ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the role of the President and of the Congress in the fundamental aspects of long-range science policy, namely, the advance of human understanding and the education of the youth of nation—with the welfare and independence of universities. It argues that the time has come to disengage science and higher education from dependence on the Executive branch. The funding of basic research should be tied to technology in each autonomous “province of learning”; that such grandly defined end-needs as “health,” “energy” and “materials,” determine the allocation of resources to the learning that answers to each. The great healing promise of institutional support for American universities lies in the provision of economic incentive for their reconstruction as communities. Americans like to rely upon what they think of as the “natural” and “self-regulating” play of the market as against the deliberate framing of public policy.
