toward more-applied research at research universities.

Other topics to be addressed during the two-day conference are: where will the next generation of academic scientists come from; the growing reliance on foreign Ph.D. students in U.S. science and engineering, and their contributions and costs; the commercialization of science and the scientific research process, with the activities of Cornell's plant breeding department being discussed as a case study; the effect of commercialization on a range of activities, from the open sharing of knowledge (there's less of it) to research earmarked only for special groups (there's more of it); and whether licensing of products developed through on-campus research actually pays off for universities.

At a lunch for participants May 21 in 217 Ives, Charlotte Kuh of the National Research Council will talk about the NRC's assessment of doctoral programs.

Cornell faculty taking part as presenters, moderators and discussants, and their areas of specialty, include: John Abowd (labor economics), Francine Blau (labor economics), Ronnie Coffman (plant breeding), John Hopcroft (computer science), Ronald Hoy (neurobiology), Lawrence Kahn (labor economics), Sidney Leibovich (mechanical and aerospace engineering), William H. Lesser (applied economics and management), Risa Lieberwitz (labor law), Susan R. McCouch (plant breeding) and former Graduate School Dean Walter Cohen (comparative literature). In addition, faculty from the fields of economics, engineering, management and public policy from Brown, Duke, Georgia State, Harvard, McMaster, Pennsylvania State and Princeton universities, Georgia Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Williams College, are also participating. Other participants are from CHI Research Inc. intellectual property consultants and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

CHERI is supported financially by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Atlantic Philanthropies (USA) Inc. For information on the CHERI conference, contact Darrlyn O'Connell, (607) 255-4424, dss7@cornell.edu . For a complete agenda and to access some of the papers being presented and discussed, see this Web site: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/CHERI .