As President DeGioia has noted, a modern research university has goals of formation of the persons who are students; support for faculty research creating new knowledge, insights, and solutions to pressing problems; and finally, service to the common good in other ways (but often through the products of the first two goals). I am happy to say that this makes working at a university a blast.
We want to recognize faculty excellence in all three of these domains, and we have awards and honorific events at various points in the year to recognize faculty who excel in each of them.
In past years, there was a missing component in the recognition scheme. Last night, in an attempt to repair this, we had a dinner for a small set of faculty who have been unusually successful in garnering external funding to support their and their students’ research activities. The research projects often require multiple persons, the use of special equipment, or the de novo assembly of data. This is a particular slice of the research activities at the university; indeed, there is much more research that is not supported by outside funds. But it’s an important part of our research portfolio.
The process of doing research based on external funding is a tough road these days. Thousands of grant proposals are submitted each year (NSF alone receives over 48,000 proposals a year). The rate of successful proposals is low and falling, given Federal government budget cuts. Some of the gap is filled with private foundation funding, but it’s fair to say that great diligence is required to garner funding in nationally (and internationally) competitive grant programs.
The process in many agencies provides a panel of outside reviewers, who read the proposals in the competition, grade them on pre-specified criteria, and write evaluative summaries. Having spent years writing such proposals, I can attest that the evaluations are critical, sometimes, brutal reviews of the value of the work. Reading the anonymized reviews on your own failed proposal is not fun, yet sometimes leads to improved ideas. But there are limits to resubmitting a revised proposal in many agencies, so the stakes are high in the first submission.
Hence, increasingly, getting a single grant funded is a big deal. Getting a series of grants funded is very rare. But it’s also true that, in almost all of the evaluations of how well a university is doing, the amount of external research funding is a critical evaluative component.
Because of the peer review process, success is explicit validation that the faculty’s work is cutting-edge. And thus the success of external funding strengthens the entire institution.
The faculty at the dinner were those from the Main Campus who had indeed assembled unusually strong track records in external funding for research. We held the dinner to acknowledge their hard work, to celebrate their success, and to let them know we were proud to be their colleagues.
When I looked around the room and saw colleagues from the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences, I was a proud provost.