A Strong Foundation for Research
Our success as an institution that integrates research and teaching depends on our ability to support the process of discovery. Support can take many forms, ranging from targeted funds for specific initiatives to resources available to researchers across the disciplines. Both types of support are critical. As a comprehensive university, we must maintain strength in all core areas. Nevertheless, we cannot achieve the level of success that we desire by growing uniformly – we cannot hope to compete with much larger universities on the basis of size. Our strategy must be based on building economies of scale and leveraging strengths across disciplines. To do this, we must have a strong foundation for research across the breadth of Arts & Sciences.
- Planning for Faculty Start-Up Costs
- Increasing Total Sponsored Research
- Building the Physical Infrastructure for Research and Creativity
- Enhancing Support for Faculty Research Travel
- Building Capacity for Outreach and Dissemination of New Knowledge
Planning for Faculty Start-Up Costs
One of the largest and most important investments we make in faculty comes at the point of hire. New faculty must be furnished with the tools they need to mine new knowledge in their field or discipline. These range from relatively inexpensive items, such as flatbed scanners for digital artists or specialized computing equipment and software for social scientists, to extraordinarily costly scientific instruments, such as mass spectrometers, advanced imaging microscopes, and NMRIs. A strong library, with collections that are both deep and broad, is critical to support faculty research in every field. Increasingly, new hires across the disciplines require dedicated research funding as part of recruitment packages. In the sciences, expertise brought in by new faculty often necessitates laboratory renovation, often at a cost of $400-500 per square foot. Total start-up costs for an experimentalist in many fields now range between $500,000 and $1 million. To remain competitive as a research institution, Arts & Sciences must take account of these costs and dedicate significant new resources to invest in our faculty from the moment they arrive on Grounds.Goal: Increase dedicated funding for faculty start-ups by 50 percent.
Increasing Total Sponsored Research
Supporting world-class research is an expensive proposition, but world-class research has the opportunity to generate significant additional resources for the University in the form of overhead returns on grants. We must increase our total sponsored research income in the sciences and make a special effort to expand social science research in areas that can attract external funding. This will require additional investments, such as providing seed money for faculty (especially in the social sciences) to formulate sponsored research proposals, as well as larger grants beyond those currently offered for summer research. More grant activity contributes to the overall visibility and international stature of our programs, enhancing our reputation and assisting with the recruitment and retention of the best faculty and students.Goal: Increase total sponsored research in Arts & Sciences by 50 percent (or $25 million) over the next 10 years, with a special focus on increasing grant productivity in the social sciences.
Building the Physical Infrastructure for Research and Creativity
Scientific research and the creative arts are extraordinarily space-intensive operations. The College does not have enough space to support its current programs adequately, let alone accommodate the ambitious expansion of the sciences and the fine and performing arts we are contemplating. We need new facilities in targeted areas consistent with our larger strategic goals, and we must renovate and expand existing buildings to keep pace with the changing needs of our departments. We must maintain and improve our excellent field stations, which provide opportunities for faculty and students from a number of programs to conduct critical research. Priority areas for new and/or renovated research facilities include the life sciences (morphogenesis/biology) and psychology. We must also acknowledge the fact that, within the next decade, we will need additional research space for virtually all our science departments, and should be prepared to invest new resources in the areas of greatest need and greatest potential impact. In the arts, new facilities are critical for Drama and Music to support creativity, and the College stands behind the University’s plans to build a new Arts Center.Goal: Build new or expanded facilities for high priority research areas such as morphogenesis/biology and psychology, and provide new and improved performance space for the arts, especially Drama and Music.
Enhancing Support for Faculty Research Travel
Faculty, especially those in the humanities and social sciences, must travel regularly to conduct research in archives, libraries, and other centers, and to carry out fieldwork. Faculty in the fine and performing arts must travel to present their work in galleries, theaters and other performance spaces. All faculty are expected to present their work at professional conferences. Travel is thus critical to sustaining the vitality of a research program and ensuring that the fruits of discovery can be shared with the academic community more broadly. The cost of supporting such travel is modest relative to the benefits to faculty, students, and the institution as a whole. Goal: Double funding for faculty travel to $400,000 by 2010.
Building Capacity for Outreach and Dissemination of New Knowledge
Through the ongoing process of research and discovery, our faculty and students create new knowledge every day. As a university and, perhaps most importantly, a public university, we have an obligation to disseminate the fruits of our work for the betterment of humankind. Jefferson understood the connection between the dissemination of knowledge and the promotion of the public good when he established the University. Public engagement and outreach must be more than simply an afterthought; they must be integrated into the grain of the core research and teaching mission, and part of the fabric of the student experience. We must invest resources in a wide variety of programs and instruments that can promote this integration. We should provide better support for the creation and maintenance of websites and digital tools that project U.Va. into the world, increase our efforts to engage alumni in the intellectual life of the University, support U.Va.-published scholarly journals, and encourage students and faculty to think of the world at large as both laboratory and classroom.Goal: support the creation of a new Science Center on Observatory Hill; improve our field stations’ capacity to support public outreach; continue to support existing outreach programs in the sciences, such as the public programs in astronomy, the Master of Arts in Physics Education program, Teachers for a New Era, and the mathematics teacher education initiative.
