0.8 The golden age: 1957-67  (Page 4/10)

Accomplishments during the eisenhower administration

The expansion of the institutional base for space science and technology was one of PSAC’s two major achievements during the Eisenhower administration. In July 1958, Congress enacted the National Aeronautics Act of 1958—essentially an Eisenhower administration bill based on PSAC’s recommendations—which created NASA and a nine-member Space Council under the chairmanship of the president. The Act’s most significant policy departure established civilian control over an area with clear defense implications, somewhat along the lines of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. NASA was given explicit authority and resources to enter into contracts and award grants to non-government investigators, including investigators in both industry and universities. Prior to and after World War II, NACA did award a few contracts, but these were considered exceptional.

The second immediate response to Sputnik was the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of September 1958, which constituted the most sweeping legislation for direct federal aid to education since the Morrill Act of 1862 had established the national land grant college system. A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1957), 169, 170. NDEA provisions included aid to elementary and secondary school instruction in mathematics, science, and foreign language; student loans; and graduate fellowships in science and engineering. Responsibility for administering the act was assigned primarily to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. It also provided a basis for expanding several National Science Foundation education programs, which had been initiated on a relatively modest scale as early as 1954. By the end of the 1950s, science education had become recognized as a legitimate though uncertain component of the U.S. science policy system, with the NSF’s science education budget steadily growing.

In both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, PSAC pressed the case for federal responsibility for science education. Its May 24, 1959, report, Education in an Age of Science , extended the argument of Science—the Endless Frontier for federal scholarships and fellowships in science by making a case for federal involvement at all educational levels. Scientific Progress, the Universities, and the Federal Government (the Seaborg report), released on November 15, 1960, argued that since the federal government had a legitimate role in the support of basic research in universities, it should provide institutional support to research universities in addition to project contract and grant support to individual university investigators. A similar argument made by the Steelman report in 1947 had been largely ignored, possibly because of the scientific establishment’s indifference—and even hostility—to the Steelman board itself. The report led to the creation, five years later, of NSF’s Centers of Excellence program.

Another PSAC study, issued in May 1959, established a not altogether felicitous precedent. Entitled A Proposed Federal Program in Support of High Energy Accelerator Physics , it made an important contribution to policy-for-science by helping to establish set priorities in what was already becoming an expensive field of basic research. However, by arguing for federal support of an exclusively academic sub-specialty, it left itself open to the charge of being, in David Z. Beckler’s words, “an island of academia within the White House”—a charge that would return to haunt PSAC during the Nixon administration.