What It Means to Reach for Carnegie’s Top Tier

During the recession, as state lawmakers stripped the University of Nevada at Reno of more than a third of its appropriations, the institution closed 22 degree programs. It eliminated several hundred positions, including some belonging to tenured and tenure-track faculty, while trying somehow to keep morale afloat.

Even with that period still fresh in the minds of many, officials at Nevada’s oldest university are determined to forge ahead with a new blueprint for success. The plan: to hire a few hundred new faculty members, recruit more graduate students, and ramp up research, all in a bid to join the ranks of the country’s top universities.

Such striving is hardly unique to Reno. The desire to move up — as demonstrated by rankings or membership in exclusive groups — is endemic to higher education. Reno has set its sights on the top tier of the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, a realm other universities have been ecstatic to reach. When the Carnegie list was last updated, in 2010, the Universities of Arkansas, Houston, and Oklahoma proudly touted their new status.

At Reno, a hopeful yet somewhat skeptical faculty gathered in February to pepper the president and provost with questions about how the university would achieve the research prowess to put it in the same group as the University of Texas at Austin, for example, and Arizona State University. Chief among the concerns: Can we pull this off?

Indeed, meeting the goal will be an uphill battle, and officials there know it. In a note to the campus, the president, Marc Johnson, called securing the “very high” rung for research universities a “stretch goal” that will “require some heavy lifting.”

“We know that the University of Nevada at Reno doesn’t have the cachet of the major private universities,” Mr. Johnson says in an interview. “We’re an emergent university.”

To keep moving in what senior leaders see as the right direction, the Carnegie classification is vital, they say, to recruit top-notch faculty, administrators, and graduate students. Of course professional pride is also at play: to be on par with local peers like the Universities of New Mexico and Utah.

One of the main hurdles for strivers, as Reno has discovered, is the cost.

“You’ve got to have infrastructure, and it’s tremendously expensive,” says Dean O. Smith, author of Managing the Research University and a former vice president for research at Texas Tech University. And the challenge of moving up is hardly finite. “Once you get there,” he says, “you’ve got to stay there.”

The Price of Ambition

The group of research universities the University of Nevada at Reno wants to join is exclusive. Only 108 institutions meet the standards, which include the numbers of Ph.D.’s awarded and research-focused faculty members, as well as the level of research spending.

More than 40 years ago, what is now known as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching developed the classifications as a way to distinguish institutions for educational-research purposes — not to rank them in any way. Yet leaders still see the system, which categorizes more than 4,000 two- and four-year colleges, as a ladder to move up. Last year Carnegie transferred responsibility for the classifications to the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University at Bloomington, which will issue an update this year.

To achieve its goal — going from “high” research activity to “very high” — Reno has set a self-imposed deadline of 2021 for growth in several areas. The university needs more professors and postdoctoral fellows, as well as graduate teaching assistants, so professors can scale back their teaching loads to focus on research, bringing in more grant money. The university plans to increase the number of Ph.D. programs it offers, along with endowed professorships and chairs, and it has set a goal of spending $150 million on research, up from $98 million in 2014.

A study of capacity performed last year made the university’s shortcomings clear. It doesn’t have enough office or lab space to accommodate new faculty members. Officials projected enrollment to hit 22,000 by 2020, up from almost 20,000 now. So Reno would need to hire 106 new tenure-track faculty members just to maintain a student-to-faculty ratio of 22:1, higher than the median (18:1) for other land-grant universities. (Now enrollment is outpacing expectations and could reach 25,000 within six years.)

With the student body growing so quickly, registration fees and out-of-state tuition should largely cover the cost of hiring just enough new professors to maintain the current student-to-faculty ratio. But even before the unexpected enrollment growth, Reno wanted to hire triple that number of tenure-track faculty, nearly 300, along with at least 200 new graduate student assistants, and 170 or so administrative staff members to improve its student-to-faculty ratio and support its research goals.

That means the university will be roughly $4 million short of what’s needed each year for those new hires. “While a gap still exists between available revenues and projected costs,” the capacity report says, “the gap is not insurmountable.”

Fund raising is one answer: The university is in the quiet phase of a seven-year capital campaign. Other ways to generate revenue, says the provost, Kevin Carman, might include offering some graduate programs online.

State support is scarce almost everywhere these days, but administrators at UNR say the outlook there is promising. That’s in part because government officials have said they see universities as major players in the state’s economic future. Nevada has been actively working to move beyond tourism and gambling; the University of Nevada at Las Vegas is also hoping to step up its research.

With money generally tight, the Reno campus will see how it goes with the state and on other fronts. “There are challenges with looking to squeeze blood out of a turnip,” says Mr. Carman. “We have to find ways of getting things done.”

Managing Skepticism

Raising institutional ambitions can create fault lines on a campus.

In many instances, says Mr. Smith, the former Texas Tech official, faculty at striving universities weren’t hired with the expectation of doing high-level research — and they may not want to step it up. “You certainly can’t just turn them into a researcher,” he says.

James T. Richardson, a sociology and judicial-studies professor who has worked at Reno since 1968, already sees some changes. In a phased-retirement program now, he’s still writing grant proposals, as he knows colleagues are, too. Faculty members are advising more graduate students and serving on more hiring committees, he says. “We’re looking for people with research records, publication records.”

The university plans to hire roughly 40 faculty members a year through 2021. Forty-one new faculty members were hired this year, and next year the university expects to conduct about 50 faculty searches, Mr. Carman says. Most new hires will be on the tenure track, says Mr. Johnson, the president.

In the last year and a half, the College of Science has hired about two dozen faculty members. The interview process emphasizes the university’s aspirations, says the college’s dean, Jeffrey Thompson, and the need for people to be open to doing interdisciplinary work.

But Kenton M. Sanders can’t help but point out obstacles. Mr. Sanders, chair of the department of physiology and cell biology in the School of Medicine, believes it will be especially difficult to make competitive hires when the start-up money or the space scientists need isn’t yet available. The newly hired science professors have both, says Mr. Thompson, but what will happen going forward is far from certain.

According to the capacity report, the university could hire between 50 and 120 new STEM faculty. A new engineering and science building is six to eight years down the line. Meanwhile, the campus may repurpose some classrooms as labs. And that’s just space. Start-up costs for some in the STEM fields, officials say, are about $500,000 to $700,000 each.

“It all sounds good, but you quickly think about what the reality is,” says Mr. Sanders, who has been at UNR since 1986. “You look at the resources that are available, and you don’t see how it can happen.”

As a dean, Mr. Thompson fields the questions. “Managing the skepticism,” he says, “is part of the job.”

And that’s in science. Other faculty members are skeptical because their disciplines don’t seem to fit into Reno’s plan. At the big meeting with faculty and the president and provost in February, at least one professor spoke out about the us-versus-them narrative that could surface as the university pursues a new level of prestige.

Peter Goin, a photography professor and chair of the art department, doesn’t want his colleagues to end up as “second-class citizens,” he says, unable to hire new faculty members or recruit graduate students because their terminal degree isn’t a doctorate. Ideally, he says, a minority share of the new positions would be allocated to the arts.

The university is raising money to build a new fine-arts building, and is considering a Ph.D. program in music. “The music program per se doesn’t contribute to our goal,” says Mr. Carman, the provost, “but we’re still investing in them.” Mr. Johnson says when it comes to new hires, faculty members in the arts won’t be left out.

After some tough years, people at Reno are cautiously optimistic.

“At least we have a goal,” says Mr. Richardson, the sociologist. “We’re not just treading water.”

Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.