David L. Goodstein is vice provost and professor of physics and applied physics at the California Institute of Technology. In several articles published in recent years, Goodstein has argued that American research universities are producing an oversupply of Ph.D.s in the sciences. In this interview, Goodstein discusses the reaction to his articles, among other matters. the interview was conducted by William Trombley, senior editor at the California Higher Education Policy Center.

William Trombley: You have been arguing that American universities produce too many Ph.D.s in science. Are you making that case successfully?

David L. Goodstein: I think I am in the following sense. When I first became exercised enough to sit down and write something about this issue, it was because some very well-known people, all of whom have since become presidents of major universities, were writing articles saying there would be a shortage of professors and a shortage of scientists by the end of this decade. And I knew that was utter nonsense. So I wrote the article pointing out that the time for shortages of such people ended 25 years ago, forever. And tried to explain a little bit about why.

I am making progress, to answer your question, in the sense that it's no longer considered heresy. It's now the main line, it's the mainstream, it's the received wisdom that the era of exponential growth is finished, and we face an over-supply of people who want academic-type jobs.

WT: When did you first start to make this argument?

DG: I first started to worry about this in 1970, which is when the crunch really hit. In my view, the academic world has been trying very hard to pretend that nothing has changed since 1970. I think the end of the Cold War basically exposed the situation--it didn't create the problem, but it made it impossible for us to claim the problem didn't exist.

WT: Did this begin with internal memos?

DG: Yes. I wrote an internal memo just for my colleagues here at Caltech, in which I said this long period of exponential growth just can't continue. And we as scientists all understand the nature of exponential growth: Positive exponentials never go on forever.

WT: You write that if Ph.D. production continues at its present rate, eventually every man, woman and child in the United States will have a doctorate in science.

DG: That's right. And my colleagues here at Caltech couldn't argue against what I said about exponential growth, because they understood that. But they thought that the solution to the problem would be for everybody else to go out of the Ph.D. business and for Caltech to go on doing exactly what it's always done. And of course, any time I've spoken about this at any university anywhere in the country, the faculty always has exactly the same response: Everybody else should go out of the Ph.D. business, but they should go on doing exactly what they're doing.

WT: If I understand you, the Caltechs of the world should continue doing what they're doing, but the Oklahoma States, or whatever, should not.

DG: Yes. But the problem with that is that if you analyze it, you find out that they're only producing two percent of the Ph.D.s, that it wouldn't make any difference if you lopped them all off.

WT: So where are the largest numbers?

DG: In good places. There is no simple solution to the problem. I should say that we in science are relatively better off than comparable people in other fields. For example, what I tell you about science Ph.D.s is true in spades of Ph.D.s in the humanities. In science, after all, if they can't get jobs teaching at universities or colleges, they can find other jobs. There's very little unemployment.

WT: Have people from other universities been critical of your opinions?

DG: I have taken surprisingly little heat on this. It may be that it's only been seen by twenty or thirty thousand people, but they turn out to be important people, and I know that copies have been sent around in Washington to everybody with any influence in science policy making. I occasionally get some vehement disagreement. I gave a talk on this at UCLA last spring in a seminar, and one of the people in the audience was Dave Saxon, a physicist who used to be president of the University of California. When I finished my talk he was absolutely livid. I've never seen anybody so angry.

WT: What was his objection?

DG: I don't remember exactly. I said that we had gone into an age of denial in which our leaders just thought we would return to a golden age of exponential expansion if we waited out the problems long enough. But by and large, what I get is a lot of interest, and a lot of people saying, "Gee, I never thought of it that way."

One of my arguments is that if the times in Washington were to change dramatically and Congress were to suddenly double the funding for research and science, all we'd do is tack on two or three more years of exponential growth and we'd be back in the same situation we're in now. So the problem we have is one of our own making; it's not the fault of the government. Now, it would be a natural conclusion of people reading what I just said to think that my solution is what you might call Ph.D. birth control--shut down the departments or close down the number of people that are admitted to Ph.D. programs. I want to say that I really don't believe that.

I find it impossible to believe that the solution to our problems is less education. I'm sure that the solution to our problems is more education, but it may have to be a different kind of education. It may have to be an alternate system of education.

First of all, we should not destroy the Ph.D. program as it exists now. It is really the jewel in the crown of our education system, we know how to do it better than anybody else in the world. We turn out the best research scientists in the world, and we shouldn't do anything to threaten that.

Second, if you step back and look at the situation in physics, which is my field, where I understand what's going on best, there's something like 20,000 high schools in the United States that don't have a single qualified physics teacher. So it seems to me that there is a solution to this problem. But the solution involves a dramatic change in the way we regard high school teaching, and pre-high school teaching, in the United States. Not only in what we pay teachers, that's not really the most crucial part of the problem. It's much more a matter of how much respect we accord teachers and the professional responsibilities we give them.

WT: You first brought this up here in 1970. Have you been maintaining this debate within Caltech since then?

DG: It hasn't exactly been a crusade of mine, because after all, you have to understand that my colleagues were right when they said that Caltech should not go out of the Ph.D. business. It's elitist and it's very difficult to say in a way that doesn't sound arrogant, but the fact is, we will always need the very best scientists, and this is a place that turns out the very best scientists. And so the Ph.D. problem is not as pressing here as it is in other places.

WT: What effect will the proposed federal research cutbacks have?

DG: Well, I don't think that that's the cause of our problems. I think that our problems are caused by us. Many analysts feel that the United States devotes too little of its gross domestic product to research compared to other countries. Many of us have pointed out that the government has been relatively generous with research. Private industry has been reducing its support of research, by and large.

Also, the government has had a kind of ideological change, where it doesn't feel that it ought to support what we used to call applied research. Also, of course, the Defense Department is shrinking, and that's an important component of research.

So the most optimistic projections I hear is that the core agencies for basic research, by which I mean the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, may stay constant in nominal dollars. But that means they will lose maybe a third of their value over the next seven years due to inflation. So the size of the research funding is likely to decrease a great deal in the foreseeable future if Congress follows through in its intended course. But I think you have to separate the two issues. One of them is, should we be devoting more of our national treasury to research? And the other one is, should the scientific community do something about the dilemma that we put ourselves in? The rate at which we produce Ph.D.s, all of whom are now hungry mouths clamoring for money for research, is governed only by our threshold for pain.

Before the end of the exponential growth, we were limited by our imagination, by our ability to do pure science, to uncover the secrets of nature. When the big crunch came around 1970, we became limited by the availability of resources.

It doesn't really matter how generous Congress is in that sense. It may be better for the country if they double the size of the research effort and we have twice as much research going on. But we'll still be limited by our threshold for pain.

WT: Do you still debate this with people here at Caltech, or do they regard you as an odd person?

DG: Nobody here at Caltech disagrees with my argument. I think that everybody at Caltech believes, as I do also, that we at Caltech should not stop doing what we're doing, because somebody has to produce the very best. And that puts us in a privileged position. And it makes it somewhat embarrassing to me. It may be that if I were at a different kind of institution, I would be more personally affected by the situation, but I would be less detached. It would be part of my special pleading. In this case it's not special pleading. We (at Caltech) are not hurting particularly. But I think we as a profession and we as a nation are hurting.