Leadership & Management of Academic Research
in the 21st Century
Leadership & Management of Academic Research
in the 21st Century
Gerald E. Loeb, M.D., Professor of Biomedical Engineering
University of Southern California
DRAFT FOR DISCUSSION Sept. 16, 2005
Parallel Structures
The exponential growth of externally funded research in academia has reached the point where it is forcing a reorganization of the traditional educational institutions that have tried to absorb this activity. Key new components such as massive center grants and endowed research institutes have been added to academia without displacing the old structure of independent investigators and faculty departments – yet. As funding inevitably level off, the transition will become more obvious and potentially divisive. Universities need to recognize these changes and
their motivation and to develop their personnel to perform successfully and enthusiastically in new roles.
The New Way
The driving force behind this explosive growth has been society’s realization that academic research can and
must be translated into economic wealth and social well-being. But if it is important enough to spend this much
money, then it is at least as important to spend it effectively. The traditional mechanisms of
investigator-initiated research reviewed one piece at a time by ad hoc committees of peers is simply too
haphazard to manage the large, coordinated attacks coming to be known as “grand challenges”.
Grant review committees used to be composed of the great minds and visionary leaders of each field, but the
explosion of grant applications has made that impractical. They are increasingly composed of modest researchers
with provincial and often self-protective instincts. Letting government bureaucrats direct research is even less
likely to identify great ideas that are both innovative and feasible. So increasingly, large amounts of money are
being given to leading researchers in academia on the basis of their track records of productivity and with the
power to allocate the funds dynamically among large numbers of co-investigators, fellows and research tactics.
The New Careers
Turning individual faculty into hierarchical, self-directed, goal-oriented teams is anathema to the
egalitarian and “curiosity driven” traditions of academic research. It requires a few faculty to become
“stars” with money and power that is derived and controlled outside the parallel pedagogical hierarchy of
department heads and deans. It requires those deans and department heads to identify and recruit the most
promising of those stars from a vast constellation of rising young faculty and potentially (but not necessarily)
hot new fields. It requires large numbers of existing faculty to contribute their vital skills to team efforts
without jeopardizing their careers.
Visionary Leaders
If universities are going to preserve the pedagogical hierarchy as a system for recruiting and
appointing faculty (as seems likely), then how can they best perform this task in the new university?
The “best” provosts, deans and department heads are already trying to think strategically about new hires
who will be stars in the new system, but this can lead to conflicts with departmental faculty who are
rightfully concerned with the raison d’etre of the university in the first place – teaching. Those same
faculty (and the department heads and deans often drawn from their ranks) are not necessarily broad enough
in their knowledge base or personal contacts to identify the big opportunities and choose wisely. The
administrative skills most likely to lead to advancement have no necessary correlation with the skills of
visionary leaders. Furthermore, it is difficult to think strategically while preoccupied with the details
of keeping the pedagogical enterprise running smoothly.
Academia might do well to look at the leadership practices of great companies. Great CEOs usually don’t
just rise through the ranks by chance. The best companies identify executive talent early and structure
assignments and opportunities to develop it for the future. Each successive promotion comes with specialized
training and regular performance reviews. It would be unthinkable to promote someone from a lab manager to
vice-president of research and development without executive training. In academia, department heads, deans
and institute directors need only to endure mandatory training on the use of a procurement card and avoiding
sexual harrassment. It would be unthinkable to waste the time of a senior executive in industry with
administrative details and secretarial chores that could be performed by support staff; academic positions
often come with no supporting personal staff beyond bureaucratic functionaries.
In the new ways of academia, deans and department heads must be trained and empowered to think broadly
and network widely in search of themes and recruiting opportunities that build on the strengths and strategic
directions of their home institutions. These activities are fundamentally different from the narrow expertise
and focused effort for which these leaders were originally appointed as faculty. Simply promoting faculty on
the basis of their success in those narrow roles is a prime example of what came to be known in the 1970s as
“The Peter Principle”. It is probably essential to select academic leaders from those who have demonstrated
personal competence and credibility in the primary missions of the university, but they must be selected on
the basis of very different and mostly latent talents that then need substantial nurturing.
Brilliant Rainmakers
Increasingly, the most successful faculty researchers aspire not to department headships and deanships but
to “star” status as directors of centers and institutes that they essentially create for themselves by
entrepreneurial grantsmanship. Academia is now completely addicted to this source of funding for trainees,
faculty salary support and overhead expenses, so the rainmakers can negotiate for freedom and perquisites
unavailable to their nominal superiors in the pedagogical hierarchy.
The rainmaker can afford to be narrow and deep in scientific expertise, but he or she must have certain
“people” skills to inspire collaborators to contribute. Some of this is likely to come from nature, but
much can be done by nurture. Again, industry is ahead of academia in providing its rising stars with
formal training in techniques for recruiting and managing teams, drafting budgets and schedules, and
handling various crises. This is ironic, because most universities have whole schools of business that
teach these very subjects to students headed for industry.
The university’s tradition of democracy and individual initiative makes it vulnerable to poseurs
and politics. Many faculty believe themselves to be brilliant and deserving of the opportunity to be
stars; not all are. Their research is often sufficiently arcane that the university’s leadership lacks
expertise to judge it independently. Large center and group grants usually require strong commitments
from the university leadership and often have rules limiting the number of applications from a single
institution. Thus, the leadership must pick which would-be stars to back with little useful information.
Ironically, the rank and file coinvestigators who will need to contribute to the proposal usually are
in the best position to know which stars they should hitch their wagons to and which to avoid, but they
are rarely asked. If teamwork in large centers and grants is really to be the new way of doing business
in academia, there must be a much more transparent system for nominating rainmakers than is now in operation.
Proficient and Enthusiastic Co-Investigators
Rainmakers spend much of their time writing grants and speaking at scientific meetings, so someone
else actually has to do the research. As the sophistication of the science and the scope of the research
increases, responsibility necessarily has shifted from graduate students to post-doctoral fellows to junior
and not-so-junior faculty. The reputation and skills of these co-investigators are essential to the viability
of the big center grant proposal, but by choice or chance they are not the Principal Investigator who will get
much of the credit. Somehow they must be rewarded for their efforts in the short run and protected in their
careers if they do not progress to rainmakers (most will not, many by choice). While it is understandable
that university leaders want to recruit and train as many rainmakers as possible, making the rest of the
faculty feel like losers will lead to disaster. Disgruntled and paranoid faculty are unlikely to be
enthusiastic co-investigators. They are not going to provide attractive role models to induce the
best and brightest of their students to go into academic research.
At the very least, the appointment-promotions-tenure process needs to consider activities for which
the candidate is not the P.I. The budgets of center and group grants can and must be subdivided into
their constituent projects so that co-P.I.s are credited for the activity that they perform and manage.
Contributions to multi-authored papers need to be assessed meaningfully, not based on first/last author
assumptions.
Integration with Education
Education is the academic mission that is most vulnerable to an excessive focus on rainmakers.
Much has been written about this but little has been done. As an increasing percentage of our faculty
owe their primary allegiance to non-departmental entities, this conflict will only intensify. Many of
these research-focused faculty would probably be happy to contribute lectures in their fields, but the
accounting and attribution of team-teaching efforts is currently just as inadequate and unfair as the
accounting of research grants. The educational mission is one of the few opportunities to bridge the
growing chasm between the faculty who teach and the faculty who do research. The university must
aggressively pursue opportunities to eliminate obstacles and encourage multidisciplinary and team teaching.
Investment
Universities have two main streams of revenue: tuition and research grants. They must apportion
their investment of resources to maximize each without jeopardizing the other. We are now in a phase
where investing in the research infrastructure of centers and institutes is yielding large and immediate
returns. Research reputation and grant income have much shorter time constants than teaching reputation
and tuition income. If we reward deans and provosts for their visionary leadership in recruiting
rainmakers, we shouldn’t be surprised if they divert resources from the educational mission to do so.
Specific mechanisms need to be put in place to assure an equitable distribution of investment. To keep
these commitments from being honored in the breach, it will be critical to convince all those stars and
leaders that the long-term health of their home institution and its core academic departments is actually
as important as their short-term interests.
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