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Coping with Bleak Budgets: View From a Vice President for Research

Coping with Bleak Budgets: View From a Vice President for Research. Kelvin K. Droegemeier Vice President for Research University of Oklahoma AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy April 26-27, 2012. My Role as VP for Research.

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Coping with Bleak Budgets: View From a Vice President for Research

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  1. Coping with Bleak Budgets: View From a Vice President for Research Kelvin K. Droegemeier Vice President for Research University of Oklahoma AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy April 26-27, 2012

  2. My Role as VP for Research • Assist faculty across all disciplines within a comprehensive research university in achieving their scholarly goals and dreams • Help locate and create opportunity • Help build collaborations internally and externally • Help define research program trajectories and prepare competitive proposals • Provide financial and other resources • Create incentives and rewards • Promulgate useful policies and reduce administrative burden • Ensure tight integration of instruction and research • Shine a bright light on achievement • Recruit and retain the best faculty and students – to continue the cycle

  3. Define Bleak…

  4. How to Cope? • Although no silver bullets exist and the overall R&D pie is fixed in size, several important principles can be helpful to individual institutions in coping with budget realities • Some investment at all levels

  5. How to Cope? • Focused strategic investment in areas of greatest strength

  6. How to Cope?

  7. How to Cope? • Fostering collaboration and leveraging(key is environment/culture) • NSF is a wonderful example (e.g., I-CORPS, OneNSF, INSPIRE, CREATIV) • Regional initiatives, university consortia (e.g., ORAU, SURA) • Intra-state collaboration (OneOklahoma) • Big projects (e.g., OSTP Grand Challenges) and centers • Engagement of the social/behavioral/economic sciences • Helping faculty see themselves as more than individual entrepreneurs – connected to a broader vision and multi-disciplinary campus enterprise

  8. How to Cope? • Providing resources to help faculty develop their research programs and competitive grant proposals • Faculty do not automatically know how to do this!! • Universities have lots of resources for students – need to not forget faculty! • Alignments with national initiatives and priorities • Expanding R&D opportunity space; at OU, into… • Defense/security/intelligence (DSI) • Applied work via Center for Applied R&D (CARD) • Becoming involved in fixing key national policies (e.g., F&A recovery, cost sharing)

  9. How to Cope? • Research in the classroom: Undergraduate Research and modern STEM pedagogy (engaged learning) • Incentives for achievement • Salary bonuses for awards/honors, large grants, prizes, performances, exhibits • Removal of constraints on internal seed funding • Larger pots of one-time internal seed funding (a little can go a long way) • De-investing in or shutting down facilities (seriously?)

  10. How to Cope? • Building more (and more effective) linkages with industry • Key to innovation and wealth creation • Key to economic diversification in states • Important for workforce development • Universities weren’t structured to do this (philosophically or administratively) but are improving! • Challenge: Portraying/marketing institutional capabilities

  11. Where Do We Go From Here? • Political support for research is VERY strong… • …but we have a serious budget crisis in this country • …and a serious challenge regarding the value proposition of higher education • We need to portray the real costs and real value of research and education • We can’t eat our seed corn: we must be more effectiveasan enterprise at telling our story but also realistic in our expectations • Research and innovation need to be an authentic partnership among academia, the Federal government and private industry • Earmarks likely to return but don’t count on them! • We can achieve more with less by working together

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