You are cordially invited to attend the Fall 2025 Research Seminar Series of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, organized by Professor Mark Solovey

Julia Menzel (IHPST K.O. Postdoctoral Fellow) will present: 

Austerity Politics and the End of Cold War Science

In-person Event

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, severe and ideologically-motivated cuts to federal research funding in the United States brought an end to an era of “Cold War science” characterized by high levels of state support for basic and applied research and justified by reference to national security priorities. This paper situates the breakdown of the postwar political economy of science within the rise of a politics of austerity in the US, focusing particularly on its consequences for physics. It examines challenges to the postwar logic of state support for basic science in the form of social-scientific audits of federal research programs conducted in the 1960s, which invoked economic notions of “efficiency” and “cost-effectiveness” to cast doubt on the value of government spending on undirected (as opposed to mission-oriented) scientific research. It then shows how “big science”—and high-energy physics in particular—became a specific target of fiscal discipline under the Nixon administration, foregrounding funding struggles between once-influential science advisors and the top brass of the newly-created Office of Management and Budget, who took an axe to physics as part of a broader program of austerity aligned with emerging neoliberal ideologies. Finally, it documents the radical, sudden, and largely unplanned downsizing of the American high-energy physics program in the early-to-mid 1970s, which effectively ended US dominance in experimental particle physics.

Format: short presentation by author followed by extended discussion of pre-circulated paper. 

Pre-circulated paper: This paper will be available 10 days before the event, on Sept. 15th.  To request a copy of the pre-circulated paper, please write to Adriana Leviston  adriana.leviston@utoronto.ca

Wednesday, September 24, 2025 from 1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.

91 Charles Street West, Room VC303 (IHPST Lounge)