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Does UT Research Justify Its Keep?

by Joe Sullivan

The University of Tennessee garnered $182 million in research grant and contract awards in the most recent year (2000-01) for which data is available. Yet the associated costs were well in excess of that figure after allocations of faculty salaries and facilities and administrative costs are taken into account. Because of the complexities of trying to make these allocations, UT officials can't quantify the total tab, but they stress that it should be viewed as an investment rather than an expense.

So the question becomes whether UT can justify stepping up its investment in research at a time when the financially strapped university is having a hard time just offering the courses that students need to graduate in a timely manner.

UT President John Shumaker's answer is a resounding Yes. "If we don't [remain committed to research] the university will die intellectually, and the economy of Tennessee will never catch up with that of its neighboring states," he states. "The greatest energy for economic development over the last 20 years has come from research universities. And the states that have progressed the most dramatically in the last two decades are those that have invested in them."

Shumaker singles out Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Michigan, and California in that regard. But all of them have rich traditions and have built up capabilities that far outstrip UT's using the two measures that are assigned the greatest weight in academic circles: namely, federal research spending and faculty members who are members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. The University of North Carolina, for example, received nearly three times as much as UT in federal research dollars in 2000. Chapel Hill's faculty included 33 national academy members, of which UT has one (computer science professor Jack Dongarra).

Is it realistic for UT to make headway in catching up? Shumaker cites the University of Alabama-Birmingham as a model of a university that has done so. "UAB has emerged as one of the best research universities in the nation, the largest employer in the state of Alabama, and they have built their strength entirely on medical research. And Birmingham is a hot bed of medical entrepreneurship. The number of companies that are being started is just amazing."

At the same time, he faults the UT system administration in Knoxville for having been more of a hindrance than a help in fostering entrepreneurship based on UT research. "There is a palpable feeling abroad in Tennessee that Knoxville is the point of constriction and constipation in getting things done through the bureaucracy, the hierarchical nature of the organization," Shumaker asserts. "In Memphis there's been great consternation, as there has been in Chattanooga, about how things come up to Knoxville and get lost in the black hole and never come out." (On the Knoxville campus there is also a considerable concern that the university's culture and structure discourages the patenting of inventions, let alone their commercialization.)

To rectify all of this, Shumaker is pushing the formation of a UT Research Foundation that would operate as a private not-for-profit entity, free from a lot of constraints that state law imposes on the university itself. "The reason we're setting up the research foundation is two-fold," he says. "One is to create a more robust infrastructure to support R&D activity by our faculty—help them get the grants, help them manage the grants. Secondly, it's to set up a mechanism to help us commercialize appropriately, and I'm going to stress the results of that research."

The foundation would include an office of technology transfer to push the licensing of patentable UT research. And Shumaker notes that "Tennessee is one of the last states to come to this process" since Congress acted more than 20 years ago to allow universities to patent federally funded research. In addition, he envisions a for-profit subsidiary funded by private donors or investors that would help faculty members through the formative stages of setting up enterprises of their own. "Traditional venture capital types don't want to get into something until there's a full-fledged business plan. So we'll get them through that first stage and maybe create some venture capital of our own," he says.

As evidence that results, not rhetoric, are what he's all about, Shumaker is preparing what he calls his UT Scorecard that will set performance goals looking out to 2010. As with research foundation plans, it will be presented to the October meeting of UT's Board of Trustees. The goals cover everything from student retention and graduation rates to endowment growth and the number of endowed professorships. But research funding and results are a major focus.

The scorecard will set targets for federal funding, total grants and contracts, patents and licenses based thereon, royalty income, and the number of businesses incubated.

"I'm very much in favor of scorecard management, and it's anathema to many university presidents because once you've set a public objective, if you don't meet it you're subject to criticism," Shumaker says.

The Health Science Center in Memphis and the relationship with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, deepened by UT-Battelle's management of ORNL, are clearly the two biggest targets of research opportunity. In furtherance of its ORNL ties, three joint institutes are being formed and top scientists recruited to fortify them. Tom Dunning, who's been a distinguished chemistry professor at the University of North Carolina, is coming to head a Joint Institute of Computational Science. Takeshi Egami, a materials scientist, is coming from the University of Pennsylvania to join a Joint Institute for Neutron Science. A Joint Institute for Biological Science is also in the drawing boards.

Separately, UT is launching a Computer Simulation Institute, drawing on a team of about a dozen researchers who've opted to relocate from Mississippi State. While the institute will be domiciled in Chattanooga, the team will hold joint faculty appointments in Knoxville. Its luminary is Harry McDonald, an aerospace engineer who has done extensive work with NASA and who adds a second member of the National Academy of Sciences to the UT faculty.

As important as they are, big science and commercialization are by no means the end all and be all of UT research in Shumaker's view. Far from it, he waxes passionate about a research university's mission to create knowledge as well as disseminate it. "The collateral benefits [of research] on the intellectual aura and excitement of the university are incalculable because it creates this atmosphere for bright students to work with bright faculty, and that holds true just as much in English and philosophy as in these other things," he says.

Cynics will say that sounds like the academic party line. But it's a party line that has stood civilization in good stead going back at least to the time of the ancient Greeks, who just happen to be Shumaker's favorites.
 

September 26, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 39
© 2002 Metro Pulse