ABSTRACT
Globalization is re-shaping networks that organize and integrate science and engineering research, and the functions that research universities play within these networks. Complex research problems outstrip the capacity of even the best-funded institutions. Rising costs are driving adaptation as institutions seek participation in distributed arrangements and partnerships. Faculty research is located along transnational pathways and supported by collaborations and shared funding arrangements that must negotiate not only different legal and regulatory environments, but the often-bewildering diversity of institutional cultures in the universities and other organizations that participate in these networks. Globalization poses new risks and opportunities for every research university. The moment is transitional, and the outcome uncertain. Frameworks for global research are emergent, and protocols of collaboration and competition are unresolved. Overhead costs are high for universities, but opportunity costs for delaying entry may be far higher. Viewed through a different frame, however, the continued development of advanced global research rests on its workforce, particularly on the mobility and entrepreneurship of highly talented early-stage scientists and scholars. These mobile postdoctoral researchers move to leading centers around the world to find opportunities to work with senior investigators in state-of-the-art facilities in order to lay the groundwork for their careers (Adams & Wilsdon, 2006; UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2009). It is the mobility of these postdoctoral researchers that helps build and sustain the productivity of the global research enterprise. The first pulse of this global movement came nearly a century ago when it was recognized that talented and ambitious young U.S. researchers could benefit from exposure to the centers of science in Europe. Leading universities faced a shortage of leading research scientists who could help the U.S. catch up with Europe. Few institutions had such talent within their own ranks. The development of the research-based doctorate and the postdoctoral fellowship were innovations to meet the calls to improve national standing in science and advanced research. Postdoctoral training allowed promising young researchers to spend a year or two working in a well-equipped laboratory under the
192
tutelage of a senior scientist, free from other commitments. From the outset, this advanced training was an international undertaking, as postdoctoral fellowships sent Americans abroad and brought talented young researchers to the United States. The circulation of gifted and ambitious postdoctoral researchers among universities and research centers in the United States and Europe foreshadowed the closer global linkages and collaborations that have arisen with such speed among universities in the twenty-first century. The idea of the postdoctoral fellowship emerged during World War I, when the National Research Council (NRC) came to grips with the problem that the research capacity of the United States badly lagged behind that of Europe (Assmus, 1993). The NRC concluded that doctoral education was not closing this deficit. Tensions between the teaching and research missions of the university had become acute with the growth of graduate education in the pre-war period. Critics charged that the rapid expansion of doctoral education diluted talent, with many students engaged in merely repetitive technical work. Further, most universities were ill-equipped and faculty were insufficiently experienced themselves to mentor young researchers. Doctoral students and freshly appointed young faculty spent too much time teaching and too little in the laboratory (Hawkins, 1979). In 1910 the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching noted that “in many institutions, the creation of a graduate school has practically put an end to research,” and that while the interest in research had grown in American colleges, this growth “was in no such proportion as the graduate school has grown, and the growth of one has had too little to do with the growth of the other” (Curtis, 1969, p. 8). In 1919 the NRC created the first postdoctoral research fellowships as a mechanism for identifying and supporting promising young scientists at the start of their research careers. The NRC also sought to stimulate a greater commitment to research within the leading universities that hosted these predoctoral fellows (Curtis, 1969; Rand, 1951). The first fellowships were awarded in physics and chemistry, followed by additional awards in the medical and biological sciences. The postdoctoral fellowship helped give birth to a second innovation: the formation of the research group. Postdoctorates took on the role of day-to-day management of laboratories of leading scientists, helped train doctoral students in the laboratory and research skills, and freed the senior scientist to pursue funding and to supervise the ideas that channeled the daily operations of the group (Etzkowitz, 1992). The postdoctoral fellowship begot a third innovation, as many of the most talented of the first generation of postdoctoral fellows traveled to leading centers in England, Germany and elsewhere in Europe for research training.1 The NRC provided a number of international fellowships in its first several years, but it was the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Education Board (IEB), established in 1923, that became the primary funder for the development of
international postdoctoral research and training.2 In its brief history, the IEB built the first scaffold for the international mobility of scientific research (Curtis, 1969; Gray, 1941; Kohler, 1985). The IEB awarded grants to selected European research centers to help them recover from the turmoil of the postwar years, and established a system of postdoctoral fellowships to support the advanced training of talented young U.S. and European scientists at these centers. Between 1924 and 1933 the IEB funded 509 researchers from 35 countries to take postdoctoral appointments in the natural sciences in the United States and Europe. These postdoctoral fellowships had an immediate impact on U.S. university-based research and doctoral education, and fostered a new degree of international collaboration. Their significance can be seen in the development of the career of David Dennison who, as a new PhD in physics at the University of Michigan in 1924, accepted an IEB award to pursue his research in Europe. A year earlier, Oskar Klein, a colleague of Niels Bohr, had visited Michigan to teach the first advanced courses in the new field of quantum physics. While in Ann Arbor, Klein helped advise Dennison on his research and arranged a visit by Bohr, who, impressed by the quality of Dennison’s work, invited him to his new IEB- funded Institute for Physics at Copenhagen. Dennison spent the next three years developing his research and working with leading physicists in Copenhagen, Zurich and Cambridge. In 1927 he returned to Michigan to take up a faculty appointment. He was soon joined by Otto Laporte, George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goldsmit, highly accomplished theorists he had met in Europe and who formed the University of Michigan’s first research group in quantum mechanics. The consequences were far-reaching for U.S. science and physics research: their collaboration led to Michigan’s Summer Symposium on Nuclear Physics, which convened leading theorists from around the world in the 1920s and 1930s to work out fundamental problems in quantum mechanics (Coben, 1972; Dennison, 1974; Meyer, Lindsay, Barker, Dennison & Zorn, 1988). The NRC recognized the decisive impact that these investments had made in such a short time, and in 1934 redirected funding to other fields (Rand, 1951). Dennison’s postdoctoral experience had a transformational impact both on his career and the development of theoretical physics in the United States. The IEB and NRC awards presaged the massive growth in postdoctoral training that followed World War II, when federal agencies became the principal funders of postdoctorates to help fuel the rapid expansion of the U.S. science and engineering workforce. In 1946 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) initiated its postdoctoral fellowship and training grant programs, and the National Science Foundation (NSF ) followed several years later on a much smaller scale. By 1963 NIH funding supported nearly 7,000 postdoctoral positions, and the NSF funded nearly 250 early-career researchers in the natural and behavioral sciences and engineering (Curtis, 1969). Sources for
194
postdoctoral funding diversified in the following years, and by 1994 federal research grants funded just over half of 36,158 postdoctoral appointments, and non-federal sources funded nearly one-third (NSF, 1994). The postdoctoral fellow became an essential part of the workforce of the university research enterprise, and such an appointment was soon considered a requisite transitional stage for a research career. The NSF ’s 2006 Survey of Doctorate Recipients showed that 45 percent of persons who had earned U.S. PhDs in science, engineering and health fields within the previous five years followed their degree with one or more postdoctoral positions, an increase of one-third over the 35 percent of SEH degree recipients who had taken up postdoctorates two decades earlier (Hoffer, Grigorian & Hedberg, 2008). Over the past three decades, growing numbers of non-U.S. citizens have come to the United States for doctoral education. Equally, postdoctoral opportunities in the United States have attracted talent from around the world. These knowledge migrants raised concerns about the impact of a “brain drain” to the United States on scientific and economic development elsewhere in the world (Bekhradnia & Sastry, 2005). The end of the Cold War opened new pathways for young talent to follow ambition across once-closed borders. The United States remains the greatest beneficiary. During the fiveyear period from 1960 to 1964, non-U.S. citizens with temporary visas received 10.2 percent of PhDs awarded by U.S. institutions in all fields; by 2002-2006, when the number of doctorates awarded had nearly quadrupled from 58,699 to 211,886, this share had increased to 27.8 percent (NSF, 2009; Thurgood, Golladay & Hill, 2006). The growth in the number of postdoctoral fellowships awarded to non-U.S. citizens saw a similar four-fold increase. In 1977 just over 6,000 non-U.S. citizens/non-permanent residents held postdoctoral appointments, comprising about 32 percent of these positions. In 2006, about 28,000 non-U.S. citizens/permanent residents held just over 57 percent of all postdoctoral positions (NSF, 2008). For many researchers around the world, a postdoctorate in Europe or the United States has become a critical step for early-career development (Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy, 2000). The global pull of the U.S. doctorate feeds part of this workforce, as many international students who earn PhDs in the United States opt to stay for a postdoctoral appointment. An NSF survey of Chinese engineering and science students showed that over 30 percent intended to remain in the United States for postdoctoral research (Johnson, 2001). Yet, not surprisingly, 80 years after Dennison’s sojourn in Bohr’s laboratory, the motivation for a U.S. PhD to look for postdoctoral positions overseas has weakened. New PhDs who are U.S. citizens often are reluctant to move outside the U.S. postdoctoral research network and risk the chances of finding a good job.3 Other countries are catching up quickly to the United States, investing in postdoctoral research positions and encouraging the mobility of top young
researchers. Member states of the European Union are investing in the expansion of the science infrastructure and increasing the size of their research and development workforces. While the postdoctorate was uncommon in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, nearly one-quarter of PhD recipients who completed their degrees between 2002 and 2007 took postdoctoral positions in higher education institutions (Haynes, Metcalfe & Videler, 2007). Cambridge has about 3,000 postdoctoral positions, roughly equal to the number of doctoral students and faculty, and 80 percent of these appointments are held by non- UK citizens (Salje, 2007). Britain’s anxiety about a brain drain, when many of its most talented researchers went to the United States for postdoctorates and a fair proportion remained, has given way to the expectation that the most highly skilled researchers will spend a portion of their early careers overseas and then return; a higher percentage of persons who have held postdoctoral positions abroad have a greater number of highly cited publications and attribute career benefits to their experience (Bekhradnia & Sastry, 2005). The postdoctoral position was also uncommon in France before the 1970s. Most PhDs found permanent government positions and most scientists were employed in universities or national research institutes and centers. In 1996, fewer than 20 percent of French doctoral recipients took postdoctoral positions, and two-thirds of these were outside France (Martin-Rovet, Terouanne, Thibaud & Neher, 1998). In the mid-1990s, in part because of the difficulty of finding research employment in France, at least 1,500 young French scientists held postdoctoral positions in the United States, but no more than 100 U.S. researchers worked in France (Martin-Rovet & Carlson, 1995). The creation of the European Research Area in 2000 has helped lower barriers to postdoctoral mobility within Europe, and countries have established prestigious programs to identify and attract the most talented researchers. The creation of a new postdoctoral designation in Germany, junior research group leader, has opened an alternative to the arduous postdoctoral Habilitation thesis that has been the traditional qualification for securing a professorship. This new option fosters the development of highly accomplished early-career researchers ready to move directly into faculty positions when they have established an independent research program. These positions represent only a small portion of Germany’s postdoctoral positions, however (Hornbostel, 2007).4 Across Europe, a number of flagship awards share a similar purpose with the IEB fellowships from over 80 years ago. The Humboldt Foundation supports German postdoctoral fellowships abroad and funds highly talented foreign researchers seeking an opportunity in a German research center. The Rubicon program of the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research is a comparable program, and others are located elsewhere in the European Union. At the regional level, the European Research Area has implemented highprofile postdoctoral awards. The Marie Curie Networks provide postdoctoral research opportunities and encourage cross-border mobility of young E.U.
