Dartmouth recently earned a number five ranking, not for selectivity or academic excellence, but for the amount of pork barrel spending it receives, according to a new report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
In fiscal year 2003, the College received $29.5 million in non-competitive Congressional earmarks. Over the past five years, the figure has totaled just under $100 million.
Earmarks are appropriations that Congressmen give for projects involving specific colleges and universities, bypassing the normal competition for federal funds. Earmarks for colleges and universities are often called academic pork, as Congressmen attempt to bring funds to their home states. This type of federal spending has ballooned in recent years, from $300 million nationally in FY 1996 to $2 billion this year.
Last year, Dartmouth received more academic pork than any other Ivy League institution. Brown received the next highest amount, $4.9 million in FY 2003, placing them 96 in the Chronicle's survey. The New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology ranked first by a wide margin with $56.1 million.
Much of the money comes from influential New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, who sits on the Appropriations Committee and chairs a subcommittee which appropriates money for the Commerce, Justice and State Departments. Gregg served as an ex officio member of the College's Board of Trustees when he was Governor of New Hampshire from 1989 to 1993.
The project that received the vast majority of Dartmouth's earmarked funds is the Institute for Security Technology Studies, run by the Thayer School of Engineering. It has received $78 million over the past four years and $21 million this year. It is also slated to receive $5 million in FY 2004. The earmarks mainly come from the Departments of Commerce and Justice, whose spending is set by the Subcommittee that Gregg currently chairs, according the Chronicle report.
ISTS originated out of a conversation that occurred four and a half years ago between Gregg and Lewis Duncan, the Dean of the Thayer School of Engineering. According to Duncan, Gregg said two years before Sept. 11 that he hoped one of his legacies would be counterterrorism. With no coherent program to fight cyberterrorism at that time, despite two directives from President Clinton to create one, Duncan suggested that Dartmouth could fill this national need.
In FY 2000, Congress appropriated its first $15 million to begin ISTS, which is located one half mile from campus on Lyme Road. It currently has a full time staff of 50 and employs many undergraduate and graduate students.
Its mission is to study methods of protecting critical information systems such as infrastructure, the economy and national defense from cyberterrorists and hackers. Additionally, ISTS is involved with first responder technologies.
ISTS is also a member and administrator of a 24-member consortium called the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection. Comprised of academic institutions, non-profits and federal laboratories, I3P brings industry, academia and government together to address how to protect our information infrastructure.
Critics of the millions of federal dollars spent on ISTS and I3P say that it would have been better spent on other centers around the country instead of building a new center at Dartmouth. They also complain of overlapping responsibilities of the National Science Foundation, National Academy of Sciences and other schools, which produce similar work.
Duncan, however, fiercely defends the program.
"ISTS is in keeping with the principles Dartmouth holds to -- that it be a demonstrative national need, it is complemented by Dartmouth's strengths as an institution, it is of the highest quality scholarship, and it had no other reasonable means of receiving funding," he said.
He said that the reason why many criticize the program is because many of the Institute's findings are not publicized due to their sensitive nature. He also stressed that what would be defined as "pork" is simply Congress exercising its constitutional authority to appropriate money as it deems fit.
According to Duncan, no comprehensive center for the study of information security existed before ISTS, leaving only certain private initiatives. After Sept. 11, others also entered the field of cyberterrorism, which he said may create redundancies in research.
"Everyone is trying to proclaim that they've been doing this all along, but Dartmouth was the first, and the first to address the problem holistically," he said.
Other earmarks include $6 million from the Department of Commerce to research how to genetically engineer biomass -- such as leaves and sugarcane -- to produce ethanol. Currently the gasoline additive is inefficiently produced from corn.
$2 million was also appropriated through the Small Business Administration to help develop minority-owned businesses, but these are only one-time earmarks, as compared with the continued commitment of the federal government to ISTS.
"In some ways they are the young Jedi of the Internet to protect us from terrorists and hackers," he said.
