[9711] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Some Thoughts on The National Science Board
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean McLinden)
Mon Jan 17 16:16:00 1994
Date: Mon, 17 Jan 1994 15:50:07 -0500 (EST)
From: Sean McLinden <sean@dsl.pitt.edu>
To: Stan Barber <sob@tmc.edu>
Cc: Gordon Cook <cook@path.net>, com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <9401171308.ZM25268@TMC.EDU>
For the record, let me say that among the Federal agencies with which I
have had the opportunity to work, the NSF is among the fairest and the
most innovative. Whatever the weaknesses inherent in the peer review
process, NSF has managed (I think) to have come as close to and, perhaps,
surpassed the ARPA of the late '70s and early '80s in terms of the
innovativeness of their research and the balance of their approach. I am
not and have never been a recipient of NSF funds but I will say that
their record in the development of new programs such as those at UIUC and
Lehigh has been stellar.
In part, I suspect that this is because many of the NSF Program Directors
are committed academicians rather than the career bureaucrats that often
plague other Federal agencies.
Whatever the case, while I support reform of the peer review process I
cannot condemn NSF for what I have observed to be a highly imaginative 2
decades of support for innovation.
Sean
