Brenden McNeil, an associate professor of geology and geography at West Virginia U., earned tenure there despite not having won his own major research grant. “I think I’ve been doing good work,” he says. “I just haven’t had that success yet.”Chris Jackson for The Chronicle
It’s long been a rite of passage at major research universities: To have a chance at tenure, scientists first need to win at least one full-size federal grant.
Now that’s changing. Though they’re reluctant to discuss details, several large research universities admit that they’ve begun granting tenure to faculty members who haven’t yet crossed that threshold, a concession to several years of flat federal support for science.
Faculty members still are expected to demonstrate independent research activity, says Gary K. Ostrander, vice president for research at Florida State University. “That by definition has historically required that you secure competitive federal funding,” he says. “Right now, that is not always happening.”
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Brenden McNeil, an associate professor of geology and geography at West Virginia U., earned tenure there despite not having won his own major research grant. “I think I’ve been doing good work,” he says. “I just haven’t had that success yet.”Chris Jackson for The Chronicle
It’s long been a rite of passage at major research universities: To have a chance at tenure, scientists first need to win at least one full-size federal grant.
Now that’s changing. Though they’re reluctant to discuss details, several large research universities admit that they’ve begun granting tenure to faculty members who haven’t yet crossed that threshold, a concession to several years of flat federal support for science.
Faculty members still are expected to demonstrate independent research activity, says Gary K. Ostrander, vice president for research at Florida State University. “That by definition has historically required that you secure competitive federal funding,” he says. “Right now, that is not always happening.”
The reasons seem clear. Government spending on science has been on a decades-long slide relative to GDP, with total federal spending on research still sitting below 2003 levels. Even worse, a one-time federal spending increase from the economic-stimulus act of 2009 led to a burst of research hires on university campuses whose costs now can’t be sustained, just as those hires are reaching their tenure decisions.
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There are now a lot of “mouths at the trough,” making competition for grant money very tough, says George W. Bates, associate chairman for undergraduate studies in biology at Florida State.
The institutions willing to acknowledge that they have granted tenure to science faculty members who have yet to win their own major federal grants are largely in the peer group of Florida State, which ranks 194th nationally in grant support from the National Institutes of Health. They include East Carolina University, West Virginia University, the University of Memphis, and the University of Mississippi Medical Center. West Virginia University believes in “looking holistically at a faculty member’s record for the purposes of promotion and tenure,” says Fred L. King, vice president for research.
Higher-ranked institutions, such as members of the Association of American Universities, more frequently deny permitting such promotions. But not all maintain a hard-and-fast ban on the practice. Tamara L. Wall, associate vice chancellor for academic personnel at the University of California at San Diego, says she has seen such tenure promotions “on occasion” at her university. Barbara Entwisle, vice chancellor for research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says UNC may show “some flexibility” on the matter when faculty members work in large group projects.
Either way, it’s not something many universities want to discuss in detail. Among leaders at a couple of dozen institutions surveyed by The Chronicle, none were willing to identify a single faculty member who had been awarded tenure without first winning a major federal research grant.
New Pressures, New Debates
Brenden E. McNeil, an associate professor of geology and geography at West Virginia University, is a tenured professor without major grants who agreed to identify himself. Mr. McNeil exemplifies the profile that West Virginia and other universities describe as common in such promotions: an accomplished scientist with a strong publication record who is willing to work in groups and chafes at funding agencies’ wariness of higher-risk grant proposals.
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Mr. McNeil studies why some types of forests are better than others at capturing carbon from the atmosphere. His work involves examining satellite images of forests, and requires an interdisciplinary mix of colleagues from such fields as ecology and biology. His conclusions should help improve predictions about the future course of climate change.
At age 36, he has already been a co-principal investigator on three large grants from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation, and he has been an author on 20 published papers. He just hasn’t managed a major grant as sole PI. He’s still gaining experience in navigating the grant-application process, he said, and he’s still accumulating the field data needed for more-comprehensive projects.
“I think I’ve been doing good work,” Mr. McNeil said. “I just haven’t had that success yet.”
The kinds of questions we want to address now are of such a complex nature that they can’t be adequately addressed from one particular discipline.
Mr. King agreed. He said the tradition at many universities of requiring a tenure candidate to win at least one major grant as a full PI makes even less sense at a time when funding agencies are increasingly emphasizing teamwork on projects. “The kinds of questions we want to address now are of such a complex nature that they can’t be adequately addressed from one particular discipline,” he said.
West Virginia allows faculty members to earn tenure if they’ve been a co-PI on at least two grants, a policy that goes back at least a decade. It does not plan to toughen that requirement, Mr. King said, even though this year’s Carnegie classifications upgraded the university into the highest tier of research institutions.
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Still, the concept is sufficiently new, or below the radar, that universities appear uncertain about how much to reveal publicly. Mr. Ostrander raised it at a recent meeting of his fellow research vice presidents organized by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, citing it as evidence of how deeply Congress had cut spending on science. A spokesman for the APLU, Jeff Lieberson, said he had heard of only a few such cases and did not know how widespread the practice of granting tenure without major individual grant support may be in research-intensive fields.
Like every other university leader surveyed by The Chronicle, Mr. Ostrander declined to provide examples. Several other faculty members at Florida State, however, expressed deep admiration and sympathy toward one colleague who was granted tenure this year despite failing to win any independent major federal grant support. They described the tenure process as a stressful experience for the academic, now an associate professor of biology, Hongchang Cui.
Mr. Cui’s promotion “created a tremendous amount of debate” on the Florida State faculty, said Kathryn M. Jones, an associate professor of biology. Some were uneasy “about going down that path,” she said. To Ms. Jones, however, the case was clear: Mr. Cui had a strong publication record — at least 20 papers — and was having trouble winning grants largely because his most likely source of grant money, the NSF, had just switched its emphasis away from the type of model organism he was studying. (The Chronicle confirmed details of the situation with Mr. Cui.)
“He’s a really excellent scientist,” added Mr. Bates, a professor of biology.
Grants or Groundbreaking Work?
Mr. Ostrander said Florida State had begun basing as least part of its tenure decisions on the scores faculty members receive on unapproved grant applications. “We never did that before,” he said.
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That admission surprised several of Mr. Ostrander’s colleagues at other institutions. “We don’t promote faculty who have access to funding opportunities, but are not successful,” said Jonathan A. Wickert, senior vice president and provost at Iowa State University. “It is not a formal condition,” said G. Michael Purdy, executive vice president for research at Columbia University, “but I do not know how anyone could achieve the research productivity that we expect without receiving substantial outside finding.”
I do not know how anyone could achieve the research productivity that we expect without receiving substantial outside finding.
The NIH’s biggest recipient of grant money, the Johns Hopkins University, used to require two such independent grants for tenure. But now, with lower levels of federal support, one grant may be a more realistic expectation, said Denis Wirtz, vice provost for research.
At East Carolina University, 208th on the NIH funding list, even one fully independent grant may be unrealistic for young faculty members seeking tenure, said Michael R. Van Scott, interim vice chancellor for research. “This should not be surprising,” given that fewer than 2 percent of NIH-funded investigators are age 35 or younger, he said.
Alan J. Snyder, vice president and associate provost for research and graduate studies at Lehigh University, said he’s not sure whether any of his researchers have gained tenure without winning a major federal grant.
But he said funding pressure is producing researchers who increasingly avoid groundbreaking research ideas, fearful that proposals that deeply challenge established thinking will not win support from funding agencies. Department chairs at Lehigh have been warning him about the trend, Mr. Snyder said, calling it a “very, very rational” response by faculty members to tougher grant competition.
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Mr. McNeil feels that pressure. He has an ambitious idea for a major grant to track the effects of acid rain on the forests of the East Coast, some 25 years after a federal law largely ended the problem by requiring scrubber technology on the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants. The project would involve studying tree rings to identify variations in how acid rain affected different tree species. But funding agencies probably wouldn’t approve such work unless he first had at least a decade of preliminary data to suggest a likely outcome, he said, and that’s just not possible for him to have accumulated at this stage of his career.
More “incremental” work that can be done in a few years stands a much better chance of winning approval at federal funding agencies, Mr. McNeil said. “They say they want to fund transformative research,” he said of federal agencies, “but they end up funding work that can be done in three years.”
Certainly scientists should be expected to prove to their universities that they can do independent research, Mr. McNeil said. Getting a full-size grant on your own, however, doesn’t have to be the sole measure of that ability, he said. “Is that a reasonable expectation for pre-tenured faculty in this day and age? I’d say no.”
Florida State has recognized that, too, said Jonathan H. Dennis, an associate professor of biology who works just down the hall from Mr. Cui. “By giving Hongchang tenure, they retained an outstanding scientist who just had not yet found that money,” Mr. Dennis said. “It would have been foolish to get rid of him.”
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.
Paul Basken was a government policy and science reporter with The Chronicle of Higher Education, where he won an annual National Press Club award for exclusives.