Over-reliance on strictly economic justifications has already begun to hurt the quality and range of education at every level of American life.

For much of this decade, both Congressional and administration budget projections showed a decline in science and technology accounts of between 20 and 30 percent in real dollars. The real impact to date has been far less severe.

Literally from the moment I came in the door of MIT, it was very clear that a highly productive 40-year partnership between U.S. research universities and the federal government was badly eroding.

I believe that our office has clearly been the leader in building coalitions, in getting other universities across the contrary to interact more effectively with the government and particularly the Congress.

The thing that we at MIT must understand is the amount of real damage that is being done to us in the fine structure of how research funds are expended.

The term 'cost shifting,' as I use it, refers to those items in a university's budget that used to be reimbursed by the federal government but are no longer paid for by them.

We have been restraining the growth of the cost of education-that is, tuition, room and board-to be within approximately one and a half percentage points of the consumer price index.