Building and Sustaining Excellence in the Public Research University: The American Model

Anyone who comes to Ireland and Dublin, whose contributions to learning over the millennia cast such long shadows, and purports to talk about higher education, feels a bit of the sheepishness that Frank Rhodes expressed when he spoke here last October. Fortunately, my charge is a quite limited one. I have been asked to speak about some features of the American model of the public research university. My career has been spent in such institutions, and it is my good fortune to serve as chief academic officer of what has long been regarded by many as one of the best ones. Much, perhaps most, of my time is spent wrestling with some form of the question, how can the public research university build and sustain the highest level of excellence?

In his remarks last fall, Frank Rhodes presented a wide-ranging description of some of the most important features of higher education in the U.S. ¹ I would like to assume his presentation as background to my remarks as I try to grapple with the more focused question of how the best American public research universities create and maintain excellence.

This is, of course, a complex question that has no easy or singular or settled answer. Any attempt to answer it probably strikes you—and should strike you—as evidence of naiveté at best and hubris at worst. The only bona fides I present for addressing this question are the the grey hairs that come from a fair amount of experience in trying to help a university with a long history of excellence to maintain and enhance its quality amidst the changing challenges and opportunities of recent years.

While I am offering caveats, I must note also that of course there is no single “American model” of how to create and maintain quality in a public research university. Institutional excellence is always created in local contexts, arising from local opportunities and fit to local challenges, so there are striking differences among the leading American public research universities. But the story is not simply one of local exceptionalism.

When we look at the public universities that have been perhaps most successful over the years in achieving and sustaining quality, we think of the well-known institutions such as the University of California at Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, the University of North Carolina, and, I make so bold as to suggest, my own University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Those of us who have charge of such universities are constantly learning from each other’s successes and failures, as we confront challenges and opportunities that have much in common. Despite the differences between these institutions, there are some notable similarities in their approaches and institutional characteristics. These similarities are not directly related to resources. Resources do not guarantee excellence, although they certainly help. This evening, I will try to describe some of the similarities of culture, practice, and resource management that I believe are most responsible for excellence. They don’t comprise a singular “American model,” nor will they be unfamiliar to you, for universities face much the same challenges.

In doing so, it is not my purpose to offer advice to those who guide your universities, nor to propose that American practices should be emulated in this country or anywhere else. I do hope my observations about how the best American universities are dealing with some of the challenges we all face, in one form or another, will be of some value to you.

Differential Merit, Differential Rewards, Differential Investments. At the core of the world’s great universities is an institutional culture built on an uncompromising commitment to excellence—aspiring to it, achieving it, sustaining it, and rewarding it. Many universities espouse a commitment to excellence, of course, but the first-class U.S. universities are marked by their institutional practices for connecting merit and achievement to resources in tangible ways.

The quality of a university begins with the quality of its faculty. The ability of American universities to fashion and administer their faculty reward system is perhaps their most fundamental tool to build excellence. The key test of an institution’s commitment to quality is the strength of the connection between probing, honest judgments of an individual faculty member’s merit, accomplishments, and career achievement on the one hand, and the faculty reward system—salary, other support, promotion, and tenure—on the other hand. Of course, this connection is always mediated to some extent by other factors, such as disciplinary salary norms and time-in-rank. Such factors notwithstanding, institutions that more closely and differentially calibrate individual rewards to individual merit tend to maintain and improve their quality over time. Institutions that distribute rewards in a less differentiated way do not achieve the highest level of excellence. The perception by all of a direct connection between achievement and reward is essential to the recruitment and retention of outstanding, high-achieving, sought-after faculty members.

In our best universities, the connection between merit and reward is also clear at the level of the college, department, or program. Excellent colleges and departments fare better in the competition for always-scarce resources controlled by the university than units that are less distinguished. Units that significantly improve their quality enhance their resources and opportunities; units that decline face diminished resources and opportunities. Managing resources in this way requires constant monitoring of colleges’ and departments’ achievements and quality. An internal culture of honest evaluation to shape resource allocation is another attribute of our leading universities.

These tools for building quality come at a price that must be acknowledged. The competitive marketplace for faculty in the U.S. has given rise to an intense competition among universities to recruit and retain the most promising and accomplished faculty members. This produces a constant upward pressure on salaries, accompanied by steady increases in the cost of start-up packages that are offered to assist new faculty to get their research programs up and running quickly. In scientific and engineering fields in my university, start-up packages for new faculty fresh from graduate school average $300,000 and more. At MIT, average start-up costs in the School of Science, including both research costs and facilities costs, have increased 145% since 1999, to a current average of nearly $900,000. And in the battle to retain our best senior faculty against bids from competitors, we have sometimes found ourselves providing multi-million-dollar support packages in the form of space, equipment, research personnel, and research funding, along with pledges of future faculty recruitments to provide additional colleagues.

The effort to recruit and retain outstanding faculty members strains our resources and often leaves us struggling to cope with problems of salary compression and inversion that are corrosive to faculty morale. All of this complicates the lives of administrators, but the process also keeps us focused on the importance of providing the research infrastructure needed to attract and support the highest level of quality. On balance, the university’s ability to connect merit and reward is an enormously valuable tool for building excellence.

Organizational Agility, Willingness to Wager, and Trickle-Up Innovation. In addition to attracting and retaining outstanding faculty, our best research universities also are adept at creating new structures and allocating resources to support groundbreaking advances in newly emerging fields and research directions. The hand of tradition rests but lightly on these institutions, which give high priority to trying to anticipate and lead transformative developments in and, equally often these days, between the disciplines. As a result, these universities are constantly refashioning themselves, moving aggressively to establish new units and frameworks to stay in the vanguard of research and discovery. In fact, a history of correctly anticipating major developments and marshalling resources to lead them is an attribute that distinguishes our leading universities. They understand that the pace of discovery and innovation is such that stasis is unacceptable.

One manifestation of this sort of intellectual and organizational agility is the willingness of the best universities to create discipline-spanning programs to support interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research and education. This willingness reflects, among other things, universities’ growing desire to engage pressing societal issues, such as aging, which typically require that a number of disciplines be brought together under a thematic focus, and also the tendency of many of the best and brightest new faculty to want to work on the interesting problems found in the interstices between the disciplines. The rise of interdisciplinary studies is evident across the board, from the humanities and social sciences to engineering and the life sciences.

Indeed, the great challenge to the traditional organization of universities is turning out to be the rise of new kinds of fields. This is evident to business leaders, as when Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM, recently asked, “U.S. universities are the envy of the world, but are they creating the necessary disciplines that will likely emerge from novel combinations of established fields?” As Stanford President Emeritus Donald Kennedy has put it, “Never have our universities lived in a more abruptly changing society. To speak of ‘academic rigor’ by way of appealing to the disciplinary status quo is self-evidently anachronistic now.” ² Along these lines, I have just asked my colleagues to examine the idea of multidisciplinary Ph.D. degrees. We have yet to offer a degree in Chemical Ecology, for example, which is a newly emergent interdisciplinary field designed to lay bare the fundamentals of chemical communication in nature.

In some respects multidisciplinary work might be seen as incompatible with our long-standing model of discipline-based graduate education, and faculty members who are interested in interdisciplinary problems often delay pursuing their interest until they have earned the security of tenure. If we are serious about becoming the more agile institutions that the future seems to require, we must have the courage to ask whether the discipline-based models of education and faculty work that have served us well for so long need to be revisited. I realize that merely raising this question is heresy in many quarters. But we simply have no choice.

A university’s willingness to refashion itself by launching new intellectual enterprises also requires the courage to reallocate resources. I use the word “courage” advisedly, because the reallocation of resources always involves slowing work in one direction in order to open a new direction. The decision to do so entails an element of risk, and inevitably a degree of controversy as well.

The risks can be high and the choices difficult even when an institution comes late to the game, embarking on a trail already blazed by others. On my own campus as recently as perhaps four years ago, some of the best faculty members in the College of Engineering began to argue that it was time to create a new department devoted to bioengineering. The revolution in biology and life sciences was manifesting itself in a number of new institutes and centers around our campus, but aside from the great expansion of work in nanotechnology, these exciting developments had not yet expressed themselves in Engineering in any formal or institutionalized way.

Now, our College of Engineering is rated among the best in the world, with each of its departments perennially ranking among the top ten in the U.S. Each department is distinguished by about any measure; each has a long history of attracting exceptional faculty and students; each has attracted very substantial funding to support its research from government and industry, as well as generous gift support from donors. Yet the Engineering faculty and Dean eventually became convinced, as did I, that the future of the College made it imperative to find the resources to launch a full new department in bioengineering—with several dozen faculty, support to attract outstanding graduate students, laboratories and equipment, and all the rest. Engineering proposed to fund part of the cost if the university would contribute the rest. Then, as now, we were struggling to cope with the same decline of state funding that afflicts all American public universities these days, so we could find the money to launch this new department only by declining to make investments in other areas, some of which were established centers of excellence and others of which held high promise. These were difficult choices. We chose between competing goods, and the new department will formally open next fall. The future will tell whether our wager was a sound one, but it seemed to us that we could not afford not to make it if the quality of our programs in engineering was to be maintained.

The example of our new bioengineering department suggests another attribute that is common in the leading American research universities. In this example, the drive to create a new unit trickled up from faculty members who were first on the scene. If a university has outstanding faculty members, it is they who will always be first to see the need to change directions and make new investments. Of course, there are always more good proposals than there are resources, and it falls to those at the center to make hard choices based on future consequences that are uncertain. My point is that an important feature of agile university organizational structures is that innovation is led by their best faculty members and their best departments and colleges. These are people the university must listen to carefully.

So our first-class universities have central administrators who listen to their best faculty, and they strive to allocate resources in ways that enable and support innovation. The center also works to foster a culture that insists upon excellence and expects to lead change. That said, it is a tricky business to balance support for the disciplines with support for new enterprises emerging outside of or between the disciplines. Trying to see across the horizon while managing the tension between tradition and innovation stretches the talents of even the most wise and skillful administrators.

Qualities of agility and courage are not, perhaps, traditionally associated with universities. But today they are hallmarks of the best institutions.

New Friends, Old Friends, and Enduring Commitments. Universities find themselves pushed and pulled in more directions these days than they used to, it seems to me. One direction everyone is focused on concerns economic development. Universities have moved to center stage in producing the workforce and flow of discoveries and innovations that are required for economic success at the enterprise, sectoral, and national levels.

Universities have embraced this enlarged economic role in several ways. Based more or less on the model set by the North Carolina Research Triangle Park in 1959, university-based research parks have been established everywhere; there are now about 200 of them in the U.S. A common companion to research parks is some sort of incubator facility, in which fledgling start-up companies are provided with a range of support services to aid their development and success.

Universities have also created so-called “tech transfer” organizations, providing expertise and support for the transfer of university-developed innovations to the private sector and their commercialization.

In addition, universities have created other sorts of private sector partner programs, such as arrangements by which, in return for substantial contributions, companies may become affiliates or corporate partners of a university laboratory or research organization, and company researchers can interact with university researchers on problems of mutual interest. On my own campus, for example, our National Center for Supercomputing Applications has long maintained what it calls a Private Sector Program of short-term and long-term relationships with technology companies “to guarantee that the work of NCSA [is] applied to real-world challenges faced by industry.” Current partners include IBM, Intel, Motorola, and Boeing.

My university has been in the middle of these developments, and our experience has impressed upon me both the reasons why it is essential to engage in these activities and the many complexities that such activities present.

Corporate-university partnerships provide substantial support for research. In the U.S. between 1980 and 1995, industry funding of university research grew by 249 per cent, from $236 million per year to $1.5 billion.³ By supporting successful start-up companies, the university contributes, and is seen to contribute, to economic development. Through its beneficial engagement with the private sector, the university can win the active support and advocacy of business leaders, support that can favorably influence public funding of the university. And in many fields in the sciences and applied sciences, a significant number of the most sought-after faculty members cannot be recruited or retained unless the university has effective mechanisms to support their engagement with the private sector.

Increased university-private sector engagement also poses challenges that must be managed carefully. Intellectual property issues have become more complicated than ever before as we work to balance the rights of faculty inventors, opportunities for the university to enhance its revenue, and access to university research results by other scientists. Moreover, a faculty member’s simultaneous involvement in university work and private sector activity can raise questions about possible conflicts of interest and commitment that may be quite difficult to sort out.

Contrary to what some had feared, the evidence does not suggest that expanded engagement with the private sector has changed university research priorities very much or withheld research results from the public domain as proprietary. The best universities are showing themselves able to manage relationships with the private sector pretty well. As Brooks and Randazzese conclude, “It appears that in the spectrum of research universities and firms, the best seem quite capable of protecting their traditional values of openness, with only modest concessions to the practical needs of industry.” ⁴ MIT President Charles Vest stated the case well in his 1998-99 “State of the University Report” when he wrote that developing “strong and appropriate research relations” with industry can “improve our education” by better preparing students for the industries in which they will work, “diversify our sources of financial support” by supplementing government funding of research, and “create new pathways for contributing to the common good” by supporting the dissemination of new discoveries and advances.⁵

Set against our new friends in industry, our old friends in government remain the universities’ principal source of research funding and, for public universities, general operating funds. In the U.S. over the last 25 years, there has been a steady decline in state funding for higher education. State aid accounted for 46 per cent of public university budgets in 1980 but only 34 per cent in 2000. At some of our leading public universities, the decline has been more dramatic. State funding has dropped from 37 per cent of my own institution’s budget in 1990 to 20 per cent this year. Similarly, state funds now provide only 25 per cent of the budget of the University of Wisconsin and only 10 per cent of the University of Michigan’s budget.⁶

As state funding has declined, federal funding for university research has increased, by almost 370 per cent from 1980 to 2001, to more than $19 billion per year, of which 78 per cent supports basic research and 22 per cent supports applied research and development.⁷ In some of our leading public universities, research expenditures from all sources now exceed state support.

One might imagine that growing partnerships with private industry, coupled with growing research funding during a long period of declining state support, would lead universities over time to tilt more toward the fields that produce external support, and away from central disciplines at the core of our traditional conception of the university. However, an attribute of the best American public research institutions is that they maintain the traditional central disciplines at their core. In fact, the flow of external funds to fields that attract generous research support can allow a university to direct more of its institutional funds to supporting excellence in other fields. Through such processes, our best universities have maintained great strength in the humanities and the arts, for example, and they have resisted financial temptations to turn the university into a research institute or to narrow their educational mission to only workforce training, as important as those goals are.

So while our universities have welcomed new friends in the world of commerce and struggled with sometimes disappointing old friends in state government, their traditional values and ideals remain the compass by which the best of them navigate through the landscape of new opportunities and challenges.

Keeping the “Public” in “Public Research University.” American public universities were formed in a compact with the public and the state governments that support them. The public universities educate nearly 80 per cent of college students, and the quality of their education, research, and public engagement has important consequences for the success of American society. I would like to end this presentation by noting some of ways that the public research universities currently are struggling to meet their obligations as public institutions. The responsibility for ensuring that universities meet these obligations falls primarily on the central administration, so the center typically plays a somewhat more directive role in this area than in the other areas I have discussed.

Let’s begin with questions of finance and the resulting problem of access. In the U.S., the model of the modern research university emerged following World War II through an alliance between the federal government and the universities to support research thought to be important to the national interest. At the public universities especially, enrollments swelled with the influx of returning war veterans supported by the G.I. Bill, faculties expanded to handle the greater numbers of students, and federal dollars allowed universities to support research in ways never possible before. Public support for higher education—as the pathway to individual and national prosperity, the tool to understand and devise solutions to a host of social problems, and the guarantor of national security in a threatening time—was high, and public support was backed up by a generous, increasing flow of state dollars to higher education. The public universities were able to keep tuition charges to students low while the proportion of high school graduates who enrolled in college within one year after leaving high school rose steadily, reaching 45 percent in 1960 (and over 60 per cent today). These were days of rising institutional aspirations and rising achievement in higher education, and the great public universities that had risen to prominence in the closing years of the 19th century further consolidated their position on the world stage.

Over the last quarter-century, as I have noted, state support for public universities has declined steadily. Causes include the expansion of state-funded services and support to new areas, and also a growing attitude of lawmakers and the public that higher education is more a private good than a public good, and those who directly benefit should bear a greater share of the cost.⁸ The effects on public support for universities are exaggerated in times of economic downturn, of course. The drop in state funding for public higher education has been precipitous, with cuts averaging 5 per cent this year.

As a result, public universities have had to raise tuition charges to students. Over the last 10 years, tuition at public universities has increased by an average of 47 per cent in 2003 constant dollars, to a current yearly average cost of attendance (tuition and fees, books and supplies, room and board, transportation, estimated expenses for personal items) of $10,636.⁹ This year, public colleges and universities raised their tuition by an average of 14.5 per cent.

The universities have worked to maintain access for students of limited means by increasing financial aid to students. Grants to students increased at more than twice the rate of increase in tuition over the last 10 years. About half of all students receive financial aid in the form of grants, and when the increases in grants are taken into account, the real increase to students in the cost of attendance from 1993 to 2003 was a total $1,445 in 2002 dollars.¹⁰

Despite their efforts to increase financial aid to buffer the increases in student costs, the problem of providing access to the public universities for all talented students regardless of means is a difficult one for universities. Mark Yudoff, Chancellor of the University of Texas System, explains it this way:

More than a century ago, state governments and public research universities developed an extraordinary compact. In return for financial support from taxpayers, universities agreed to keep tuition low and provide access for students from a broad range of economic backgrounds, train graduate and professional students, promote arts and culture, help solve problems in the community and perform groundbreaking research. Yet through the past 25 years, the agreement has withered, often leaving public research institutions in a purgatory of insufficient resources and declining competitiveness.¹¹

In addition to the problem of economic access, public universities struggle with how to achieve “social inclusion” and have student bodies that reflect the ethnic and gender make-up of society. In 1960, about 7 per cent of U.S. high school graduates were members of minority groups; by 2012, this is projected to grow to 40 per cent. The U.S. Supreme Court recently affirmed the positive educational value of a diverse student body, and as the population becomes ever more diverse, it is essential—especially for the public universities—to ensure that the most able students have full access to the leading universities. Attempts to do so have involved universities with problems of inadequate primary and secondary schools serving minority populations, inadequate financial aid to fully enable students from poor families to meet their college expenses, issues of how to incorporate social considerations appropriately in the admissions process, questions of how to nurture and support minority students on campuses where they encounter too few others from their background, and problems of how to construct a fully inclusive university community among those who are on their campuses. It is imperative that we succeed if we are to fulfill our obligations as public universities in the twenty-first century. To the extent that we do so, we will better educate all our students to become responsible and successful members of our increasingly diverse society, and our society will benefit from the full contributions of all its members.

Educating our students well also requires that we find ways to prepare them to succeed in a world that is increasingly interconnected, where more permeable national boundaries are less relevant to economic, social, and cultural life. We need to prepare students to be what Martha Nussbaum has called citizens of the world, people who have developed “an ability to see themselves not simply as citizens of some local region or group but also, and above all, as human beings bound to all other human beings by ties of recognition and concern,” because “the world around us is inescapably international. Issues from business to agriculture, from human rights to the relief of famine, call our imaginations to venture beyond narrow group loyalties and to consider the reality of distant lives.” ¹²

Many of us grapple with the question of how to “internationalize” the university. In the U.S., the events of September 11 gave heightened urgency to the need to make our universities, and our students’ experiences within them, more international.

Of course, our best public research universities are institutions of global stature that have long been enmeshed in far-flung international networks of individual and collective collaborations and exchanges of all kinds. My university is typical, with current agreements for all manner of exchanges and joint activities with more than 200 institutions around the world and a large traffic in international students and visitors coming to our campus, as large numbers of our own faculty and graduate students are abroad at any given time. Our efforts in research and graduate education are reasonably international in scope, I think.

The area in which we and our peers have been least successful is in somehow creating a meaningful international dimension to the education of all our undergraduate students. We have a full suite of highly regarded area studies programs, and a study abroad program that ranks as one of the largest in the U.S. We have taken a few steps, such as modifying study abroad experiences so more students can participate, and introducing international themes and connections in some basic courses that most students take. These are useful steps in the right direction, but they leave us far from where we need to be.

Our efforts to somehow internationalize our undergraduate education are hesitant and halting because we lack good models. We and our peers are all struggling with how to accomplish what is needed.

As our efforts in access, diversity, and internationalization suggest, the leading American public research universities are working to enhance the undergraduate education they provide. This includes making sure their students receive the quality of education that only a first-class research university can offer. They believe that research and teaching are complementary and mutually supporting, and their goal is excellence in both. To learn from cutting-edge researchers who bring their latest discoveries into their classroom, to share the joy of discovery with scholars who are leading their fields, to learn the possibilities and limitations of inquiry by being an apprentice researcher in a faculty lab—these are added values that the research university brings to undergraduate education. And this is the ground on which the various missions of the research university achieve unity.

The unity of missions and clarity of purpose that characterize the very best public research universities is a theme on which it is fitting to end these reflections. Ultimately, that unity of missions and clarity of purpose is probably the quality that has made the great American institutions great and will keep them so in the future. Despite the increasing and ever-changing demands and expectations laid on them, these institutions do not lose sight of what they are about, at the same time as they work to serve the needs of society in ways that they are uniquely equipped to do.

Our best universities embrace change and innovation. They constantly renew and refashion themselves. They are agile, and courageous, and deeply committed to excellence and to great public purposes. In the constancy of change, these universities do not become distracted from their fundamental nature as academic communities. They are a magnificent expression of particular ideals and values and society’s best hopes for the future. They make choices that are true to their character, that allow them to contribute as academic communities in ways others cannot. In so doing, in each generation, they redeem their charter and extend the possibilities of the future.

1 Frank Rhodes (2003, October 6), Keynote Address to Workshop on Challenges Facing Irish Universities, Royal Irish Academy, Dubin. (return to text)

2 Donald Kennedy (1994), “Making Choices in the Research University,” in Jonathan R. Cole, Elinor G. Barber, and Stephen R. Graubard (Eds.), The Research University in a Time of Discontent (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. 109. (return to text)

3 Harvey Brooks and Lucien P. Randazzese (1998), “University-Industry Relations: The Next Four Years and Beyond,” in Lewis M. Branscomb and James H. Keller (Eds.), Investing in Innovation: Creating a Research and Innovation Policy that Works (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), p. 369. (return to text)

4 Brooks and Randazzese (1998), pp. 379, 375. (return to text)

5 Charles M. Vest (1999), Three Questions in Search of Answers: Report of the President for the Academic Year 1998-99. Available URL: http://web.mit.edu/president/communications/rpt98-99.html (return to text)

6 June Kronholz (2003, April 18), “As Amount of Funding Declines, Public Universities Trim State Ties,” Wall Street Journal. (return to text)

7 National Science Foundation, Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences, Division of Science Resource Statistics (2003, April). Academic Research and Development Expenditures: Fiscal Year 2001, p. 43. (return to text)

8 Jeffrey Selingo (2003, February 28), “The Disappearing State in Public Higher Education,” The Chronicle of Higher Education. In a national opinion poll conducted for The Chronicle of Higher Education in early 2003, nearly two-thirds of respondents said that students and their families should pay “the largest share” of a higher education. See Jeffrey Selingo (2003, May 2), “What Americans Think About Higher Education,” The Chronicle of Higher Education. (return to text)

9 The College Board (2003), Trends in College Pricing (Washington, DC: The College Board), p. 3. (return to text)

10 The College Board (2003), Trends in College Pricing (Washington, DC: The College Board), p. 15. (return to text)

11 Mark G. Yudoff (2002), “The Emergence of the Hybrid Research University,” College Planning & Management, November, pp. 16, 18. (return to text)

12 Martha C. Nussbam (1997), Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 10. (return to text)