30 Strategic Options to Enhance the Research Competitiveness of EPSCoR Universities

ing from formula-based funding (say, for state Agricultural Experiment Stations under Hatch funding) or specific congressional earmarks, the amount of externally funded research support received by a university is primarily the product of the number of proposals submitted by its faculty, the percentage of these proposals that are funded, and the average size of the awards. Enhanced institutional research competitiveness entails improving performance with respect to each and all of these three variables. a) Increasing the number of proposals submitted relates to the institutional commitments of universities and their faculty to research and to the necessity, criticality, or convenience provided by external research support. A strategy to increase the number of faculty writing proposals is likely redundant in universities, colleges, or departments already committed to national standards of research or where external support is necessary for the conduct of research. Faculty likely are fully employed in this activity, and so strategy moves on to focus on other parts of the university or to b) and c) below. The strategy of increasing the number of research proposals likely has more relevance in universities and units that have made new or more intensive commitments to research performance. Some faculty, particularly in the science and engineering disciplines, are socialized to seek external research support and thus to write proposals early in their graduate or post-graduate training; other faculty are not (or are less so). What the first set needs or is most likely to need, as indicated by the Teich– Gramp findings, is infrastructure support—ranging from secretarial and budget assistance to service-oriented sponsored research offices. Proposal writing also often means rewriting, whether it be revisions or new proposals. How a unit treats those who have tried but failed can be an important element in determining future endeavors. Evident in these observations is the recognition that proposal writing is neither a spontaneous process nor a costless endeavor. Academic administrations exhorting faculty to write more proposals may squeeze some more work from faculty—the WTBH strategy, as it has been called—but are unlikely to find this a viable (or productive) long-term strategy.