For research institutions seeking assurances that they too can grow fast, Northeastern University may be a case of cold comfort.
The institution owes its steady rise—from 163rd to 136th nationally in research spending over the past decade—to some deliberate strategies that should have wide application.
But the underlying conditions were decades in the making. And even then, Northeastern’s location and finances may have given its president, Joseph E. Aoun, advantages that other universities would find tough to replicate.
“This breakthrough didn’t happen overnight,” Mr. Aoun said from his office, which overlooks the construction site of a $225-million science center, as he enjoyed a burst of national attention over a major research breakthrough in microbiology. “It’s an investment that has been going on for many years.”
Long accustomed to living in the shadow of Boston’s research heavyweights, Northeastern saw its rise punctuated by the January announcement of its development of a device known as the iChip. The iChip can grow bacteria that cannot be cultivated in laboratory settings, paving the way for critical advances in antibiotics and a range of other scientific pursuits.
But that one success, while attention-getting, isn’t a major aberration. Northeastern received $111-million in external research funding in the 2014 fiscal year, nearly double the amount five years earlier. Across the country, universities saw their average spending on science and engineering research rise less than 16 percent during that same period.
Founded in 1898 and long known in Boston as an evening commuter school, Northeastern found its ascent to the ranks of major research universities helped by its presence in one of the nation’s entrepreneurial hot spots.
Business Ties
One of the best explanations for Northeastern’s research success may be its cooperative-education program, through which students typically spend two six-month periods in a paid job at a company related to their studies.
The century-old co-op system still meets its original goal of giving students a leg up after graduation. But a broader benefit, university officials have recognized, is the establishment of deep ties to industry that foster partnerships between companies and Northeastern researchers.
Replicating those ties isn’t easy. Susan A. Ambrose, Northeastern’s senior vice provost for undergraduate education and experiential learning, said she regularly hosted visitors from other institutions considering adding a co-op program. Few actually do, Ms. Ambrose said, once they understand it’s not just a work-study program but a system embedded in how students learn and professors teach. “People look at what it takes and then say, ‘My God, we could never do this,’” she said.
Northeastern also has the benefit of Mr. Aoun, who arrived in 2006 after overseeing an expansion of 100 faculty members in his previous job as dean of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California.
At Northeastern, he’s added some 400 faculty members over the past five years. In a deliberate strategy of growing during the recession, he aimed to take advantages of retrenchment elsewhere. The strategy also included hiring in three specific areas—health, security, and sustainability—that fit Northeastern’s existing strengths and complemented rather than competed with expertise at other Boston institutions.
Such moves partly reflect the flexibility of private institutions, whose average research expenditures have risen by 55 percent over the past decade. Meanwhile, spending at their public counterparts has grown by only 47 percent. At a time of declining or stagnant stock values during the recession, Northeastern also had a comparative advantage with its financial reliance on tuition rather than an endowment.
Mr. Aoun is adept at managing such expansion, said Beth Meyerowitz, vice provost for faculty affairs at Southern California, who served as his dean of faculty. “One of the things that Joseph is very good at is knowing when those opportunities are there,” she said.
The inventor of the iChip, Slava S. Epstein, attributes Northeastern’s success to its promotion of good ideas, regardless of origin. “It doesn’t matter if you’re an undergraduate student, if you’re a postdoc, or you’re a faculty member—they support it, and support it big time,” he said.
His research partner, Kim Lewis, also a biology professor raised in the Soviet Union, sees a similar attribute: a willingness to ignore traditional career markers that might disqualify candidates elsewhere.
The “black mark” on Mr. Lewis’s résumé is that he did not make tenure at his previous institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Even though that was a result of MIT’s closing his department, it left him with an “imperfect pedigree” in the eyes of many universities, Mr. Lewis said.
“So we come here, set up shop here, and the environment here is very favorable,” Mr. Lewis said. “You get this sort of family feeling, a lot of nice people, there’s no backstabbing. We do not compete within departments; we compete with the rest of the world.”
Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.
