Any Other Stanfords Out There?

Someone eager to make a case against Stanford University might invent a 72-foot yacht, then put it on the university’s charges for federally backed research programs. But an Italian fruitwood commode? One of those was also on the list.

Whether things like that happen because of sloppy bookkeeping or greed--or some of both--is an important question that must be answered. The Feds should aggressively go after abuse at Stanford and at any other university where it crops up.

But whether estimates of overcharges by Stanford that go as high as $200 million are accurate remains to be determined. For now, two things seem certain: One is that the answers will come not from seven-hour circuses like that hosted last week by Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Another is that unless Congress looks beyond the political rewards of grandstanding on the question of how big a school president’s bed needs to be, what will suffer is real work on science, technology and health.

Most schools on Dingell’s target list, such as Johns Hopkins and MIT, will survive the battering. Some of the research they do may not. In a circus atmosphere, research on things as crucial as the mortality rate in the 2000s or America’s role in a global high-tech market can be smothered without even being mentioned.

Costs rise not only because of abuse. As research at all universities grows in complexity, more tends to be done by teams and less by individual scientists working alone. That sends costs sky high at a time private research budgets are down. Washington tries to pick up the slack, but it has immense budget problems of its own. So universities apparently either swallow part of a project’s cost or squeeze their government contracts for every last nickel, and then some.

It’s noteworthy that the California Institute of Technology withdrew $500,000 worth of requests for reimbursement this week because, a spokesman suggested, it would have taken too long to justify every nickel.

He didn’t need to add that Caltech had no intention of going through what Stanford faces.