Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

XLVI Samy Friedman
States of America- but this example is being followed elsewhere- have become
‘big science’ in that they attract substantial investments which, in many cases,
have increased more, relatively speaking, than investments in the natural
sciences. Everywhere, however, with very few exceptions, there is a more or less
marked separation between the university and teaching, on the one hand, and
research, on the other. Everywhere, the financing - if there is any - is haphazard
or badly co-ordinated, in spite of many sporadic efforts to set up central bodies
with more or less extensive functions in regard to science policy. Manpower
resources, which are relatively large in the developed countries, are scarce in
others and, even so, work is hampered, here and there, for various reasons, by
poor research organization and a marked ‘brain drain’.
The situation calls for remedies which are available to States, although this
does not mean that they are easy to apply. The first thing to do is to establish
modem social science institutions. The separation of these sciences from phi-
losophy has not generally been accompanied by any corresponding institutional
reorganization, as a result of which both teaching and research are greatly
dispersed - a situation described by Piaget as ‘tragic’ because it prevents the
necessary regrouping of different branches of science. The next thing is to re-
duce the cultural lag which is too often to be seen between the present state of
knowledge and the university scholar’s idea of his r61e in society - what E. Trist
calls the ‘dysfunctional persistence of academic individualism’. Historically
everything points to the idea that research was left free provided it remained
‘pure’, i.e., left to the isolated research worker, safe in his ivory tower after
going through a few compulsory rites of passage. This phase is no longer fitted
to the situation in consequence of the ever-greater inter-penetration of science
and technology, and the need for collective as well as individual research. As E.
Trist shows in striking terms, the persistence of this dysfunction is revealed in
Europe by the universities’ opposition to any but basic research, and by the
academic individualism which encourages the maintenance of small units,
dissipation of effort and an overloading of the educational system itself, made
worse by the increase in the numbers of students. Individualism can no longer
be the predominant philosophy. The university and society must work to-
gether. New institutional resources should be devised to promote large-scale,
long-term research, which implies new forms of co-operation between official
and professional sources, with due respect for individual freedom, and a new
type of ethics in the relations between research workers in a given group. This
could have important consequences as regards closer co-operation, if not uni-
fication, of the various branches of science and its overall progress.
All this, as E. Trist rightly points out, leads to the conclusion that a deter-
mined planning drive must be undertaken in every field, to secure a rational
distribution of activities among the universities, technical colleges and research
institutes, and the allocation of adequate manpower, having regard to the
present available resources. In the case of small and, more especially, of devel-
oping countries, very careful choices have to be made to achieve satisfactory
development in a few specified directions - since it is impossible to do every-
thing - in other words, to achieve specialization offset by rational development