Pre-Submitted Town Hall Meeting Questions

The current landscape is both a challenge and an opportunity. Reconciling the goal of research growth with changes in federal funding means that we need to pivot from “responding to federal opportunities when they appear” to a proactive, diversified, and mission-aligned strategy. We need to reduce our reliance on federal funding by diversifying our portfolio and aligning our strengths with both national priorities and regional needs. I see us executing on this in three different ways:

1. Align with mission-driven federal priorities: While total funding may shrink, specific federal agencies (like the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and elements of NIH/NSF focused on national security, AI, advanced manufacturing, and biotechnology) are often reprioritized or insulated from the deepest cuts. We must strategically map USA's existing expertise—especially in areas relevant to the Gulf Coast like coastal and marine sciences, advanced manufacturing, logistics, and biomedical research—to these new and emerging federal mission areas.

2. Focus on 'Convergent' and Large-Scale Funding: Federal cuts often increase the competition for individual, smaller grants. Our focus should shift toward large, multi-PI, interdisciplinary center-level grants that align with new federal funding concepts (like the NSF's focus on regional innovation ecosystems or new NIH focus areas). This requires fostering convergence across colleges (e.g., Engineering, Medicine, Marine Sciences, Arts & Sciences).

3. Embrace a Regional Economic Catalyst Role: We must position USA research not just as academic pursuit, but as a direct economic engine for the Gulf Coast. This aligns our research goals with state appropriations and local government support, making the case that investing in USA research is an investment in regional jobs, health, and resilience.

It’s impossible to predict 100%, but normally government shutdowns are resolved where most projects are made whole once the government opens back up. Hopefully, the only effect will be a delay in the execution of some processes. There is a link here to a page that provides access to the current processes and procedures that are in place both here and on the government side.

Carnegie classifications are released every three years; the next release is scheduled for 2028. Each classification release is based on the three-year average of research expenditures and research doctorates. Assuming the thresholds are not increased, I am confident that we will be above the minimum research expenditure threshold in 2028, as we were very close to the threshold in 2025, and since then, we have improved our identification and capture of institutional research expenditures, which are more than $10M per year. 

We are short by an average of 10-15 graduates per year in terms of research doctorates, and while I am hopeful, I am not optimistic that we can make up this gap on a three-year average basis by 2028. This means that the first year that we could realistically cross both thresholds is 2031. 

While achieving R1 is important, some benefits will accrue because we are close to the threshold, even if we haven’t technically crossed it. So, growing our research portfolio is manifestly critical regardless of when we are named to be R1. There is benefit to explicitly receiving the designation, so we will be focused on achieving this as quickly as possible.                                                                    

Limited federal dollars are not likely to increase anytime soon, and with potential changes afoot in how funding is distributed, it is unclear what the net impact is going to be on the bottom line. Fewer dollars available risks our ability to grow our research infrastructure and capacity. Additionally, we are constantly dealing with the challenges of recruiting and retaining faculty – we need to improve how we do this and our success rate in retaining faculty to keep growing our research portfolio. We can’t let our emerging researchers leave, which means we must make staying a more attractive option.

Additionally, we need to make sure that our research administration infrastructure can support growth. Historically, it hasn’t grown at the same rate as our research enterprise, and we have reached a point where our lack of support has inhibited growth. We need to make sure this doesn’t continue to happen by making adequate investments in research administration.

Lastly, we have challenges with growing our graduate programs. We need to grow because it is to our benefit to get reclassified as R1. But we also need to grow because our graduate programs are the lifeblood of our research portfolio. Conditions to accomplish this may be challenging over the next few years.

We need a multi-faceted approach – we are never going to compete effectively based on salary alone. Such an approach will need to address compensation, infrastructure, professional development, and quality of life. The goal is to compete not just on salary, but on the overall research ecosystem and culture. 

To compete, we ideally need (a) aggressive offers that include competitive start-up packages and competitive salaries, (b) spousal hire support for really strong candidates; (c) aggressive retention packages; (d) teaching loads that enable protected time for research; (d) better seed grants; (e) robust core facility support; (f) a formal mentorship program and useful training; (g) facilitated interdisciplinary research leveraging USA’s unique strengths; and (h) and a commitment to work-life balance. These are the things that are in current practice to recruit and retain faculty at our R1 aspirational peers.

We are a significant distance away in terms of being able to afford these strategies. As an institution, we need to grapple with the long-term financial cost of being able to do this effectively and develop a plan to grow in ways that will generate the revenue to do these things well. We need to start this planning NOW. It will take years to grow into doing this well.

Three categories should be prioritized: Protected time, targeted funding and opportunities, and specialized training. The most critical resource for junior faculty is time. Opportunities should be created to maximize junior faculty focus on launching a robust research program.

We need to ensure that junior faculty have aggressive course releases and summer support in some measure. Perhaps seed funding could be provided to increase course buyouts beyond whatever the department and college provide.

New faculty need start-up funds to begin, but they also need smaller, strategic grants to maintain momentum and build a track record. We have seed grants; we need to find a way to increase these opportunities. We need to make sure that these faculty have access to discretionary funding that may result from their research (such as returned F&A). Junior faculty also need to have access to substantial travel grants so that they can integrate with their national and international research communities.

We need to also provide specialized training and mentorship. This could include a formal mentoring program, training in proposal development, tenure dossier coaching, and ways to meet program officers and others in their professional communities.

Lastly, we need to better support junior (and mid-career and senior) faculty with administrative and grant writing support, as well as support in terms building interdisciplinary teams, and communicating and marketing research.

All this costs money. We must figure out ways to increase revenue or increase operational efficiency. This will require an institutional planning effort to grapple with these size and scope of these financial challenges, and the identification of new revenue sources and how to stimulate additional revenue. We need to develop a bold plan.

To scale research administrative support effectively and support growth across the university, especially in under-resourced units, the strategy should shift towards a centralized service model. The primary goal of such a model would be to provide reliable, expert support to all faculty, particularly those in departments without dedicated research administrators. This model provides dedicated, high-level administrative support to low-volume or under-resourced colleges and departments by creating a central pool of expertise. This needs to be done in such a way that services are improved for all stakeholders, and there is no diminishing of the quality of service receive by any stakeholder. Figuring out the right way to do this will require a collaborative approach that is informed by the participation of all stakeholders.

Additionally, we need to standardize and automate workflows. We need a full-lifecycle management process that is heavily dependent on ERA systems like Cayuse. We can incorporate state-of-the-art systems and use artificial intelligence to obtain substantial performance gains, provided we can find funding to increase our investment here. I believe strongly that anything we do to improve ERA utilization and improve workflows will pay for itself many-fold.   

Scaling university compliance systems like the Institutional Review Board (IRB), Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), and others (e.g., IBC, COI) requires a shift from manually intensive, paper-based workflows to an integrated, risk-based, and digitally streamlined compliance model. The goal is to handle increased volume and complexity without compromising ethical oversight or increasing review turnaround times. Again, this will need study and collaboration to develop systems that work, but I believe there are opportunities through automation that we should take advantage of. We have already increased our ERA investment to support research compliance.

Strategic decisions about where to invest in research will be driven by our research strategic plan and a commitment to maximizing institutional return on investment, which includes both financial gain and academic impact. To ensure campus-wide benefit, investment must be managed through a portfolio approach that includes both highly concentrated (large grants, Ph.D.-intensive) and broadly distributed (seed grants, capacity-building) funding. The Discover 2030 strategic planning process will help us identify the ways in which faculty want to be supported, which will inform strategic decisions. Ultimately, a three-pronged approach will include differential investment in high impact areas of strength and opportunity; taking a systems approach to capacity building; and modeling capacity and impact of potential strategies. 

On the “highly concentrated” side, we are looking at one outcome of the research strategic planning process to identify some institutional focus areas (areas of strength and opportunity) that are sometimes called “grand challenges.” If we are successful in finding grand challenges that are accepted by the university community, then those grand challenges will be targets of enough investment to enable them to grow. The intention would be to make each grand challenge broad enough that there are ways for much of the campus to participate.

On the “broadly distributed” side, we need to invest in existing resources and services that are distributed across the entire campus that would enable the overall capacity to increase. This would include seed grants, equitable access to research administration and research development services, access to needed research infrastructure, and training/mentorship.

The highly concentrated side is really focused on things that provide a direct and allocable ROI. And the broadly distributed side is focused on capacity building. As we have noted elsewhere, funding is limited, so we are going to have to move the needle on finding funding first. This can only happen when significant things happen: big gifts, major federal or state targeted funding, or increases in student enrollment.

The only way to address the lack of resources and plan for the future is to identify needs and potential strategies. We need to model research capacity in the various departments so we know what can be reasonably expected for research productivity given a particular teaching load. We need to understand what aspirational peers are doing, and the potential impacts of implementing particular strategies here. Modeling will be an important step in making strategic decisions.

Shifting to a research-focused institution without sacrificing teaching quality requires a strategic and systemic rebalancing of faculty workload and incentives, recognizing that quality research can enhance quality teaching. The single most important strategic decision is to not expect faculty to manage current teaching loads while increasing research output. This is a common failure point that leads to burnout, low morale, and diminished quality in both areas. The university must formalize policies that redefine faculty workload to prioritize research activity. This could include differential teaching loads, course buyouts, and supplementation with teaching faculty.

In addition to classical workload strategies, we need to figure out strategies for integrating research and teaching. This concept is sometimes called the “Scholar-Teacher” model, and we need to figure out what an implementation of the “Scholar-Teacher” model looks like for South. I suspect a lot of teaching quality activities are already incorporated, but there may be a way to incentivize the utilization of research to align teaching output with the needs of the workforce. In this regard, we should explore other explicit ways to integrate research and teaching, including undergraduate research activities, internships and projects, and course-based research experiences. The more we can do this type of integration well, the less we will be reliant on the classical workload activities discussed above because the Scholar-Teacher model achieves synergy between research and teaching that make the two mutually supportive.

The University Libraries must be viewed as an active partner in research, not just a service provider; an increased awareness and understanding of library capabilities and capacity as well as better integration of library functions and personnel into the research lifecycle will be essential in increasing research activity and impact. This goes beyond primary research functions of the libraries, such as data management and curation (providing infrastructure and expertise to meet funder mandates such as institutional repositories and data management plans); scholarly communications and publishing (managing the visibility of research output, impacting citation counts and prestige with transformative agreements for article processing charges, open access education, and institutional repository management); and maintaining specialized collections and databases that meet researcher needs.   

The library can also assist with the move to R1 by partnering with the Office of Research Development to enhance the competitiveness of grant proposals. Library staff can help faculty demonstrate the impact of their prior work using bibliometric tools (e.g., Web of Science, Scopus), which can be valuable for securing large federal grants. They can train faculty and administrators on interpreting and improving H-indices, citation counts, and altmetrics to enhance the perceived value of the university's scholarship. They can also continue essential support and training for faculty and Ph.D. students conducting rigorous systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

Library resources and personnel can also contribute directly to the research enterprise, whether it be with physical spaces such as the Learning Commons that can be used to support collaborative activity, or exploring new positions and services such as a data librarian or digital scholarship lab equipped with specialized software for digital humanities research, text mining, complex visualizations, and other analyses.

Yes, exploring institutional subscriptions to evidence synthesis software will be a high-priority action item, led by the University Libraries, to support the transition to R1 status. This is critical for improving the efficiency and rigor of high-impact research across all disciplines, particularly in health, education, and social sciences. Like many of the other issues identified here, we need a plan for acquiring funding and for allocating funding is a strategically desirable way.