There is something odd about reports that scientific research at Saudi universities is being hampered by lack of funding and red tape. Red tape is red tape the world over and no one would claim that the Kingdom is any better at bureaucracy than many other countries. However what does not quite make sense, is the lack of money for research.
One of two things has to be happening here. One possibility is that there is a profound dislocation between those organizations that hold the funding purse strings and scientists with red-hot projects that they want to get off the ground. The second is that there is an insufficient number of research programs that has presented compelling cases for being financed.
The answer probably lies somewhere in between the two. The amount of money earmarked for higher education, not least at the prestigious and ground-breaking King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), which is designed to be an international center of academic and research excellence, ought to include funding for post-graduate research. In the West, despite generous endowments, universities are not prepared to throw money around. In North America in particular, the strong links between business and academe, tend to direct research toward areas which are deemed commercially useful. Pure science research is increasingly hard to fund, even though ultimately society as a whole, and Big Business as well, are often likely to benefit.
One of the great draws that KAUST has, as it continues to draw in some of the world’s finest scientific minds, both as teachers and students, is that it has state-of-the-art facilities, with abundant research funding. Maybe not every place of higher learning in the Kingdom is in such a fortunate position as KAUST, but the fact remains that there is no shortage of funding for projects, especially pure science projects, that are deemed worthy of support.
And maybe in this second possibility lies part of the problem. While not wishing to take anything away from the academics who have complained that they cannot get their hands of the money they need for their researches, is it not possible that some of the projects that they have put forward for support, do not entirely deserve funding ? Research for research’s sake is by no means a bad thing. However any scientific investigation, however abstruse, has to make a robust case to receive a budget. That case has to include intellectual and scientific rigor.
One senior Saudi scientist has suggested that some of his colleagues seem to work on the assumption that with the Kingdom’s substantial resources, money will always be forthcoming for any research effort they choose to dream up, no questions asked. He added, however, that while he deplored what might appear to be a waste, by and large, unless the scientists involved were conning their funders, no research, even covering old ground, was actually worthless.
So barring the odd rogue program, such as been seen from time to time among scientists all over the world, the problem would seem to boil down largely to the red tape involved in the distribution of funds, of which eminent Saudi researchers have complained.
Were Saudi Arabia currently having to watch every penny, as in North America and Europe and even Japan, the rationing of research funding would be entirely appropriate. However, this is very much not the case in the Kingdom. The funding here is available, both from the government and the private sector. If a company sees a good opportunity, it will invest, because risk is part of what business does. However things work rather differently with government bureaucracies. For a start, there is a strong chance that the officials involved do not have a clue about the science their organization is being asked to fund. Worse, in-house systems often demand that an over-strict vetting procedure is applied, regardless of how obviously inspired, or potentially useful a research project may be.
Thus is it easy for officials to fob off researchers for many months, even sometimes years, before they decide on whether to put up the requested money. This is a most unsatisfactory situation, which must be changed. The imperative for the new official approach is simple. A single successful piece of outstanding scientific research, that has been properly funded, is well worth the outlay on scores of projects that do not return the hoped-for results.