In February 2016, four Texas universities -Texas Tech, the University of North Texas, the University of Texas at Arlington, and the University of Texas at Dallas – joined the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M, Rice University, and the University of Houston on the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education listing of 115 doctoral universities with the highest level of research activity.
Baylor didn’t make the jump to “R1 status,” but it did improve from the bottom of the R2 category to the middle. These are not rankings or ratings; they’re more a description based on a range of data. And where Baylor has previously had to wait five to six years between updates to the list, the Carnegie Classification will take data from the current school year and unveil its new rankings in 2018.
When Baylor announced its goal of becoming one of the nation’s elite research institutions in 2002 as part of the Baylor 2012 strategic plan, few thought the goal would be achieved within the plan’s 10-year time frame. So when Pro Futuris, the university’s five-year strategic vision for 2014-2018, was released, the goal was re-emphasized along with the aspiration of ranking in the Top 40 of U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings.
“I doubt anyone realized exactly how large a mountain we were trying to climb,” says Truell Hyde, MS ’80, Ph.D. ’88, the university’s vice provost for research and a physics professor at the university since 1988. “Baylor 2012 was a 10-year vision issuing a call to become a top-tier Christian research institution. Baylor doubled down [on that commitment] in Pro Futuris by setting the goal of becoming a very high research university while maintaining our Christian tradition.”
Hyde says that for Baylor to move forward, she needed to achieve “critical mass” and create a certain amount of momentum.
“As a first step to achieving this goal, the university put its money where its mouth was.” Hyde says. “We looked at teaching loads and adjusted them. We were out of space for the sciences, so we built the Baylor Sciences Building. We needed research space for the School of Engineering, so we built the first phase of the BRIC.”
Progress has been steady with each step thoroughly examined before execution.
“It took us almost a decade to pour the concrete on the new buildings,” Hyde says. ”Along the way, we established the necessary research infrastructure and developed the ability to help faculty patent their work. We started hiring lots of faculty across campus, with a focus on the school of Engineering in early 2006 when we added the departments of mechanical and electrical engineering. We now have doctoral programs in all three departments within ECS and they are beginning to produce Ph.D. graduates. Even more importantly, faculty salaries across campus are competitive, which I couldn’t have said a decade ago.”
Carnegie has a very clear formula that enables it to determine a school’s classification, and applies the numbers in 10 categories to a complex formula that is used to combine these into an index of research activity. Other organizations that look at research activity may require certain levels of annual research grants, selective admissions criteria, or membership in the prestigious, invitation-only American Association of Universities, whose members include UT-Austin, Texas A&M, and Rice, but not Baylor.
The best path to Tier One status is to spend more on research and award more doctoral degrees in the Sciences and Engineering. Schools need
to focus more on concrete, measurable goals that creating a recognizable brand. With stronger programs, an influx of capital, and continued growth in research-oriented departments, the school’s reputation will naturally improve. Making the
list doesn’t ensure you’ll stay there, as Dartmouth College of the Ivy League and seven other schools found out in the most recent list.
So what has Baylor done as it walks the path to Tier One status?
- Hired more professors, to give professors time for research through reduction of their class loads. Baylor has grown from 777 faculty members, 246 of whom taught full-time, for 13,595 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) students in Fall 2002 to 1,062 this past fall for 16,654 FTE students.
- Increased faculty pay to a competitive rate, in an effort to recruit and retain professors, including some leading researchers.
- Spent money to upgrade facilities, issuing $247 million in bonds to finance new construction and renovations. The big investment? More than $100 million to build the Baylor Sciences Building in 2004.
- Created an infrastructure to help faculty be more successful and find funding, secure patents, negotiate licensing and partnership agreements, and navigate the complex compliance and legal challenges of federal research projects. Increased the number of doctoral programs and Ph.D. Students. These sorts of programs are important to any school’s research presence since students must produce research.
- Opened the Baylor Research and Innovation Collaborative (BRIC), the first building in what is expected to be a 21-acre research park called the Central Texas Technology and Research Park. The BRIC contains 310,000 square feet of research space, university and industry partnership space, engineering space, interdisciplinary research centers, advanced workforce training, education research and outreach and meeting venues, along with an innovative business incubator/accelerator for high-tech companies.
- Focused on encouraging professors to publish in scholarly and peer-reviewed publications. In 2006, Baylor professors published approximately 400 articles; in 2015, the number approached 1,000.
”At the beginning, Baylor was at the bottom of R2 and barely made it into that,” says Dr. Vic-tor Borden, the project director for the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education and a professor of Higher Education and Student Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington, where Carnegie is based. “They’ve made about as large progress as any [school] I’ve seen. It’s about infrastructure, and it costs more to create than sustain. In research, it takes money to get money.”
When Hyde was appointed to his vice provost position in late 2001, the Research office was “just him.” Today, it’s approaching 24 employees.
The Carnegie classifications, conducted from offices at Indiana University’s Center for Postsecondary Research, were created in 1973 as a way to group the nation’s 4,600 colleges and universities by their different missions. But it’s evolved into something a bit different.
“We employ a comprehensive quantifiable index that is deliberately broad so that you can’t impact the results by focusing on one or two areas,” says Dr. Borden. “In terms of broad categories, we look at the number of research doctoral programs; research activities in terms of expenditures and staffing, giving equal weight across disciplines to both Science and Engineering and non-Science and Engineering programs; and number of nonfaculty researchers (Ph.D.s holding staff positions who were hired based on grants). We take these raw measures and convert them to a ranking across seven indicators. This enables us to look at the totality of research across all factors and measures, and being weak in one area doesn’t take you down.”
In Texas, the Legislature passed two bills that provide pathways for Texas research universities to become nationally competitive and place themselves in the top tier of public national research universities. In November 2009, statewide voters approved Proposition 4, a constitutional amendment implementing the National Research University Fund. About $500 million in a dormant Higher Education Fund was reallocated and is being provided to seven “Emerging Research Universities.”
As a private university, Baylor isn’t eligible for those funds, but the benchmarks that trigger eligibility for the public schools can be used as a comparison:
• At least $45 million in restricted research expenditures.
• Endowment assets of $400 million (Baylor has$1.1 billion).
• Phi Beta Kappa chapter or membership in the Association of Research Libraries.
• At least 200 Ph.D.s awarded annually (Baylor awarded 144 last year).
Cumulative number of tenured/tenure-track faculty who have achieved distinction as a member of one of the National Academies or are Nobel Prize recipients should be equal to or greater than five (Baylor has one right now, renowned physicist Marian Scully, who arrived in 2011 and moved his Advanced Quantum Optics Laboratory to the BRIC).
Why should the Baylor family care about the university achieving Tier 1 status? Observers say that such universities provide a nationally competitive learning environment for their students and enables them to work with world-class faculty in nationally ranked programs and engage in cutting-edge research and learning.
“Our faculty love to teach and do research,” Hyde says. “Both Baylor 2012 and Baylor Pro Futuris call for the University to be a place where such faculty do both within a Christian environment.”
Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Policy Jim Bennighof concedes that there’s been concern in some quarters that the focus on research will diminish Baylor’s focus on excellent teaching.
“That would probably be the case if we were expecting all faculty to maintain robust research agendas and teach four courses a semester, Dr. Benninghof says. “But our approach is to give faculty of whom robust research is expected lighter teaching loads so that they’ll have time to do both excellently. In that scenario, excellent research actually enhances excellent teaching, because it keeps both the faculty member and the students in closer contact with the cutting edge of the discipline. Also, in many cases, faculty have reported that their teaching informs their research, as interactions with students inspire new questions and perspectives.”
For the Waco community, achieving this status would enhance the region’s capacity to attract talent, invite new industry, strengthen existing businesses, and benefit from cutting-edge research that is locally tested and relevant. And finally, top universities attract more federal dollars, and data indicates that one federal dollar in research grants results in $18 worth of economic impact.
“One of my most important roles is to remind people on a regular basis of the enormity of the challenge,” Hyde says. ”.Although we’ve made massive inroads with the Baylor Science Building in 2004 and the BRIC in 2013 – that’s almost $200 million in infrastructure – I’m impatient and need to help manage everyone’s expectations, including my own.”
As the University’s chief research officer, Hyde represents the University with federal and state funding agencies, foundations, and corporate research organizations and has responsibility for the Office of Sponsored Programs and Contracts, Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer, the Baylor Advanced Research Institute (BARI), the Baylor Research and Innovation Collaborative (BRIC), the Central Texas Technology and Research Park (CTTRP), University Research Compliance (IRB ,IACUC, IBC) and Research Misconduct.
The competitive nature of hiring outstanding faculty who can help improve the university’s status presents yet another challenge to overcome.
“If you want to be one of the Top 25 research institutions – and this is where Pro Futuris calls Baylor to be – there is a restricted pool of profes- sors and researchers from which to draw,” Hyde says. ”At Baylor, we provide an academic home for faculty who wish to be ‘intentionally Christian’ while at the same time productive scholars and teachers. Because of this, there are plenty of top [teachers and researchers] out there who choose to come here, and even more who will choose to come here once we achieve R1 status.”
Reaching the Very High Research goal established within Pro Futuris will require the STEM disciplines to make significant new contributions to research productivity, especially given the large financial investments made to these areas. Ph.D. graduation rates must be increased by a factor of Research Park (CTTRP), University Research Compliance (IRB, IACUC, IBC) and Research Misconduct.
Hyde says Baylor has always been a very good school, but in today’s ranking-obsessed world “people tend to list universities by the amount of external research funding the university receives.”
He further explains that collaborative efforts are key to stretching finances, and return on investments can often be minimal at best.
“It’s very difficult to get a $50 million or $60 million grant. To be competitive, you first need faculty who have grants of $1 million or more and who can work together,” Hyde says. “Even so, it’s important to keep in mind that you may only see a 3 percent to 10 percent success rate, which is down from the success rates of even a few years ago.”
Hyde says Baylor has quadrupled Sponsored Program Expenditures from $8 million in 2002 to $34 million now.
“In terms of external funding, particularly external funding originating from federal grants – they’re the gold standard – we would like to be at $80 million per year. We are now approaching $20 million per year, so we have a way to go,” he says.
The competitive nature of hiring outstanding faculty who can help improve the university’s status presents yet another challenge to overcome.
“If you want to be one of the Top 25 research institutions – and this is where Pro Futuris calls Baylor to be – there is a restricted pool of profes- sors and researchers from which to draw,” Hyde says. ”At Baylor, we provide an academic home for faculty who wish to be ‘intentionally Christian’ while at the same time productive scholars and teachers. Because of this, there are plenty of top [teachers and researchers] out there who choose to come here, and even more who will choose to come here once we achieve R1 status.”
Reaching the Very High Research goal established within Pro Futuris will require the STEM disciplines to make significant new contributions to research productivity, especially given the large financial investments made to these areas. Ph.D. graduation rates must be increased by a factor of two to three over current levels, external grant funding received from competitive sources must be increased by a factor of at least four and both research publications and research staffing must increase over current levels.
To that end, Hyde added that getting to R1 sta- tus will almost certainly require donor investment in endowed chairs with staffs and budgets.
“If we could find someone who would provide Baylor with funding for 10 [chairs] at $10 million each, the total cost would still be less than what we spent on either the Baylor Science Building or the stadium and would jump start this effort in a lot of different ways,” he says with a smile. “I sit on a lot of academic committees [outside of Baylor, particularly in Washington, D.C.], as do many college professors and administrators. We need an evangelical voice at those tables. The other benefit is that top students focus on R1 schools when they apply for college and graduate school. You can’t attract good graduate students without great faculty – that’s why Baylor has become more focused on attracting professors who are great teachers and also wonderful researchers/scholars.”
