Five years ago, administrators at Cleveland State University set their sights on a lofty goal: $50-million in annual research grants. The mid-size regional public institution—overshadowed by dozens of better-known colleges in the state—was hiring faculty with star potential and loading up on graduate students to assist in the laboratories and classrooms.
But economic and political challenges have made it harder to dream big. Cleveland State’s research grants are now less than half of the hoped-for amount. State appropriations to the university have fallen 18 percent since 2008, and enrollment is up by nearly the same percentage. And the institution is under pressure to improve its dismal graduation rate—about a third of the university’s undergraduates complete their degrees within six years.
Stretched thin by a mile-wide mission and an equally broad pool of students, Cleveland State is, like many similar institutions, stuck in the mushy middle of higher education. For decades, such universities have been reaching for higher education’s brass ring: a bigger share of research grants and accompanying prestige. Now many regional public colleges are trying to balance their aspirations with reality, focusing on the economic and educational needs of their regions rather than striving to compete nationally.
Ronald M. Berkman, president of Cleveland State since 2009, said his university needs a culture change to focus on undergraduate success and cannot afford to support an ambitious research agenda for all faculty members. “We can no longer hire everyone on a tenure track and invest in their development for seven years before seeing if they’re productive in research.”
The Climb
Many regional universities began as teachers’ colleges in the late 19th century and developed into four-year colleges with graduate programs as demand for higher education boomed in the decades after World War II. Such institutions have become the draft horses of public higher education, distinguished neither as flagships nor as land-grant colleges but often with ambitions of more prestigious universities.
But too many of those institutions have expanded their goals and activities in ways that don’t support the economies of their regions, said Patrick M. Callan, former director of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. “If you look at American higher education from the outside in, what does the country need from them? Our major deficits are not on the research side but on the training of undergrads,” he said.
While many institutions are not going as far as Cleveland State, some are moderating their aspirations.
“When I came here, faculty said, ‘We want to be the University of Michigan,’” said Timothy J. Greene, provost of Western Michigan University. “I said, ‘That can’t happen.’” The state can’t afford another research university, he said, and an institution has to understand its niche.
For Western Michigan, that means applied research that can be accomplished in a relatively short time frame, with a focus on transportation technology to fit with the state’s automobile industry.
In Northern Virginia, George Mason University has built a thriving business offering master’s-degree programs tailored to federal workers and contractors, says its president, Alan G. Merten.
Although Cleveland State is much younger than many of its peers—it was founded in 1964, when the state acquired a private college of about 2,500 students—it has followed a similar path as its peer regional public institutions during the past half century.
It now enrolls more than 17,000 students and has acquired all the trappings of a modern, urban university, with more than 40 buildings on 85 acres in the heart of the city. It has nine colleges offering more than 200 majors, a law school, and nine doctoral programs, including staples such as business and engineering as well as specialties in clinical-bioanalytical chemistry and urban studies.
As it grew, Cleveland State became a striver. By 2005 the university was receiving more than $30-million in research awards, an amount that set “the stage for the target of $50 million ... in the future,” according to a 2006 university report. At the time, the growth in research grants was credited to a hiring strategy that required new faculty to seek research grants as a part of their regular workload and to a big increase in the number of graduate students.
In 2005, the university was hiring people like Anton A. Komar, a molecular biologist who had been a faculty member at Case Western Reserve and the University of Bern, in Switzerland. Xue-Long Sun, who specializes in pharmaceutical chemistry, came to Cleveland State in 2006 from Emory University.
Graduate-student enrollment has been steadily rising since 1989, when grad students accounted for 27 percent of the student body. By 2009, more than 35 percent of Cleveland State’s students were in graduate programs. That is a higher percentage of graduate students than enroll at nearly all of the members of the American Association of Universities, an exclusive group of North American research institutions, of which Cleveland State is not a member.
The Fall
Despite the goal of moving up the research ladder, on nearly every standard that the university measures, Cleveland State has fallen far short.
Since 2005, its research grants have fallen 27 percent, to less than $23-million; the number of proposals for research grants has declined by nearly a quarter; and the success rate of those proposals has shrunk from 70 percent to 51 percent, according to university figures.
Rationalizing an ambitious research agenda at a nonselective public university can be hard enough when the results are positive and the state is generous. But Ohio lawmakers had to close a $3-billion revenue shortfall for the current fiscal year, equal to 11 percent of the state budget. In the budget-cutting, Cleveland State lost more than 15 percent of its state appropriations from the previous year, while undergraduate enrollment has increased by about 13 percent.
And so Mr. Berkman has taken a critical look at the institution’s role. He’s not giving up on research and still wants some faculty members to engage in scholarly pursuits. But he also wants many more of them in the classroom. He is now directing more money and staff toward helping undergraduates complete their degrees, especially now that a portion of state appropriations is based on the number of those completions.
A committee of faculty members, appointed by the president, came to the same conclusion in a report to the Faculty Senate, finding that Cleveland State had the second-worst graduation rate in a group of 14 similar institutions. “There is no relevant comparison group in which we perform well,” the report said.
Since 2008, the university’s internal spending on research has declined 22 percent, to less than $19-million. And a new labor agreement with faculty will save money in the long run by allowing the university to employ twice as many nontenured instructors, who will teach up to 32 credits per year. Under the new agreement, up to 20 percent of total faculty members can now be hired at this level, which allows for longer-term contracts only after six years of teaching.
In addition, deans at the university will be able to require tenured faculty to teach up to 24 credits per year if they are not active in research, said the provost, Geoffrey S. Mearns. Faculty members with potential for more research productivity would teach only 16 credits worth of classes.
“For somebody who really cares about teaching, the expectation for more classes shouldn’t be a burden,” he said.
George E. Walker, vice president for research and graduate studies at Cleveland State, said the focus of the university’s continuing and future research will be in areas that undergraduate students can participate in and fields that have a high potential for research awards, especially in the sciences.
“For an institution like ours,” he says, “the majority of our investments need to have some clear payoff for undergraduate learning.”
Faculty members who are successful in their research agendas might not notice any difference. Mr. Komar, an associate professor and director of the graduate program in biology, who came from Case Western, said he doesn’t think the changes represent a diminished commitment to research by the university.
“I would think just the opposite,” he said, since his department has just been approved to hire an additional tenure-track researcher. “It’s just a difficult time to get external funding.”
