The Role of Research In Our Academic Plan

C. Bradley Moore
Vice President for Research
Jan. 6, 2001

It is a pleasure and privilege for me to be here at Ohio State and to meet with you this morning. Thank you for including me on today’s agenda and most of all, thank you for bringing me here as a colleague.   

OSU is a truly exciting place to be.  Our President is leading the nation in defining the vision and agenda for land-grant universities in the 21^st century.  You all have worked hard with campus leadership over the past 2 years to define our purpose and goals and to construct an Academic Plan for achieving them.  Our job in the Office of Research is to help you turn the spirit of this plan into a reality and its concrete initiatives into accomplishments. 

First some key features of that spirit as it relates to research.

 I think that our Purpose--To advance the well-being of the people of Ohio and the global community through the creation and dissemination of knowledge—captures the essence of the mission of a great university.  It broadens the traditional missions of conducting research, teaching students, and serving our university, our professions and our governments to include a broader responsibility for the dissemination of knowledge to the benefit of society.  The importance of this for Ohio’s development in this era of the knowledge economy has been laid out clearly in President Kirwan’s speeches around the state.

The primacy of our first Core Value -- the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake—must be emphasized and safeguarded.  For this is the well from which the university draws all of its contributions to society. This core value has served universities and society well for many hundreds of years and will be no less central to our success in the future.

Our Overarching Goal--The Ohio State University will be among the world's truly great universities—is suitably ambitious.  I believe that it is sensible given our resources and potential.  It will be very challenging and difficult; it will require tremendous focus and stamina for many years; it will require us to obtain major new resources; we will need to be creative and to work hard together.  I think that it will be exciting and fun, most of the time.   

We have tremendous assets. With well over 100 departments and a full array of professional schools and colleges we have experts in almost every imaginable area.  We should be able to tackle any problem. 

We are big, really big, with over 50,000 students, some 3,000 faculty, more than 14,000 staff and a budget in excess of $2 billion. 

Our sponsored research work has been growing rapidly, more than 20% per year for the past two years.  With a total of $322M we are 19^th overall nationally.  With respect to Federal funding at $135M, we are ranked 34^th nationally with plenty of room to grow.

We have a great campus with plenty of room for new facilities to support our programs and natural beauty to lift our spirits.

We are the acknowledged flagship campus of Ohio—House Speaker Jo Ann Davidson made that very clear in her commencement address.

Our land-grant history prepares us perfectly for the future.  We are respected throughout the state for our contributions to agriculture; we are fifth in the nation in the magnitude of our sponsored research for business and industry. We are ready to propel Ohio into the era of the knowledge economy.

University, City, State and business leaders work together and solve problems together.

And Ohioans are just plain genuinely nice people!

So, as I told our Trustees last February, I am convinced that “We are in the right place, with the right people, at the right time to launch research and educational programs that will define the great universities of coming decades.” 

The Academic Plan with its quantitative goals, strategies and 14 specific initiatives is designed to bring us to true greatness.  Research—That is to say, the research that you do, plays a major role in the Academic Plan.  Research plays a role in all of the strategies but let me focus on the first four and the final one for the next few minutes.

A major new thrust of the academic plan is building multidisciplinary research programs. During the past few decades, extraordinarily powerful new research tools and methods have been developed in many fields.  These bring us to the point that we can attack vastly more complex problems than ever before, problems that are fundamentally multidisciplinary in nature, problems that are immensely challenging intellectually, problems that profoundly affect human society.  I think that there are abundant opportunities.  Successful attacks on a few of these problems should define OSU as a truly great research university, prepare our graduates to make valuable contributions to society and provide important foundations for economic and social progress in Ohio, the nation and the world. 

Selective investment in departments and the existence of key multidisciplinary centers position us well for creating some of the major intellectual frontiers of coming decades and for making some of the most important contributions to the progress of human society.  Our colleagues have proposed more than 100 possible programs for getting us started.  In the Office of Research we will be working with a faculty advisory committee, with deans and chairs, and with proposal authors to combine some of these proposals and to provide funds for developing program plans and proposals to funding agencies in several areas.  Where this work requires people from many fields, we will need to seed focused centers and, as they grow, build the connections among them.  With this strategy we should be able to build the critical mass to open new areas in which we can be world leaders and simultaneously to create points of strength from which to build in most of our departments.  It is always the right time for good ideas, so please continue to submit requests for planning funds and we will move forward on new ideas as opportunities allow.  Office of Research funds will be used primarily for program initiation and for obtaining outside funding for the long-term support of programs.  The breadth of our programs is a great asset as is our culture that values both the creation of new knowledge and its application to the benefit of society.  It should be pointed out that our multidisciplinary thrust will not prevent us from seizing exceptional opportunities within a single discipline.

The sine qua non of our Academic Plan is the building of a world-class faculty.  There are two initiatives here: hiring established leaders to build strength rapidly in areas of special need and opportunity, and building solid strength for the long haul by developing and rewarding our existing faculty.  Ed Ray and I have asked for your proposals for recruiting specific individuals.  Together the Offices of Academic Affairs and Research  will develop a ranked list with the help of a faculty advisory group and authorize recruiting of specific individuals.  Deans and chairs will be intimately involved in this process.  We will move down this list as rapidly as our resources permit.  New proposals will always be welcome and will be slotted into the list on a continuing basis.  To nurture and build our existing faculty, we need to ensure that OSU is the best place to do research in the areas in which we choose to be leaders.  We need to be diligent in ensuring that all of our professors receive recognition and rewards comparable to those that they would receive at any other institution.  This will minimize the need to deal with outside offers and maximize the likelihood of our success when they do arise.  We cannot afford to have our best young people stolen.  We need to be preemptive and proactive, not simply reactive in this regard.

A key part of being the best place to work is having first-rate facilities.  The Academic Plan includes $1/4 billion dollars for this purpose.  We need to begin a comprehensive process for planning research facilities and for constructing them in a timely and cost-effective way.

The academic plan calls for $3/4 billion dollars in five years.  Clearly, we cannot achieve our goals with the resources currently in hand.  By pooling our various resources, targeting our top-level faculty recruitment and making tough choices wisely, we can reallocate enough resources to seed programs that should ultimately bring in major new resources.  One possible resource is The Ohio Plan (TOP).  TOP may provide major new resources next fiscal year.  The proposal for the Governor’s budget is $150,000,000 per year to fund multidisciplinary, multi-institutional programs in biotechnology, information technology and/or nanotechnology at up to $50,000,000 per program.  The fundamental goal is to move Ohio’s economy forward in these technology areas.  If TOP is funded, programs will be selected competitively on the basis of scientific quality and economic effectiveness.  Task forces have developed examples of some of the research directions that could be funded.  Because the goal is economic impact, the scope of programs must address technology development and transfer and workforce development.  All disciplines that relate to the impact of these technologies on society and particularly on Ohio’s economy are relevant.  We will need involvement of the professional schools, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Arts, Humanities, and others in addition to science and engineering.  For TOP, it is Ohio’s economy and quality of life that are the real goals.  We need broad involvement; this is not just a science and engineering program. 

The final initiative of our Academic Plan brings our technology transfer work to the next level through TechPartners and SciTech.   The basic purpose is to transfer the knowledge that we create for the broadest impact on Ohio’s economy and quality of life.  This has been a high priority of President Kirwan’s since his arrival and is a major activity of the Office of Research.

My main purpose in being here today is to respond to your questions and to get your input on how the Office of Research can serve you better.  My job and the job of my office is to make OSU the best possible place for you to do your research, to help you get new things started and to help you bring in new resources.  You and your students have the hard job of identifying the great new research frontiers and pushing them back.