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[totoro]

The campus in transition to truly acting like an R1 can be a treacherous place, as others have noted, with senior faculty's expectations of teaching from junior faculty, who are to be assessed far differently for tenure.  Beware.

As for what real research support means, I have family members at such campuses, and they have grantswriting offices that do most of the work of proposals, which is a lot of work.  They have research assistants offered to them every semester, multiple research assistants to do a lot of the drudgery work.  Of course, yes, they have large travel budgets, they have supplies budgets for a new computer every other year, if they want it, and new computers and IPads to take home, too, as well as to cover journal subscriptions and association dues and more.  They have funding to take grad students to conferences, too, and they have great grad students to assist in research projects, because the campuses promise more funding for more years for those students.

This must be really elite R1s because it wasn't my experience at universities ranked about 40-60 in doctoral unis in the USNWR. We taught 2/2 - 8 contact hours (social science - yes we had TAs for larger courses). About $1000 a year travel budget and the research office tended to be pretty hopeless though there were seminars etc. on applying for NSF grants (but nothing on anything else). No RA unless you had a grant to cover it. And no extea help or many for being DGS or whatever. There was start-up money for 3 years ($15k). Now I don't think there was anything wrong with that but it wasn't like you describe.

It's better in terms of "support" here at a top Go8 uni in Aus but not like you describe and most of us do more grading than in a similar place in the US.

[proftowanda]

The campus in transition to truly acting like an R1 can be a treacherous place, as others have noted, with senior faculty's expectations of teaching from junior faculty, who are to be assessed far differently for tenure.  Beware.

As for what real research support means, I have family members at such campuses, and they have grantswriting offices that do most of the work of proposals, which is a lot of work.  They have research assistants offered to them every semester, multiple research assistants to do a lot of the drudgery work.  Of course, yes, they have large travel budgets, they have supplies budgets for a new computer every other year, if they want it, and new computers and IPads to take home, too, as well as to cover journal subscriptions and association dues and more.  They have funding to take grad students to conferences, too, and they have great grad students to assist in research projects, because the campuses promise more funding for more years for those students.

This must be really elite R1s because it wasn't my experience at universities ranked about 40-60 in doctoral unis in the USNWR. We taught 2/2 - 8 contact hours (social science - yes we had TAs for larger courses). About $1000 a year travel budget and the research office tended to be pretty hopeless though there were seminars etc. on applying for NSF grants (but nothing on anything else). No RA unless you had a grant to cover it. And no extea help or many for being DGS or whatever. There was start-up money for 3 years ($15k). Now I don't think there was anything wrong with that but it wasn't like you describe.

It's better in terms of "support" here at a top Go8 uni in Aus but not like you describe and most of us do more grading than in a similar place in the US.

I'm sure that you are correct about your experience.

Other than that, what are you saying?

[totoro]

That there aren't sharp lines between R1s and R2s. You described some picture where there are a lot of research support resources, but that isn't the case at the R1 unis I was at.

[southerntransplant]

That there aren't sharp lines between R1s and R2s. You described some picture where there are a lot of research support resources, but that isn't the case at the R1 unis I was at.

This is interesting. While we're recently an R1, it hasn't been that recent, and until a third state university was added to the R1 rolls we were only one of two R1 state institutions for about 15 years. Outside of a fairly significant startup (which we had two years to spend down), though, we have to pay for everything through grants. It's the same at the other state R1's. Our grants office helps us with submissions and budgeting, but in no way help with the writing. Grad students who are interested in working as RAs must be hired by the individual PIs and are typically paid through grants.

One thing we do have is incentive return, in which the PI gets some percentage of the indirect back into an account with no expiration and that can be used for anything. It's not much but it's better than nothing, and useful in emergencies. The other big R1 here doesn't have it, and neither do other R1s I know about in other states.

While our teaching load is representative of other R1's (1/2 or 2/1 in STEM), it is rigid, and we are watched like hawks. Friends in other R1s can typically get away with teaching only grad courses and can shirk their standard load with no buyout so long as someone picks up the slack. I have to buy out of a course by giving the department 1.5 months of my salary (fully loaded), and since my course load is set for the next few years (until we can hire someone else) there's no way I can buy out or entertain a sabbatical without being a total butthole about it.

I think Totoro's point is that "support and resources for research" is fluid between R1s, so is not a rigid demarcation separating R1s from R2s.   

[polly_mer]

I think Totoro's point is that "support and resources for research" is fluid between R1s, so is not a rigid demarcation separating R1s from R2s.   

This was my point upthread.  I had the interesting experience of going from being the graduate student of a top performer at an R2 to being the graduate student of being a top performer at a top R1.  There is no way, no how, no day that anyone could pay me enough to attempt the life of that top performer at a top R1.  On the other hand, I did see that getting any research done was substantially easier at that top R1.

For example, the libraries had all the journals I ever read.  There was no foolishness about waiting for interlibrary loan to come through, maybe, oh, and we're at the budget for this year, perhaps you can make an all-day trip to the nearest good library and just photocopy what you need.  The same was true for books.  I seldom needed interlibrary loan at that top R1 and when I did get interlibrary loan at the R2, driving to the mid-tier R1 two hours away and checking out the book as a state resident was often faster than waiting for the interlibrary loan to come from across the country.

The atmosphere with multiple people working in areas related to my research was wonderful at the R1.  Instead of trying to buttonhole a bunch of people at the conference twice a year while going to see talks, I could wander down the hall and bounce ideas off people.  I saw three to ten seminar talks a week that helped me think about the field and my place in it, instead of having a visitor's talk forwarded to me from colleagues at the mid-tier R1 and other research places within driving distance where I had to decide if an all-day trip was worth it to go see some colleagues and that visitor.  Ideas flowed like water at the top R1 and it was wonderful.  The R2 was nice, but nothing like the research environment even at the mid-tier R1 that I frequently visited.

Now that I'm at a regional comprehensive without even a master's program related to my fields, I feel the lack of facilities very keenly.  I had to help the grants office sign up to be qualified to submit grants to some federal agencies.  My colleagues who recently got million dollar grants are helping me work within a system that actively opposes writing grants and certainly doesn't want to help administer them (one very overworked accountant who also does several other things is the person tasked with that, not an entire staff of several people like at the R2 or a huge staff for each division like at the R1).

[proftowanda]

That there aren't sharp lines between R1s and R2s. You described some picture where there are a lot of research support resources, but that isn't the case at the R1 unis I was at.

Well, duh.  I described what family members described to me at their campuses.  Now, I do not have so large a family that members are at more than a few campuses -- few meaning three, which is exactly the number of R1 campuses where three of my family members work.  Did you think that anyone could have family members by the several dozens, all with professorial positions at several dozen top R1s?  Did I state that any of those were the R1 unis where you worked?  Of course not.  So your tone was unnecessary.  But thank you for filling bandwidth.

[fedscholar]

I went from R1 graduate student to public SLAC affiliate, and the difference was pretty shocking. Maybe it is my personality, but I don't mind breaking trail that much. I helped shepherd our little school into a large federal research partnership, and I have worked with a number of faculty on projects, usually doing much of the paperwork and reporting. So, the initiative is not so unexpected. What was surprising was the cultural difference. People just lack research initiative here. I start just about everything, and it is like trying to start a fire with wet logs. Faculty initiative, administrative competence, students, and of course, infrastructure are all ingredients that may need to change before things can hum along. The first two can be quite slow to change. My impression after ten years of working at it is that a university culture is not easily transformed, even if a university wants to up its research intensity. But my situation is extreme.

It seems like R2s would be much more intermediate in all aspects, but R1 aspirations with R2 teaching loads, administrative facilities, and infrastructure could be stressful. As I said upthread, in my field, I would feel better about training and working with master's students than PhD students, because I genuinely worry about the overproduction of the latter. A master's is the key to the realm in the environmental field, and I think I could calibrate my research expectations to jive with undergraduates, master's students, and the occasional PhD and postdoc. I don't like the idea of the pyramid schemes that seem to operate at many R1s. I actually like the idea of hosting teaching/research postdoc at teaching Us or R2s, to give them teaching experience and to crank up our research capacities a notch. I would even like to do that in my current position.

[drscot]

That there aren't sharp lines between R1s and R2s. You described some picture where there are a lot of research support resources, but that isn't the case at the R1 unis I was at.

Well, duh.  I described what family members described to me at their campuses.  Now, I do not have so large a family that members are at more than a few campuses -- few meaning three, which is exactly the number of R1 campuses where three of my family members work.  Did you think that anyone could have family members by the several dozens, all with professorial positions at several dozen top R1s?  Did I state that any of those were the R1 unis where you worked?  Of course not.  So your tone was unnecessary.  But thank you for filling bandwidth.

I didn't detect any discordant tone in Totoro's posts. This, however, is the full nails-on-the-blackboard experience.

T says some R1s are very different from R2s. P says R1s are not necessarily all alike. Tomayto, tomarto: Let's call the whole thing off.

[polly_mer]

It seems like R2s would be much more intermediate in all aspects, but R1 aspirations with R2 teaching loads, administrative facilities, and infrastructure could be stressful.

Yes, that would be bad.  You want expectations that are in line with what people can do with the resources and support available.  I would take a job in a heartbeat with a solidly R2 like Missouri Tech or Colorado School of Mines.  I have not applied for positions where the vibe is clearly "you better be doing near MIT work with Missouri Tech resources".  I can do research and teach 2/2.  I am not going to be running a thirty-person, multimillion-dollar group while doing so.

[totoro]

What Polly describes upthread is almost what it is like here at the top Australian research university but not really at my alma mater/VAP place (the library would just tell us to go to MIT to read what we needed) and my tenure place in the US where we were a small social science department in an engineering university. A really useful thing here is that there is writing coaching for first time grant appliers and an internal review system - research office staff and faculty - for all grants to our NSF equivalent agency. At my tenure place there wasn't anything like that and the research office got confused and flustered if you got money from anywhere but the NSF. We did have a research officer assigned to the social science faculty but it wasn't much help.

Fedscholar is right that there was a lot initiative and pressure to do research at the R1 unis but often it felt like we were flying in the dark not knowing how to go about things or having much contact or resources.

I'm not trying to be confrontational or anything with Proftowanda. Sorry, if that was the impression.

[pgher]

I'm at an R2 and got my PhD at a top-tier R1, and have friends at both R1s and another R2.  My perception is that the better R1s are more uniformly good--that is, most parts of the university have high research activity (every college, every department), most faculty within a given department are highly active, etc.  At an R2, it's more spotty.  For example, my department has both a lot of activity and a lot of encouragement from the chair etc.  Other departments...well, less support, less activity, more teaching, more service burden, and therefore more marginal tenure cases.  So you need to be careful to look at the specifics of the department you're joining.

[southerntransplant]

I'm not trying to be confrontational or anything with Proftowanda. Sorry, if that was the impression.

I'll say that I certainly did not get the impression that you were being confrontational.