Diane Dietz has the story and data on UO here. I got the OSU data from their very complete Research Office data page, here. Both are "Federal Flow Through" totals, which are the easiest to find directly comparable data. They include spending on outreach and instruction, but it's mostly research money and the trends look similar no matter how you cut it. That's the table on the left. The table on the right shows athletic department spending, from USAToday. (Official UO and OSU numbers for 2012.)
The five years since Interim Provost Jim Bean took over have been a self-inflicted disaster for UO research. First there was Bean's silly "five big ideas" effort. No disrespect to those who participated - but look at the funding sources data - that's not where the money that might have kept UO in the AAU was to be found.
Then there was the large and continued diversion of funds from UO's core academic mission to things like UO-Portland. Sure we need a presence there, but have you seen how expensive, and empty, the White Stag building is? Remember the Old Town sign? Like Bend, this all probably started before Bean - but why didn't he have the guts, or the brains, to reign in Frohnmayer and Moseley?
Then there's the millions UO has taken from the academic side to spend on sports. $1.83 million a year for athlete-only tutoring - straight out of the Provost's budget. $467,000 a year to the athletic department for Mac Court - for the next 30 years. Millions of subverted overhead funds. Why didn't you just say no, Jim?
On top of this all is the developing disaster that is Bean's hire as VP for Research, Kimberly Espy. He got her straight from Nebraska - just after they got kicked out of the AAU. WTF? People ask me to try and keep track of how many PI's Espy has chased off campus so far, and how many searches she's blown. Sorry, I don't have the time, gotta write a grant proposal. But the comments are open. 12/29/2012.
Update - partial salary list from Espy's office:
Kimberly Espy gets $295K. For comparison, we paid Rich Linton $185K.
Patrick Phillips gets $168K at 0.5 FTE
Update - partial salary list from Espy's office:
Kimberly Espy gets $295K. For comparison, we paid Rich Linton $185K.
Patrick Phillips gets $168K at 0.5 FTE
Patrick Jones gets $165K
Chuck Williams gets $160K
Chuck Williams gets $160K
Sandra Morgen gets $150K
Beth Stormshak gets $140K at 0.5 FTE plus $15K
Moira Kiltie gets $93K
Matt Hutter gets $95K
Analinda Camacho gets $95K
Moira Kiltie gets $93K
Matt Hutter gets $95K
Analinda Camacho gets $95K
The 0.5 FTE are typically also 0.5FTE as faculty, that part at lower pay. Full staff list here. Top this off with continuing contracts with Huron and who knows who else. From an earlier post:
And a commenter points us to this RFP that UO put out in December, ago, for a consulting firm to do what Espy and her new hires are supposed to do. In FY 2011 the VPR's Office Admin budget had $437,430 for admin salaries. For FY 2013, Espy's got $1,111,007 to spend. Full report here. The consultants are on top of that. As a commenter notes:
Look at Acct code 20000 - Service and Supplies. That's Espy's black hole of consulting:
2011 $2,164,191
2012 $4,546,478
2013 $5,154,632
I'm guessing Oregon State pays Rick Spinrad $220K or so to manage a considerably larger and more complicated research portfolio: http://oregonstate.edu/research/contacts (E.g. Small boat and diving safety officer!) I'm also guessing it doesn't take more than two months to get a simple IRB renewal at Oregon State.
Dog Says
ReplyDeleteGiven the fact that OSU has an engineering school as well as COAS (which gets significant NOAA funding) I don't believe these results are surprising and, by themselves, are certainly not an indictment against the UO. However, the UO has not been very good at building core faculty expertise in emerging funding areas to leverage new sources of funding. We remain stuck in our discipline silos.
Level differences do not explain why the differential is increasing.
DeleteDog says
DeletePlease state the difference between "level differences" and "differential".
in round numbers, over the last 5 years, UO has had 100M in
funding and OSU has had 160M. I do not find that difference
to be surprising.
Within the noise of grant funding, there is no systematic trend
between UO and OSU.
Remember, OSU is a land grant, sea grant, space grant, sun grant (http://www.sungrant.org/) University which makes them
eligible for different kinds of funding streams than UO.
I agree the fact that OSU has more total research dollars in not particularly relevant. If the UO wants to compete with OSU on this basis we need to invest in new faculty in areas that are well-funded, such as the applied sciences.
DeleteWe need to do something, if we are going to try and stay an AAU research university. These five years have brought a 20% increase in undergraduates, only a 10% increase in tenure track faculty, no increase in PhD students, and no increase in federal research money.
DeleteIn 2009, Frohnmayer wrote in the RG: http://projects.registerguard.com/turin/2009/jan/11/higher-standard-uo/
"Everyone agrees that the AAU is the gold standard for research institutions in North America. I have been elected unanimously to the AAU governing board for two successive three-year terms. The UO's competitive, peer-reviewed research grants, the single most important criterion for AAU membership, have risen dramatically in recent years, even in times of flat federal research funding.
Furthermore, Richard Linton, UO vice president for research and graduate studies, serves as a national voice for research excellence, most recently by direct participation in the AAU's national effort to assist President-elect Barack Obama's transition team in science and technology matters. The UO's place in the AAU is secure because of the significant and sustained efforts of our distinguished faculty members."
UO's place in the AAU was not secure when Dave wrote that, and it certainly is not anymore.
Do the math: federal research money at UO is down 10% in real dollars since 2008.
DeleteI know. Let's get a faculty union! That'll level the playing field!
DeleteI've heard "applied sciences" several times now, including in the post above, so I assume this is being pushed at some level. I'd be interested to hear more, because at least in my field, "applied sciences" is so vague as to be meaningless. And if that's true, creating a new school of applied sciences just means more administrators - is this what we really want?
DeleteThe Old Man hopes that “Applied Science” is not in the future of the UO. This University gained its AAU membership on the basis of strong programs in the Basic Sciences, whose Faculties understood that Science is a vital part of the Curriculum at any university whose dedication is to Education in the Liberal Arts. We will be far better off if building on that strength than if we try to be another Georgia Tech.
DeleteDog on Applied Science
Deletea now antiquated term. Interdisciplinary Informatics is the future of large amounts of research and funding for grad programs in the future. Unfortunately, we do not have a CIS
department that are leaders in this area.
And if you google on informatics you will find lots of material related to Biomedical research but its well beyond that.
A good example of a good initiative is here
http://cci.uncc.edu/cip
Applied Sciences???? Really??? Antiquated is right. Is Espy pushing this? Further down the rabbit hole we go...
DeleteTo Dog: There is currently a search for a "Math/Bio" faculty member that could result in someone working in the area you describe.
Deletesort-of relevant: http://physics.aps.org/articles/v5/143
DeleteDog on Informatics
DeleteYes I am aware of searches here and there but we need a much broader and more sustained effort to build a relatively large scale informatics/computational "science"/big data/data viz center. The recent block NIH grant is a step in this direction and there are some other steps (small) being taken.
There really is nothing "wrong" with the Institute model and indeed it was a good thing when IMB started. But now we need to refresh that model to cutting edge research relevant to the current century and focus more on the marriage between science and public policy and decision making and real world global problems (public health, stability of food chain, climate change, weather prediction, better computational modelling of materials for energy production, etc, etc).
The list of problems that can be attacked by state of the art computational, visualization, and analysis tools these days is very large (hence the success of Google Analytics) and there is funding to be found if your University has critical mass.
Although this dog is dying away, I do hope the UO can move in this direction before the final breath. In my view, this direction saves us as an AAU research University and revitalizes our grad program, but it requires a) a significant investment and b) an understanding that this is now the future of much research.
"Sort-of relevant": Thanks for the link. That article is very exciting but it also suggests that "Applied Sciences" plays to UO's weaknesses (e.g. the lack of engineering school or talent) rather than its strengths.
DeleteDog: An alternative viewpoint:
Deletehttp://www.r-bloggers.com/data-driven-science-is-a-failure-of-imagination/
Dog Says
DeleteFrom the Blog:
"So why many scientists find data-driven research and large data exciting? It has nothing to do with science. The desire to have datasets as large as possible and to create giant data mines is driven by our instinctive craving for plenty (richness), and by boyish tendency to have a “bigger” toy (car, gun, house, pirate ship, database) than anyone else. And whoever guards the vaults of data holds power over all of the other scientists who crave the data."
Yes, if you actually believe this, then make no investments at all because scientists ultimately are Evil White Men who only want toys to compensate for their lack of humanity.
The bigger issue is that most experimental science these days produces data that can not be adequately analyzed, organized, or viewed which leads to pre-filtering of the data and losing
discovery space and producing biased results. Climate data suffers big time from this limitation.
So there are two choices
a) Big data is irrelevant
b) Big data will lead to breakthroughs and new insights, especially into old problems
Choice A gets us nowhere and maintains an inadequate status quo
Choice B is risky.
Looks to me like Oregon's "Flagship University" flies an orange flag from its mainmast.
ReplyDeleteAny Corvallis readers know how many months it takes to get a simple IRB renewal at OSU?
ReplyDeleteIn the last five years we've had to deal with Paula Roberts and Huron running ORSA/SPS. During that time ORSA lost several talented ORSA/SPS employees to OSU. What UO got was poor grant administration leadership and a bill for millions of dollars from Huron.
ReplyDeleteDog Says
DeleteAgree completely on poor grant administration but that generally
is unrelated to actual grant funding. What strikes me as a problem in the actual data (linked in the UO matters post) is the relatively low proportional NSF funding this campus receives. I believe that is a reflection that we do not have critical mass in new areas that NSF is now funding.
Dog has identified the key problem: OSU currently gets about three times as much money from NSF as we do. Three times!
DeleteWhat about NIH? I'm guessing that isn't pretty either.
DeleteI don't understand the negative views of Espy. How does she control hiring of new faculty? Or making counter offers to those that are considering leaving? I thought the purse strings now lie in the college? I have had only positive interactions with her.
ReplyDeleteThe VPR will always have a role to play in retention and recruitment (regardless of the new budget model) because those are fundamental aspects of the mission to nurture research at UO. Unfortunately, Espy has failed miserably at these crucial aspects of her job. Will the Provost and President respond effectively? That remains to be seen.
ReplyDeleteYour solely positive experiences put you in a shrinking minority.
Nice add with the increases in the athletic money suck. (Go back a few more years and that trend continues.)
ReplyDeleteProjecting from the five-year trend, athletic department spending will eclipse spending on research at UO in 2014. Yikes.
ReplyDeleteOSU, and almost any other research university, have far more science faculty than the U of O. There are nearly 100 faculty in the Molecular and Cellular Biology graduate program at OSU. At the U of O, there are 38 faculty in the entire Biology department, and only around fifteen faculty that would be part of an equivalent program. The life sciences here is ludicrously small, and as that makes up a good part of research dollars, we are small in research dollars as well.
ReplyDeleteUO also does not have an engineering school. Does anyone know the total number of science and engineering faculty at OSU versus UO? I would wager that the funding per STEM faculty is substantially higher at UO than OSU. However, that really means we need to invest in new faculty lines, particularly in the sciences. That also means continuing to grow our undergraduate program in those areas in innovative ways.
ReplyDeleteKimberly Espy gets $295K. For comparison, we paid Rich Linton $185K.
ReplyDeletePatrick Phillips gets $168K 0.5FTE
Beth Stormshak gets $140K 0.5FTE plus $15K
Moira Kiltie gets $93K
Matt Hutter gets $95K
Patrick Jones gets $165K
Chuck Williams gets $160K
Analinda Camacho gets $95K
Sandra Morgen gets $150K
Full staff list here: http://research.uoregon.edu/sites/research.uoregon.edu/files/uploads/researchunitcontactlist11302012.pdf
I'm guessing OSU pays Rick Spinrad $220K or so to manage a considerably larger and more complicated research portfolio: http://oregonstate.edu/research/contacts (E.g. Small boat safety and diving officer!) I'm also guessing it doesn't take more than two months to to a simple IRB renewal!
This makes me sick. Highly paid, and grossly incompetent.
DeleteThe Old Man s right, The strategy that propelled us into the AAU was not simply research dollars, esp applied research. Funding for applied research is fine, but only to the extent that it is complementary with basic research. The two largest units in the sciences that are the most applied, or have shifted their emphasis in that direction are the two units that sank the most in the NRC research rankings. Look them up; they are easy to spot. That said the relatively small numbers of majors in the physical sciences will need to grow if they are to thrive in the current tuition-driven environment. A tally of the most significant patents coming out of the sciences here almost all have roots in our strongest basic sciences.
ReplyDelete