Making policy for making selves in science and engineering: from Sputnik to global competition

Abstract

This dissertation is a cultural history of the making of policy for education and human resources in science and engineering for the American nation. The main thesis of this work is that national narratives, mostly made up by images of nation, its problems and solutions, as defined by powerful social actors and groups, have significantly shaped policies and program-: for education and training of scientists and engineers since Word War II. Nowhere is this cultural relationship between nation and policy more evident than around the programs in education and human resources at the National Science Foundation (NSF), This dissertation analyzes the emergence of four national narratives, their influence on the redefining the national mission of the NSF, and their impact on the policies that NSF has implemented to educate and train scientists and engineers in the last four decades. The four narratives explored here are: a nation under threat by Soviet science in the 1960's, a nation plagued by its own social and environmental problems in the 1970's. a nation challenged by the technological successes of Japan in the 1980's, and a nation facing uncertain and ambiguous threats under global competition in the 1990's.

After locating these national narratives, this dissertation traces the trajectories of cultural models of the nation into the struggles among different actors that over the past 40 years have defined NSF’s mission. Narratives about the nation and actors struggling to define national problems and solutions shape federal policies and programs in education and human resources in science and engineering. In turn, policies and programs come to define, to a large extent, stereotypic images of scientists and engineers, and in doing so contribute to shaping our understanding of what it means to be a scientist and an engineer in the U.S..