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Views and Expectations of the Research University

Franklin D. Raines

My task is not to discuss primarily the direct federal interactions with universities, but to go beyond that. In my lifetime, I have occupied just about every role with universities other than full-time faculty member or full-time administrator. I will share some of that perspective, but also discuss the federal government's relations with research universities.

If you were to look at the list of university-related issues that I have dealt with in my time as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, you might get a less-than-happy picture of the current standing of research universities and their functioning in society. If you sit where I sit, these are the kinds of issues that come across your desk:

• How big is the R&D budget and how do we increase it?
• Who is going to police scientific integrity and judge whether an individual or group is claiming too much from research, or claiming exclusive rights to research when others had primary involvement?
• Are directed grants to universities any different from what we would otherwise call "pork barrel" spending? If Congress decides to create a laboratory at a particular university, how do we know whether that decision was full of wisdom, or simply local, parochial politics?
• Are universities and their faculty members players in tax bills in the same way that other special interests are? A lot of people in Washington are interested in the President's use of the line-item veto on a tax bill. Universities lobbied on this bill on the provisions concerning tax-exempt bonds. And a number of university professors were concerned about taxation of TIAA (the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association) accounts as well. Are their interests any different from those who have spokespeople along Capitol Hill's "Gucci Gulch"?
• Is indirect cost really the most important issue facing university presidents? If you were to judge by my conversations with them, you would think so, since it seems to always lead the list and is often hard to get beyond.
• Are universities really members of a tightly knit oligopoly who can manage prices in a way that is anti-competitive? The President just signed into law the largest increase in tuition assistance in 30 years, but the major objection to his initiative was that universities would just raise their prices and reap all the benefit.
• Can university budgets continue to grow dramatically faster than the economy as a whole? At some point, doesn't that mean that all we do is fund universities in the economy?
• When you look at issues of diversity in the universities and in the composition of their student bodies, it is a curious fact that some institutions (including research universities with large sports teams) seem to manage to fill the ranks of those teams, and seem to be responsive to donors who have interests in particular students, but appear to be reluctant when Title IX issues arise. We have what I consider to be a scandalous result: Several research universities that were required by law to drop their affirmative action programs have discovered that they had nothing but these programs attracting minority students, as demonstrated by the dramatic decline in the ranks of these students when the programs were terminated. Yet these same schools seem to manage to recruit particular students when they have a very strong internally driven need.

This is not a very pretty picture, and it is certainly not the picture you normally get from hearing discussions of university faculty and administrators at the National Academy Complex. But again, sitting where I sit, one could come away with the jaundiced view that these are the most significant issues facing universities. I think that would be tragic.

But this kind of list is quite often what public policymakers see. It contains not the uplifting issues of education and research, or the dissemination of knowledge. Rather, it appears to contain the issues of a large economic enterprise, seeking to acquire resources and exert its will, just like large business corporations, large unions, and large governments. I think something is lost if that is the only perspective conveyed to policymakers.

I would like to specifically address three areas that I believe are the core functions of research universities: teaching, the creation of knowledge, and the integration of knowledge in its relationship to society.

Teaching

Research universities are different from other institutions of higher education because of the breadth of their teaching responsibility. They teach undergraduates seeking their first degree, train people for specific professions, and seek to create the next generation of scholars. This is a broad task, although it is not as broad as the entire higher education function. It does not, for instance, deal with the kind of training that we find in our community colleges. But it is broader than what we find in the majority of our higher education institutions, which focus primarily on teaching undergraduates.

Some of the accouterments of teaching have changed over the last 50 years, but in remarkable ways they remain the same. We live in an era in which we have the technology to record the best performances by the most distinguished faculty, and distribute these widely. Yet we still find that having faculty members repeat and duplicate lectures again and again (trying to keep their expression new throughout) seems to be the method of choice.

At a time when students are paying enormous amounts of money to have access to teaching and research universities, they often find themselves spending an inordinate amount of time being taught by apprentice teachers or graduate students, who have not had the opportunity to be fully seasoned. And we find a strange reluctance to reach beyond the dissemination of knowledge within the geographic bounds of the university. The result is to avoid what is happening in the rest of society, which is the very fast and broad dissemination of information using modern technology.

In a sense, the dissemination of information in the rest of the world has gone from broadcasting to "narrowcasting," as organizations try to hit individual interests. Universities began with "narrowcasting" and have yet to discover broadcasting as a way to carry out the teaching function. In particular, they have yet to discover how to carry out that function where the objective is not a traditional degree or major credential, but involves instruction that is of shorter duration.

Creation of Knowledge

This is an area in which the federal government, obviously, has a particular interest. We are a major financier of the creation of knowledge through universities, and we are quite proud of what our support has produced over the years. The range of scientific achievementthe revolution now going on in biochemistry, our expanding understanding of the human genome, the discoveries of new forms of matter in the subatomic area, and the discovery of new planetary systemshas been quite extraordinary. The uses of technology in modern life have become so commonplace that we do not marvel at them in the way we once did.

One of the examples of how fast technology is changing our lives can be seen in popular culture. Even Disneyland and Disney World have decided that they can no longer have a "Tomorrowland" that is credible, because technology changes so quickly that they cannot keep up with expressions of what the fantasy world should look like. Tomorrowland has been totally reconceived, taking into account the fact that even Disney cannot keep up with science.

Research is clearly an area that has been one of our priorities for federal spending. Funding has increased by 11 percent since 1993 (when the Clinton Administration came in), with the largest increases going to university-based research. In the next several years, however, we will find that the requirement to balance the budget is going to affect research spending, just as it will affect all discretionary spending. If we are to sustain these kinds of increases, we will need a concerted effort to keep research at a high level of priority. While I believe that the support for research and technology is quite broad in Washington, and will, in fact, be sustained in this period, we almost certainly will not meet the highest aspirations of those in the research community.

But a number of issues do arise. For example, how large a scientific enterprise does the Nation need? In some ways, having large research capabilities has become a matter of prestige in universities, creating pressures for a broader and broader base that needs new grants to be sustained. At some point, that will raise questions about whether we have spread our resources too thin. It will also raise questions about whether we are still getting the kinds of synergies that one would expect from successful labs, in which one successful team can have a stimulating effect on others.

Another question concerns the composition of that scientific establishment. As universities begin to look and behave more like ordinary economic enterprises, will they be able to claim a priority status for research funding, or will other nonprofit or even for-profit enterprises rise up to argue that they should be treated exactly the same? In this sense, the TIAA issue in the tax bill is quite interesting. TIAA is losing its tax exemption, not because of anything it did, but because other insurance companies said, "We'd like to compete with them. Why should they have benefits that we don't have?" Congress responded by saying, "They look like an ordinary insurance company to us." What happens if Congress applies that same standard to research universities as compared to for-profit companies or other nonprofit entities who seek to obtain a larger share of the federal research dollar?

Another question concerns how we measure the success of our Nation's research programs. I can almost feel the collective cringe when anyone in the federal government talks about measuring the success of research programs, because it raises the specter of government auditors imposing narrow-minded, green­eye-shade approaches to setting research agendas. On the other hand, we have to be concerned about the productivity of our investment in intellectual capital in the same way we are concerned about our productivity in other areas. Just simply spending more cannot be an adequate test. One example is the recent Mars Pathfinder mission, which cost about one-tenth of some of our other interplanetary probes. It has achieved its goal of landing on Mars a rover that is now conducting scientific experiments. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration did it in a rather unorthodox way, bouncing the package on the Martian surface like a beach ball, and not in the more controlled way that engineers prefer (with retrorockets bringing it down to a soft landing). But would we say that we were less productive in getting a probe there because it cost less? Would we say that we were less productive because we used a somewhat unorthodox approach that perhaps some would consider inelegant?

Clearly, we have to address issues of productivity in research and technology. We are required to do this by the Government Performance and Results Act, which requires all federal agencies to set goals that they intend to work toward, and measures of their performance. We are already asking those performance questions. At a recent congressional hearing Members told research agencies, "You've got to tell us more about how we're going to measure your success as you go forward."

Another issue I have raised concerning research in the universities and government is partnership. While it is often talked about, the research partnership between the government and research universities has never been clearly defined. When I talk to university presidents, I often hear them talk about this partnership, but I also hear them using two words interchangeably. One is federal "assistance" and the other is federal "support." They use these words as though they mean the same thing, but often, if you listen carefully, you will hear that they actual impart different meanings to them. "Assistance" carries the implication that one is participating in providing help. "Support" carries an implication that one has an obligation to help sustain the entity, as opposed to simply providing assistance on particular projects. This is one of the tensions that exist in the discussion of research budgets: To what extent does the federal government have an obligation to support the research establishment of research universities? Is the federal government merely required to support the research in which it has an interest? One can come to very different conclusions about how we budget for research, depending on where you come down on this issue.

There are also questions about the issues of infrastructure and demographics related to technological change. The rapid depreciation of the value of scientific instrumentation, given our increasing knowledge, is an important issue. How do we make investment decisions, particularly if having a functioning lab requires an enormous upfront cost? At some point, one has to wonder what the right approach is to this initial investment question, because it can mean that the mere presence of a lab is going to affect the allocation of grants. Should we be concerned about this?

What happens if certain universities can afford their own labs? Should they get the lion's share of research grants because they could afford to invest in lab facilities as an inducement? Or should we have a positive program of ensuring that lab facilities are spread ubiquitously, so that the allocation of research grants is not affected by present lab facilities?

Integration of Knowledge

A major function of research universities is not simply the creation of knowledge and teaching, but the integration of knowledge in a world where knowledge is exploding. And we have great challenges before us as to how we do that. A little over a hundred years ago, it was expected that a well-educated person would essentially have read all the important works of human creation, and that was not an inconceivable task. The research library was created when knowledge, or at least books, began to expand so rapidly that it was not possible for everyone to have read all the major works, and it was not even possible for individuals to keep track of them.

There are great stories about how books were piling up in various places and no one knew what to do with them, because no one had an idea of how to arrange them: by author, alphabetically by title, subject, and so forth. There were also concerns about whether any two libraries would classify their books the same way. The creation of the various library classification systems was a major breakthrough in ensuring that knowledge was available for research, because it improved access to this knowledge by creating a numerical system. Currently, the Internet raises a similar question. How do we organize knowledge at that level? Beyond just simply organizing what we know, how do we apply it across fields so we aren't overwhelmed by the burgeoning knowledge within a single field, and thus misunderstanding the interconnections until 10, 20, or 30 years later?

At Harvard, which is the research university that I am most familiar with, President Neil Rudenstine has spent most of his tenure trying to get the various schools to talk with one another. He has encouraged them to take on joint enterprises, looking at issues like our growing biological understanding of the mechanisms of the mind and the applications of this in education and other areas. He would like to see the university look at such issues across the domains historically established for organizing itself, because the answers to the most pressing problems are unlikely to come solely from within one of those domains. This has been full-time work for him. There are enormous institutional jealousies, difficulties in getting faculty members to see beyond their own fields, and even a certain reticence that it may diminish their role if they get too close to real-world problems.

This integration role is going to be just as important in the evolving role of research universities as it is in the rest of society. Our knowledge is increasing, but the biggest challenge is still going to be how best to integrate that knowledge so we understand the interconnections. That integration will enable us to move rapidly from the creation of knowledge to its application in society.

Franklin D. Raines was director of the Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office of the President, currently he is chairman and CEO-Designate at Fannie Mae. This article is based on remarks delivered at the Woods Hold Symposium entitled "A Dialogue on Research University Futures," held August 9, 1997.