Faculty Panel at U. of Wisconsin Sees No Need for New Office to Manage Research

The real story here is not the restructuring of research supporting systems but the broader issue of disintegrating research administration infrastructures at Wisconsin, and indeed across the United States. Offices that manage sponsored programs (grants, contracts, research fellowships, etc.) universally have had flat budgets for the past decade, and yet this period saw an unprecedented growth in research funding (e.g., doubling of NIH grants) as well as a torrent of new regulatory requirements governing all aspects of research (electronic submission of proposals, research subjects, animal care, conflict of interest, export controls, accounting, reporting, auditing, technology transfer, etc.). After a decade of re-engineering of systems to get “more for less” out of research administration, most sponsored programs offices at major institutions across the university are operating in the red zone. What investments have been made in the infrastructure have gone to avert threats from the government to shut down research because of weaknesses in regulatory compliance – usually weaknesses that have to do with maintaining red tape than in providing actual improvements in the care of human and animal research subjects. During the past two decades the administrative costs for which the federal government will reimburse colleges and universities has been capped at an artificially low percentage – one appropriate for twenty years ago, but one totally incapable of sustaining an administrative infrastructure. This has resulted in two major impacts – first, faculty now must spend over 40% of their research effort on administrative tasks that universities at one time did for them, that’s twice the amount of time they spent twenty years ago; and second, since central offices have not kept pace with the growth of research programs and unfunded mandates, colleges and departments have had to create shadow administrative systems for their faculty just to keep the paperwork flowing. All of this extra support is provided free to the government. Worst of all the additional reporting requirements required to provide immediate transparency on the spending of Stimulus Funds (ARRA grants) is swamping the nation’s entire research enterprise. The federal government complains that universities do not provide effective management of federally funded projects and they should operate more like companies. Companies, however, are fully reimbursed for their administrative costs so as research programs grow so does the supporting infrastructure. Universities alone are singled out for having a cap on administrative cost reimbursement. This was a penalty inflicted on all universities because of perceived abuses in the charging of indirect costs by a few institutions over twenty years ago. The punishment appears to be a life sentence. In a time when we need the world’s best scientists and engineers looking for solutions to global challenges, their research programs must creep along because they are bogged down in a bureaucratic quagmire. The committee is correct – structural changes won’t help anymore, neither will employing the latest management fad to increase productivity. But the real story isn’t that they were against reorganization, but that they saw that the root problem is an inadequately maintained administrative infrastructure that can no longer support such a massive enterprise. The only change that can really help is getting relief from the arbitrary cap placed on administrative reimbursements and requiring any additional funds go directly into the support of faculty researchers.

The Chronicle has misquoted the Capital Times article and did so both in the headline and the body of the article. As the Cap Times said, this was the report of the academic staff ad hoc committee. The faculty ad hoc committee on research restructuring has not yet submitted its report.