We are attempting to strengthen the Georgetown environment to support faculty ambitions for their scholarship and research. In an institution where we believe in research and great teaching as well as the synergy between them, we need to do everything we can to make excellence possible in both. We’ve changed a few things toward this end.
The first initiative was the new presidential fellows program to honor our best scholar-teachers (See: Honoring Great Scholars who are Great Teachers). The first two awards were given to Richard Schlegel and Der-Chen Chang. The Presidential Fellow group will be our models for joint excellence in education and research.
Second, we launched the redesign of the research administrative activities on the main campus, placing them under a new vice-provost for research, Janet Mann. We’re interviewing candidates for a new senior director of this unit now.
Next, in a move to help faculty in juggling teaching and research duties, we introduced more flexible ways to schedule their teaching obligations and a procedure to access partial sabbaticals (for those with tenure) (See: Flexibility for Faculty Scholarship).
Then, we introduced a protection for newly-tenured associate professors to shield them from being asked to take on major administrative roles (See: Administration by the Professoriate), allowing them to launch substantial new research projects appropriate for the promotion to full professor.
Soon, we will present to the main campus executive faculty a new proposal — an enrichment of policies for faculty research fellowships — that moves in the same direction as the ones above.
Guaranteeing Research Semesters for Assistant Professors. While schools vary in their practices for newly-hired assistant professors, we want all schools to guarantee reduced teaching, in the form of a semester free of teaching responsibilities or course reductions, to newly-hired assistant professors, in order to enhance their research product prior to the tenure review. For several schools the practice has been to ask assistant professors to apply for a junior fellowship, which provided a research semester. I’m told that in recent years nearly all such applications for research have been granted.
We propose to eliminate the need for a proposal for this research semester and instead will grant this as a right in the initial contract as an assistant professor. (This, or some functional equivalent, is already a practice in some schools.) We propose to eliminate the need for research proposals immediately, helping current assistant professors who have not yet taken this research semester. The deans and I believe that in the case of a semester release for research, it is best placed in year 3 or 4 of the first six years as an assistant professor.
Increasing the number of Senior Faculty Fellowships. For some years, 6-7 associate or full professors have been granted a senior fellowship based on a research proposal for a semester free of teaching duties. This program has been administered by a peer review faculty committee, which evaluates proposals from individual faculty. We propose to increase the number from 6-7 to about 20 fellowships per year. We propose to reserve at least 10 of the 20 fellowships for those from fields that have few or no real opportunities for external funding for research. The selection of the remaining 10 will also give preference to research ideas that cannot be funded with existing research grant and contract mechanisms, but all fields will be eligible. These preferences are designed to help increase the time for scholarship among the humanities, broadly construed, and allied fields, for which there are few programs of external support. We will maintain a competitive internal process that is designed to support the best proposed research.
With these two additional steps, we seek to build a more supportive environment for faculty research. Through the faculty’s cutting edge research we can offer the best education possible to Georgetown students.
I look forward to the reaction of my faculty colleagues to these ideas.
I am sure that I speak for many faculty, especially in the Humanities, in saying: thank you, Provost Groves, for listening so carefully, thinking so clearly, and taking consequential steps so quickly. This array of new research options is just the kind of boost we have long needed, and it is immensely encouraging and motivating to know that these forms of flexibility and support are now in place at Georgetown. Many, many thanks.
The focus on improving the climate for faculty scholarship deserves high praise. In the overall discussion of funding for research, however, I believe we need to consider the special case of PhD students. GU has played catch-up for years; we constantly seek to match offer packages of competing institutions, just to stay close to level. One area in which we have rapidly fallen behind is summer grants to PhD students. The History programs with which we compete for students – Ivies, Chicago, Stanford, Duke, etc. – now regularly offer one or two summers of funding for research (often pre-dissertation research) as part of their 5-year fellowship packages. I presume the same is true in other disciplines. These seed money grants for preliminary research make students far more competitive for national dissertation-research grants, like Fulbright or SSRC, because the student can write far a more specific proposal, based on an actual scouting visit to the archives in question. That same principle applies to faculty seeking outside grants: we have research funds, true, but for those working in international fields, in which their research sources lie overseas, those funds rarely provide anything close to adequate support. In moving forward with greater flexibility for faculty, with increased funding for the actual research needs of the different fields, and with special, targeted support for young faculty, let us not forget that the quality of our PhD programs has much to do both with our research climate and our research reputation. We need to think of PhD-level research as an integrated component of faculty research in those disciplines in which we offer the PhD.
Anything that is designed to enhance the presence of research on our campuses is more than welcome, thank you for starting such a debate. For what they are worth, I offer two other concepts that sprung to mind when reading this post. The first is that it is not necessarily onerous for junior faculty to write proposals, particularly short ones. It can be very good practice for more important federal and foundation grants later on. In particular, short proposals to internal programs that provide feedback, if done well, serve a very valuable purpose to young scholars. My experience (both as a youngster years ago, and as a senior faculty member working with younger faculty) is that the quality of the feedback (the degree of rigor in internal review of short proposals) can have a profound impact on long term grant writing success. Thus I suggest that automatically providing research leave without encouraging young faculty to practice “putting their thoughts to paper” takes away an opportunity.
Second, providing support for research that has limited funding options elsewhere is obviously needed, but in the larger picture, over time, Georgetown must also be more aggressive in obtaining larger, sustained support. It is tempting in the current federal funding climate to think that applying for grants is increasing futile, but that is not necessarily the case. It is simply more difficult to obtain grants in the current climate, and (much) more work is required to get them. An extremely important facet to that work is preliminary studies that entice and excite grant reviewers and that help review panels to better see the very positive benefits of the research project. Increased support for successful researchers to obtain these preliminary data are essential and increasingly important in the current climate, because they synergize with the long term goals of raising our overall portfolio.
Cheers
Paul
At a research university which, unlike most of its peers, provides only one semester sabbaticals at full pay instead of one year at full pay, the senior faculty fellowship is one of the few means by which research active faculty can have year of uninterrupted research time and not suffer severe financial stress. In the past the senior faculty fellowship was designed to support the best work regardless of the field of the researcher. I fail to see the logic behind favoring one set of fields over another when it comes to semester leaves. Would such a policy make sense when deciding on sabbatical eligibility?
Funding for research often comes with restrictions that do not allow for funds to be easily used to pay for semester leaves. As an example, nsf allows no more than two months of support for faculty salary per year which is usually used for summer support. With the current situation of shrinking research budgets, and the need to support junior team members on grants, faculty salaries often cannot be supported on research grants, or the amount that can be supported falls below the two month maximum.
Furthermore, research active faculty who have grants need to complete work on that grant in order to have the grant renewed. Semester leaves are just as valuable to them as to faculty who do not have access to external research support.
To send a message that semester release should be preferentially given to faculty who cannot find external support for their work is the wrong message to send by a university that seeks up increase its external funding portfolio.
While there may be good reasons to set aside a small fraction of the senior faculty fellowships for particular fields, the remainder should continue the tradition of funding the best projects, regardless of the field.