Report on Challenges, Draft 21

Centennial Research Task Force Team on Organizational Culture, Process and Policy

Report on Challenges, Draft 4

October 25, 2004

Authors: Roberto Osegueda, Claudine Riccillo, Harmon Hosch, Russ Chianelli, David Novick

All participants: Mike Acosta, ChuckAmbler, Russ Chianelli, Diane Doser, Laura Garcia, Jorge Gardea-Torresdey,Carlos Hernandez,Harmon Hosch,John McClure,Soheil Nazarian, David Novick (Chair),Roberto Osegueda, Claudine Riccillo,Manny Pacillas,Scott Starks,Ryan Wicker

Introduction

This document reports the interim results of the “Organizational Culture, Process, and Policy” team of the Centennial Research Task Force. The report is based on barriers, concerns and challenges generated by participants in the October 8 forum of the Research Task Force, on additional items contributed by faculty through the College of Science, on the recent UTMB report, and on additional items suggested by members of the team.

The team grouped all items into categories, which we then named, refined and ranked in the order that we thought they should be addressed. There were 32 items, which were grouped into five categories. The categories have been recast from barriers to areas of challenge. These five areas of challenge are

  1. Understanding of and commitment to UTEP’s vision and mission
  2. Faculty quality, leadership and skills
  3. National-level self-confidence
  4. Valuing research activities
  5. Organizational attitudes
  6. Generating resources

We now look at each of these challenges in detail.

1.Understanding of and Commitment to UTEP’s Vision and Mission

(Primary author: Russ Chianelli)

The first organizational challenge to increasing funded research at UTEP arises out of incomplete understanding of and commitment to UTEP’s vision and mission. Of particular importance are the goals of access and excellence and developing a culture of cooperation. Items suggested by participants in the October 8 forum reflected concerns and obstacles that suggested confusion regarding the UTEP vision statement and tension that exists between education and research objectives:

  • Lack of buy-in to the vision
  • Broaden base for research culture
  • Tension between research and education
  • Paradigm shift from research to education
  • The “old guys” problem.
  • Lack of focus on core areas
  • Moving from regional to state to national prominence

The UTEP vision statement “Access and Excellence” is often misinterpreted as fostering a tension between two mutually exclusive objectives: educating as many as possible of our “border population” and achieving excellence in research. This tension reflects a broader philosophical conflict between education and research. Both tensions are artificial and their elimination is the first step to achieving a research culture that is nurturing, allowing the “spontaneous generation” of creative innovation.

UTEP is uniquely poised for developing a culture that embraces access and excellence. The overriding fact is that our border population is a crucial resource for the future prosperity of the United States. The National Science and Technology Council’s 2000 report entitled “Ensuring a Strong U.S. Scientific, Technical, and Engineering Workforce in the 21st Century,” confirms the national necessity of training Hispanic scientists and engineers. Therefore our border population is a coveted national asset and our students are in high demand throughout the nation. “Access” therefore translates into providing opportunities at all levels: undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate for our border population and “excellence” means that our programs at all levels are nationally and internationally competitive. It follows that our regional students can compete with any in the nation and this is clearly demonstrable and further that an “inherent regional inferiority complex” is not only unjustified but a strong impediment to achieving our future objectives.

The false division between researchers and educators is also an impediment to achieving the future goals of UTEP. There is not such division that is inherent. World-class researchers are also educators. Leading research groups have a strong education component. It is alsoa fact that many students that achieve a “4.0 GPA” are not successful at research because it requires different skills, involving risk and creativity. The skills of research can be taught only through apprenticeship and in cohesive research groups that contain all levels of investigators: undergraduate, graduate, post-doctoral, new and experienced scientists. The appropriate research culture will recognize the role of education in research and nurture the formation of such research groups. The payoff will be achievement of an important part of the “access and excellence” vision. Furthermore, confusion about the role of individuals in the faculty and there appropriate role in achieving the vision will be clarified. In addition, the establishment of confidence in the national vision will eliminate insecurities regarding the tension between regional and national goals and form the basis for further planning of specific research, hiring and organizational goals.

2. Faculty Quality, Leadership and Skills

(Author: Roberto Osegueda)

The second organizational challenge to increasing funded research at UTEP is finding a means of increasing the quality, leadership and general research skills of the faculty.Prerequisites for addressing this challenge are: (a) acceptance of the vision, (b) elimination of the education/research dichotomy, and (c) acceptance and facilitation of an interdisciplinary research environment. Once these prerequisites are met, then the ground would be prepared for quality faculty and quality research. Items suggested by participants in the October 8 forum reflect concerns about the quality, leadership and skills of the faculty:

  • Weak grantsmanship
  • Lack of champions (as related to interdisciplinary research)
  • Recruitment of quality faculty
  • Retention of quality faculty

The first two items above suggest that established, experienced research leaders are needed. Increasing the number of established senior researchers can address the issues of faculty mentoring, weak grantsmanship, and having champions that can enhance the research networks.

Despite the fact that UTEP has had tremendous growth of its contract and grant activities, there is a general consensus among the subcommittee members that the average faculty member has weak grantsmanship.A big share of UTEP’s current contracts and grants portfolio, although impressive, is from large federal contracts(MSP, PACES, MIE, etc.) that the University has been able to secure as a result of our location and the demographics of the students that we serve. If these grants and their respective PI’s were to be excluded from the calculation of research dollars per faculty member, the result would be a small value when compared to national averages.

The current national research trends seem to suggest that many funding agencies are recognizing that the fusion of information, research practices and technologies from multiple disciplines fosters creative approaches to previously intractable problems. In order for the University to be successful in responding to requests for proposals that require multidisciplinary research programs, it will be necessary to overcome barriers of academic culture that are inherent in tenure and promotion policies, such as procedures that generally reward individual, discipline-specific research. Although campus leaders have envisaged the need for strategic interdisciplinary programs such as inEnvironmental Science and Materials Science and Engineering, formation of faculty groups to address research is continually challenged by cultural and organizational forces that tend to respond to disciplined-specific departments. For this reason, (a) faculty members may feel rewarded only for conducting research to support their discipline (and penalized for research conducted with another department or research center), (b) interdisciplinary research groups may fail to attract a critical mass of faculty for sustainability and/or growth, and (c) the university may have difficulties in identifying highly motivated individuals to champion interdisciplinary research groups. It is imperative that the vision of interdisciplinary programs be communicated with enthusiasm and passion at the working level of the administrative structure, such as department chairs.

One challenge identified in the forum was the recruitment of quality faculty. In order to address this issue, it is the feeling of the subcommittee that it may be necessary to examine the current faculty hiring practices. The hiring processes used across campus frequently feature these three traits:new faculty hires are customary made within departmental boundaries; the majority of new hires are at the assistant-professor level;andsome departments tend to be complacent about our inability to attract highlysought and highly qualified faculty. These traits can lead to problems in faculty quality:departmental search processes may fail to identify faculty with a high potential for interdisciplinary research;hiring at the assistant-professor level is generally a long term investmentthattakes years to pay off; and salaries and start-up packages may not be competitive.Consequently, different recruitment models may be needed to attract faculty of the quality we need for the coming decade. The committee believes that there are great people who have been missed or underappreciated--people that can thrive in our unique UTEP environment. Under these conditions, retention may not be a problem.

In order to address the issue of retention of quality faculty, it may be necessary first for the university to define what characteristics define a “quality” faculty. It is very evident that every university program has a set of higher performers. If we want to reach a higher level, the “quality” of the faculty may need to be identified by benchmarking against faculty in institutions which UTEP aspires to be like. In a system, in which performance metrics are not well defined, the salary difference between high and low performers raises at the same rank are not highly differentiated. The university should consider highly differentiated salary raises according to fulfillment of accomplishments strategic to UTEP’s research and educational mission.

3. National-Level Self-Confidence

(Primary author: David Novick)

A third organizational challenge to increasing funded research at UTEP arises from a lack of self-confidence among UTEP’s faculty and staff. Despite the fact that UTEP’s researchers are conducting nationally competitive research, we often internalize what we perceive to be nationally prevalent views of UTEP and its research, views that unduly minimize our excellence. The challenge, then, is to change our self-perceptions so that we have a self-confidence that enables us to compete effectively at a national level. This lack of national-level self-confidence is reflected in, and at the same time a product of, a number of related factors, identified by participants in the October 8 forum:

  • Lack of external validation
  • Weak networking externally (re: grants, peer review, etc.)
  • Recruitment of graduate students nationally
  • Developing clear measures of research success

The lack of national-level self-confidence actually manifests itself in multiple parts of the UTEP community. Students often see El Paso and UTEP as second-rate, despite our best efforts to convince them otherwise. Faculty sometimes do not know or appreciate the excellence of our research. Some faculty may simply not see themselves as a viable researcher at the national level, and perhaps not as a viable researcher at all. While the Team on Organizational Culture, Process, and Policy does not view national recruitment of graduate students as a critical challenge (primarily because our regionally focused mission provides clear guidance as where graduate students should be recruited), the fact is that we should be operating at a level of excellence and confidence that we could recruit students nationally as a matter of course.

Building up self-confidence is not simply a matter of communicating UTEP’s research story internally and externally. We already have an excellent effort in this regard. Rather, the team concludes that UTEP might address its challenge of national-level self-confidence by addressing the root cause, which primarily involves a lack, either real or simply perceived, of research skills. UTEP can do this by creating a Center for Effective Research (CER), which would be the research counterpart to our Center for Effective Teaching and Learning. The CER would enable our faculty to use best practices for development of research plans, obtaining funding, conducting research, and mentoring graduate students.

4. Valuing Research Activities

(Primary author: David Novick)

A fourth organizational challenge to increasing funded research at UTEP arises from a failure to accord the proper value to research activities.

  • High teaching loads
  • Inflexible workloads
  • Incentives for research

Of these, the team sees incentives for research as the most critical. Problems with incentives include not giving proper credit for research activity because faculty evaluations may be conducted in departments where contributions through centers are valued; singling out principal investigators for rewards to the exclusion of co-principal investigators, which discourages collaboration; not providing increased levels of incentives for faculty who are successful in securing high levels of external funding (e.g., a faculty member supporting multiple graduate students may find their total resources not increased); and mismatches between the interests of academic departments and that of the university with respect to building interdisciplinary research, particularly with respect to teaching and evaluation.

Such problems with incentives then manifest themselves as additional problems with teaching loads and workloads more generally. While there may be a chicken-and-egg issue with high teaching loads vs. time for supported research, the team concludes that explicit policies with respect to start-up course releases, either for new faculty or for more experienced faculty seeking to transition into active research, can provide reasonable levels of support for development of a research program while placing time limits on the extent of this support. Not all faculty at UTEP have the same set of skills and interests. The university can leverage this differentiation by being flexible in the mix of assignments that make up faculty workloads. Master teachers, for example, can contribute both through maintaining higher course loads and through improving UTEP’s teaching via scholarship of learning.

In short, UTEP should take steps to make sure that incentives for faculty activity are aligned with the university’s mission. This should be an on-going process, with institutional support for periodic reexamination of incentive policies and their effects.

5. Organizational Attitudes

(Primary author: Claudine Riccillo)

The fifth organizational challenge to overcome and change is an organizational attitude that inhibits the creative and cooperative environment that is essential to the success of our research agenda. The attitude issues listed by participants in the October 8 forum and the Research Task Force Subcommittee included:

  • “On-the-cheap mentality”
  • Bureaucracy
  • Organizational structure: PI confusion of pre and post award organizational responsibilities.
  • Silos

The do-more-with-less mentalitydoes not work when trying to build the research portfolio of the university and reach $100 million in research expenditures. Additional funding for start-up, seed grant monies, equipment, equipment maintenance, technicians, administrative support and space is essential to move the university to the Tier 1 level in research activities. We can not do this “on the cheap.” A review of the 2002 NSF Survey results demonstrates that the universities who reporthigher research expenditures from institutional funds are the most successful.Table B-36“R&D Expenditures at public universities and colleges, by source of funds: fiscal year 2002”ranks universities by their expenditures. Of the top 10 ranked universities 22 percent of the expenditures are from institutional funds. In this same survey, UTEP’s figures show 5 percent from institutional funds. This suggests that additional resources are needed, as discussed in Section 6 of this report.

When resources are provided they need to be used wisely to increase the research enterprise and to prevent the building of more bureaucracy. UTEP has conducted, and continues to conduct, periodic reviews of organizational processes with these goals in mind. Such reviews have identified issues that can be addressed. For example, the bureaucracy now in place requires multiple approvals and scrutiny and approvals that are being processed at the highest levels. As a result of the multiple approvals, PI’s sometimes are unsure of who does what. A reduction in the number of signatures and number of people now looking at paperwork or electronic processes will improve the efficiency of getting the research done and reduce the frustration for the principal investigator (PI).

At the October 8 forum, participants provided a number of suggestions for possible specific changes. These suggestions included: 1) maintain status quo with additional staffing and training; 2) split the pre- and post-award functions, thus consolidating the pre-award services into one office and post-award services into the other, with additional departmental or college administrative support to help the PI navigate the administrative requirements.

These suggestions are examples, in our view, of the kinds of possible improvements that would come from a model of on-going improvement, whether based on continuous quality improvement, risk management or other process-reengineering approaches. The key is to engage in this sort of process as the norm, with concomitant involvement of critical, interested participants ranging from secretaries to auditors. The Research Task Force should identify mechanisms or models for achieving this over the next ten years.

One of the attitudinal problems that such processes should address includes a tendency on the part of the university’s administrative culture, at all levels, to be risk adverse and thus focus on efforts to eliminate risk rather than mitigate it. This risk-elimination focus has resulted in the creation of inefficient processes that serve as fuel to a poor customer-service environment. That is to say, staff often are unwilling to take on risk or feel unable make decisions contrary to strict procedures.Because culture is difficult to change and requires a long-term effort and consistent message to achieve even incremental changes, UTEP should start addressing this issue now.This process should engage support functions in all areas of the University in an effort to ensure a climate where staff are willing and empowered to provide solutions and alternatives that support the research enterprise.