Approaching the Campus Budget - Part II

Incentives to Increase Research Activity

The incentives that encourage and reward effective use of internal research funding take many forms. Sometimes a university will create internal grant competitions that allow faculty in all fields to apply for campus-based support and include as one of the criteria the simultaneous application for external support. Universities also often provide internal funds to those faculty, departments, and colleges that prove successful in gaining research grants. As is the case currently on our campus, institutions can link the amount of internal support to the amount of indirect costs recovered on external grants. In other cases, particularly in private universities, an institution can require that units in externally funded fields must put some proportion of the faculty salary base on grants or that grants pay for some specific portion of research space used. In every case, however, the methods have the same purpose of increasing the amount of external dollars generated by the campus’ research community and expanding the number of quality projects that the internal funding can support.

A close inspection of our campus budget for fiscal 2004, discussed in the previous report, clearly indicates that all changes in the distribution of resources require two actions. The first identifies which activities should receive more funding, and the second identifies which activities should receive less funding. In most campus discussions about funding for research, the first action receives the most attention. Most participants in university budget discussions prefer not to engage the second action. Nonetheless, the university’s budget is a zero sum game internally, which is why we place such emphasis on acquiring additional resources from outside sources. We have already taken out, thanks to the extraordinary budget reductions of this past session, $21 million dollars from our internal resources. This would have been much worse had the students not provided additional revenue of about $20 million to support the campus’ instructional and student activities enterprise.

In short, the challenge before us is to review what we now do, decide whether we have the best set of incentives for enhancing the research performance of our faculty, staff, and students, and implement whatever promises to improve our success in the national competition in research and creative activity.

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