It’s not provosts or presidents, but senior research officers who are presiding over a vastly expanded fiefdom at American research universities. These top administrators, some of whom see themselves as a “chief revenue officer,” may well soon have the stature of provosts as their duties grow, according to a new Ithaka S+R report released Tuesday morning.
Research officers could soon have the stature of provosts as their responsibilities grow.
Their responsibilities and challenges had expanded well before Covid-19. Escalating tensions with China put a sharp focus on the security of U.S. campuses and jeopardized relationships with a key research partner. Research became integral to how colleges showed their impact on their local economies. And an ever-increasing focus on big grants required collaboration between colleges or departments and an eye toward federal funding trends.
The pandemic may throw such dynamics into sharper relief by exacerbating divisions in institutional resources. Senior college leaders are prioritizing research, even as such a commitment requires subsidies from the rest of the campus, where budgets are tight.
“The scale and the scope of the responsibilities that the senior research officers have taken on in recent years — it’s really striking,” said Roger C. Schonfeld, one of the report’s authors and the director of libraries, scholarly communication, and museums at Ithaka S+R, the nonprofit consultancy group. “They have both academic as well as administrative responsibilities. It’s definitely a bigger, more high-profile, more strategic job than it possibly was in the past. And it seems likely to continue growing.”
Here are three takeaways from their report, written by Schonfeld and Oya Y. Rieger.
1. Top research administrators are seeking new money and doubling down on big grant proposals.
Colleges have already looked beyond federal grants for research funding. But research officers say future nonfederal research grants will come with close relationships with funders that extend far beyond one project.
Alumni, for example, want to have “an impact on major societal issues” and may give to research offices instead of areas important to their own undergraduate experiences, the report found. Corporate partnerships of the future could finance research and hire undergraduates for internships or careers.
Campuses have long sought funding streams outside the federal government, but President Trump’s term has re-established their importance. “Some interviewees emphasized that this revenue stream seems essential to support politicized research areas such as climate or stem cell research,” the report states.
To research officers, maintaining and expanding research funding is “a big part of how they understand success,” Schonfeld said in an interview.
That’s especially the case amid possible pandemic-related cuts from state appropriations, enrollment, and the endowment. How important is this priority? Senior research officers themselves are working on large grant proposals, including center grants and collaborative work with peer institutions, according to the report.
It’s not all about the big grants, though. College leaders are encouraging humanities research, even with small amounts of external funding, as an untapped area of potential.
2. Tuition, state funding, and clinical revenue subsidize research. What happens in a budget crisis?
Covid-19 “erased surpluses” from tuition, fees, and auxiliary revenue — money that supports indirect costs of campus research, prior research from Ithaka S+R found. This type of cross-subsidization is especially common at striving research universities, which often invest in research internally and hope such an investment ultimately pulls external dollars.
Expanding research can pull in faculty talent in multiple ways. It could bring recognition from external groups like the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching or the Association of American Universities. It could also finance new labs and supplies, making a campus a more attractive place to work.
But the process of nabbing this kind of investment can be inefficient and ineffective, especially when money is tight. “In some cases, senior research officers have found themselves ‘passing the hat’ among deans, department chairs, and individual researchers, attempting to cobble together the capital necessary to buy a new instrument,” according to the report.
Already, some campuses have lowered expectations for their research prowess because of these challenges. In the spring, the University of Central Florida wrote in materials submitted to its Board of Trustees that pandemic-related budget difficulties would challenge its high ambitions, like recruiting National Academies faculty members and expanding research funding.
One official told Ithaka S+R that his office expects to see budget cuts, which would delay turnaround time on grants and challenge reporting and compliance efforts. “They just wouldn’t have the capacity to do as much as they had done in the past,” Schonfeld said.
3. China is — and will be — on everybody’s radar.
Federal concern about research security related to China is still a near-constant pressure for senior research leaders.
Regulations on export controls, staffing up in areas of compliance, and educating professors on the necessity of disclosing all conflicts of interest consume time and energy. One college leader told Ithaka S+R that FBI agents visit the campus weekly.
For years, elected officials and staff from the FBI and the Education Department have said colleges are insufficiently concerned with charges of research theft, particularly from China.
But there could be practical ramifications ahead, according to the Ithaka S+R interviews. China is a key research partner with U.S. colleges, and higher-education leaders here have been concerned that tensions could inhibit collaboration or recruitment of talented scholars. That could reduce research output, especially in programs that right now attract large numbers of Chinese graduate students.
The tensions could also lead to turnover at the top. One senior research official who Ithaka S+R interviewed was responsible for investigating professors on potential research-security issues. The official “expressed an intention to leave the position sooner than they otherwise would have anticipated doing as a result.”
