Planning for the Research Mission of Public Universities in the Twenty-first Century
no. 101 - June 1997

The State of Research Endeavors: View from the Administrative Level

Brian Foster
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

My central theme is this: we have to learn to do high quality research and train researchers without dishonoring everything else we do. This is going to be the key to the success of research universities in the next decade or two.

Research universities have many constituencies which make legitimate, conflicting demands. We:

• train K-12 teachers
• provide post-graduate professional education
• train technicians
• provide non-credit professional development training
• train Research and Development people for industry
• train basic researchers
• do undergraduate education in arts and sciences
• do undergraduate preprofessional education
• train the post-secondary professoriate
• provide support for government (e.g., policy analysis)

All of this and much more is part of the mission of every major research university. In fact, for much of it, the research universities are the main (even the only) providers (e.g., post-baccalaureate professional education, training basic researchers and high-end Research and Development people, training the professoriate). Moreover, providing good undergraduate education is a prerequisite for being allowed to do the things for which we have an exclusive franchise.

But what have we done? We have honored research above all else except perhaps graduate education. Even in graduate programs we pretend to focus mainly on training research faculty for research universities--at best a distortion of our role in training the professoriate. We've dishonored undergraduate teaching, which has become punishment for not doing research. Service to the institution and society is ignored in our reward systems. All resources are skewed toward research. I think this is wrong as well as suicidal. We must do at least a credible job with our important obligations--and yes, I think these are obligations to our many constituencies.

Resources

We will continue to suffer from well known resource pressures: aging facilities, deferred maintenance, library acquisitions, and other problem areas will persist. They will get worse if we don't become more responsive to the constituents on whom we rely for resources. Our most important resource problems, however, are human resources. We must get past the belief that all faculty must do everything well. We must seek out, honor, and support excellence wherever we find it, not diluting it by insisting that people who are really good at one thing (e.g., teaching or research) spend a lot of their time doing something they are not very good at (e.g., research or teaching). This will require a revolutionary cultural change.

Cross-Disciplinary Flexibility

It is a truism that much of the most interesting intellectual activity is at disciplinary boundaries. The cultural differences among disciplines are important and difficult to negotiate. Often we confuse "interdisciplinary" with "interdepartmental"--the latter posing equally difficult organizational problems. There are many conservative forces protecting the boundaries--e.g., the rating games, disciplinary organizations, turf in the universities, and performance evaluations in units where tenure is lodged. These problems pose a bewildering array of organizational issues: joint appointments, assignment to centers, spatial separation from home units in research facilities, and participation in interdisciplinary degree programs, to name a few. Achieving programmatic cross-disciplinary programs is especially difficult organizationally--and it is critical.

Teaching and Research

The topic of undergraduate teaching has been discussed at length in many forums. I'd like to add that there is also much to say about graduate education, especially that we have conflated training researchers with training the professoriate. The fact is that 95% of higher education jobs are not in research universities; we have the responsibility to train all postsecondary faculty. We have dishonored most jobs other than those in research universities, doing both ourselves and higher education a terrible disservice. We MUST find a way to honor the positions that our graduates will be filling. If we don't, we'll be damaged greatly in the eyes of our most important constituents, and we'll have done terrible damage to the research and graduate training enterprise that we value so highly. That is, we risk further diminishing the pipeline of well trained undergraduate students who come into our graduate programs--undergraduate students who are trained by the professoriate that we have educated in the research universities.

Communication and Advocacy

We often say that if people only knew what we were doing, they would support us better. I fear that if they really knew what we do, they would be horrified. It is true, however, that we grossly overestimate how much people understand about universities. Their support is often premised on fundamental misunderstandings of what we do--e.g., "creating new knowledge" has something to do with facts, not with the research process as we know it.

This brings us back explicitly to where I began. We must learn to tell a compelling story to multiple constituencies with opposed, inconsistent interests and, therefore, with conflicting demands on us. Moreover, we must tell a consistent and true story to these many and diverse people. We can't fail to convince our many constituents that we are serving them well--and we have to actually do it, not just talk about it. Research is one of the things research universities are very much about. We need to find a way to do it well while not dishonoring the other things we do--in fact, while performing our other obligations with a high level of excellence and commitment.