He Who Controls UVA’s Strategic Investment Fund Controls Its Strategic Direction Part 3
Scrutinizing Research
UVA has established the goal of boosting its status as a research university. Sponsored research now accounts for roughly $714 million a year in a $5.4 billion total budget (including both academics and the healthcare division). The strategic case for chasing more research dollars has not been presented to the Board of Visitors, nor have the implications of expanding sponsored research for tuition and fees been explored.
The Ryan administration has identified five “grand challenge” focus areas for research: democracy, environmental resilience, precision medicine/health, brain and neuroscience, and digital technology and society. A common theme running across all focus areas is Artificial Intelligence: not research on AI per se but exploring the implications of AI for good and ill.
The competition is keen for professors whose research can win sponsored grants from the foundations, private industry, or the federal government. One way to recruit star faculty is to raise their pay by means of endowed professorships. Another is to assign them graduate students to assist in teaching and research. Another is to allocate lab space, office space, and computer resources. Meanwhile, UVA in recent years has been bolstering its spending on administrative support, mostly for grant writing, on the theory that it’s better for researchers to focus on their research rather than file paperwork.
The Strategic Investment Fund has been a boon to UVA’s research efforts by giving Ryan the authority to match philanthropic gifts, as he did to snag Paul Manning’s $100 million contribution to the Manning Biotech Center.
It is widely argued that recruiting top researchers improves the quality of the educational experience for undergraduates who get to interact with experts on the cutting-edge of knowledge creation. What that premium experience costs is another question.
Board members have no clue what impact sponsored research has on the university’s cost structure. The administration has briefly outlined its priorities and has trotted out a few researchers to describe their work, but it provides the sparsest of financial details. The Board has no basis for evaluating whether sponsored research subsidizes the cost of undergraduate education, or conversely, whether costs incurred by star faculty — salary supplements, grad students, lab space, computer time, administrative support — represent a net drain on the university that is passed on to students. Senior administrators may not know the numbers themselves; if they have conducted any studies, they have not shared them with the Board.
Playing the research game is very expensive. UVA cannot afford to run its research program on autopilot. The Jefferson Council urges the Board make it a priority to understand the economics of sponsored research, use SIF to engage outside consultants as needed to gather the numbers, and ascertain the impact on the cost of an undergraduate education. Once it has the data, the Board can decide if the cost is worth the intangible benefits.
Conclusion
We have seen the financial information presented to the Board of Visitors. We know it is superficial and incomplete — so superficial and incomplete that we question whether even senior administrators know the answers. We also know the administration is not inclined to dig any deeper, for to do so would call into question “the way things are done” and might prompt pressure for uncomfortable change.
We fully support the aspirations of some members of the Board of Visitors to review the allocations made from the Strategic Investment Fund and ask how those allocation advance the university’s strategic priorities.
James A. Bacon is the founder of Bacon’s Rebellion and a contributing editor with The Jefferson Council.
