It seems hard to believe, but when you read this section that there is nothing innovative. I was kind of expecting pointers to documents about best practices, classes on raising more money, that kind of stuff. If this was my number 1 objective, I don't think I would leave it to chance by not managing the heck out of it (this feels like a future blog subject doesn't it?).
The goals are (remember this is for FY07 - July 1, 06 to June, 07) -
Increase total R&D expenditures by 11% - fed's part 13% (including school of Med).
Identify new sources of money and increase funding in research awards by 10%. This includes hiring "high quality faculty) for $1M. Hire an energy expert. Get 3 more campus visits by external agencies. Triple number of contacts by faculty to program officers at fed agencies by publishing an article in "Research Matters" (you have got to be kidding on that one). Stimulate higher participation by faculty in "Community of Science" database.
Develop incentive-based reward systems tied to indirect cost returns from grants for faculty.
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I think these numbers are possible. The base is very low and management is pushing for research dollars pretty hard. Kind of like very small startup companies, when your base is very low, fast percentage growth works. Hey, I think this is a good idea. We can safely call this our second good management initiative of the Wendler years, it is a shame they implemented it so poorly.
Clearly this incentive-base reward system is going to screw over all the "have-nots" again, instead they could do a mixed system that worked for everyone. Some areas could do research dollars and some do enrollment? I guess that screwing over more than half your employees doesn't seem wrong to the current administrators or they just didn't think about it. See the link above for my boring blog entry and the interesting comment.
I'm not here to do anything but point out where SIUC can do better and this is how it can be done. At real universities, they raise a whole lot of money from corporations. Corporations are a bigger funding source for research than the government, but SIUC doesn't even bother to address this "biggest pot of money". In particular, the technology folks can get funding, but in order to get that money from corporations you have to provide them with a "return on investment" (ROI).
The way that corporations fund research works like this, the professor invents a new widget. Someone does a little research and figures out which companies use widgets and might pay money for access to it once the research is complete or to fund the research up front. You get a NDA signed and the professor puts his butt on a plane to meet with the CTO of the company. The professor pitches the idea and the CTO tells him why the idea will not work (or if it is too late) or gets excited and writes a check for 6 figures. You get two things, direction for the research and a chance a money, how cool is that? I can't understand why this isn't in the funding plan. This is a standard best practice at good Universities all over the country.
You might be wondering how I know about corporate funding? I am on the department of electrical engineering external advisory board (in the next few days look for my blog entry titled something like "The sad, weird state of management in EE") and was trying to figure out how EE could improve their external funding. I called a fellow on the same board who was a venture capitalist and asked him how EE could raise more money. Then I called a few professors at real schools and ask them (full disclosure, one of my uncles is a CS professor at UC Davis and he raises more money than the entire EE department each year) if this was true. I learned that EE doesn't use the EAB well, they aren't raising enough money and no one cared in just a couple of phone calls.
If we call raising more research monies our second good management initiative of the Wendler years. It seems ruined by poor planning and implementation. Where you can improve funding, the overall goal of top 75 is impossible. It screws over more than half of the university employees, so it kills morale in general. More importantly, the people who wrote the plan didn't do their homework and figure out best practices. Is it still a good management initiative then? You comments are welcome.
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