Although the University of Utah is listed among the top 100 research universities in the nation and increased its federal research support by 70 percent in recent years, school officials fear the U. is losing ground and needs to make some changes.
The problem is not that the university is doing badly. It's just that the competition seems to be doing better. The rate of growth in federal research grants at the U. since 1978 has been lower than any of the other leading 100 research universities. Nearly all research grants come from federal dollars.Broken down into into a smaller group - the U.'s so-called 12 "peer" institutions - only UCLA has had lower performance between 1983 and 1990. Among the peer schools are UCLA, Washington, Colorado, North Carolina, Pittsburgh, Texas, Arizona, Iowa, Purdue, Virginia, Cincinnati and Utah State University.
The performance of the latter is perhaps the most difficult for University of Utah officials to accept since the U. is rightly considered the state's research flagship. Yet in the seven-year stretch from 1983-1990, federal research at USU grew by 220 percent, compared with 70 percent for the U.
These figures were offered this week at the U. Board of Trustees by Richard K. Koehn, the U.'s new vice president for research. What the statistics show is an institution that perhaps has been a little complacent over the years about its vaunted research program. When the U.'s strengths are listed, research is always one of the leading examples.
Yet there is a great deal of competition for those federal research dollars and the U. may not have been scrambling as hard as some others in the past 15 years, or at least not as effectively.
So what can the U. do? Some steps already are being taken. Koehn says the school has had an inadequate infrastructure for research - things simply haven't been well-organized. The U. has established a Research Council to study the problem and make recommendations.
In addition, the U.'s approach to research has been rather scattered. The school needs to carve out its own niche and concentrate on specific areas of expertise to "gain a competitive edge," as Koehn puts it.
Since the federal government is fighting a huge deficit problem, the flow of federal dollars for research is by no means secure, although cutting back on research would be a serious mistake. Scientific and technical research is the foundation on which future prosperity is built. Utah's economy in particular is closely tied to research success at the U.
The U. needs to be as well-organized, effective and competitive as any research university in the nation, both for academic reasons and for the financial rewards that such expertise can bring.