Why has science been left defenceless? A radical proposal from Zeynep Pamuk

The commonest way of protecting an institution is to place it beyond politics. Judicial independence, central bank autonomy, academic freedom — all rest on the same logic.

Zeynep Pamuk's argument is that in the case of science the logic has backfired.

Pamuk, associate professor of contemporary political theory at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Nuffield College, is the author of Politics and Expertise: How to Use Science in a Democratic Society. She wrote the lead essay for the Boston Review forum "How to Save Science".

The forum's occasion is urgent: what it calls the greatest assault on research in the United States since the Second World War — funding cut, grants frozen, graduate admissions halted.

The settlement of 1950#

What Pamuk does is to explain the crisis not by current politics but by returning to the moment of founding.

When the National Science Foundation was established in 1950, a rationale was produced for why the state should pay for basic research. Roughly, it ran: science is an autonomous domain; it works by its own standards; keep it closed to political interference and in the long run it will do society the greatest good.

Given the conditions of the time, this was a defence that worked. But it was, on Pamuk's account, flawed — and the flaw has now become visible.

For the rationale placed science outside public argument. How funding decisions get made, which research is supported and why, who sets the agenda — all of it was treated as a matter internal to the experts.

The result: in the public mind, science came to occupy the position of an institution that answers to no one.

And institutions that answer to no one are defenceless against political attack, because there is no public bond to defend them.

The proposal runs the other way#

The expected remedy would be to strengthen autonomy further. Pamuk proposes the reverse.

Science does, she holds, play a special role in a democratic society; but that role does not derive from standing outside politics. What is required is to recognise the political character of science and to make funding decisions more answerable to the public.

Her concrete proposals fall under three headings:

Stronger legislative scrutiny. Where research budgets go should not be left to the bureaucracy as a technical matter.

Public ownership of patents. If the commercial gains from publicly funded knowledge are privatised, the argument for public support is weakened.

Citizen assemblies. Randomly selected panels of citizens acting as advisory bodies on research agendas.

The third is the most contested, and it is the one at the centre of the argument.

The objections#

The forum was published together with replies. The main objections come from three directions.

The competence objection. Setting a research agenda requires expertise. How is a randomly selected panel to judge what a piece of basic research will yield thirty years hence?

Pamuk's answer is that citizen assemblies are proposed not as substitutes for experts but as advisers to them. She also points out that under the present system the decisions are not made by scientists either, but by politicians and civil servants.

The populism objection. Does opening science to public approval not leave the door ajar for anti-scientific movements on questions such as climate change and vaccination?

This objection was pressed hard in the replies. The counter-argument is that hostility to science already exists, and that it feeds on precisely the sense of exclusion. Keeping the door shut does not defeat it; it nourishes it.

The conceptual objection. "Whose Democracy? Which Science?" — the title of one of the replies. Neither is a single thing, and a general prescription may be over-simplifying both.

Why it matters for Turkey#

Pamuk's analysis is about the United States. But the problem she sets out is a local one.

In Turkey too the arguments about the distribution of research funding, university budgets and academic autonomy turn on a similar dilemma: either autonomy is demanded in order to keep politics out, or intervention is defended in the name of public scrutiny.

Pamuk's proposal rejects the dichotomy. The third option is this: accountability is not the opposite of autonomy but its condition. An institution that can explain to the public why it deserves support is the more resilient when the political weather turns.

The fight over the philosophy department at Dundee, which we reported this week, taught the same lesson: a unit that is invisible, and cannot state its own case, cannot be defended.

A note#

Pamuk's book Politics and Expertise is among the notable contributions to the contemporary literature on the tension between expertise and democracy. It has not yet been translated into Turkish.