West Coast History of Science Society Meeting

University of California, San Francisco

April 11th - April 14th, 2002

[Program]

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Research management at UCB in the 1960s: Freedom or control of the researcher?

Asa Andersson
University of California, Berkeley

By the 1960s, the impact of external funding on American science had led observers to pose questions about the system of increasingly goal-directed management.  This paper explores the mechanisms set up for managing research within universities, widely viewed as outposts of intellectual autonomy, and analyzes the reactions of university researchers to the new control mechanisms.  The setting is the system of organized research units (ORUs) at the University of California, Berkeley.  The paper considers two examples.  The first is the criticism that a certain class of non-faculty researchers, professionals attached only to ORUs, did not have the right to be principal investigators, i.e., did not have the right to initiate research.  The second example is the process for formally reviewing ORUs and the extremely negative attitudes surrounding it.  The analysis is built around central notions from political theory, namely, justice, freedom (positive and negative), and autonomy.