"Our most significant challenge this year is to grow our capacity for research, especially self-sustaining funded research," UWM Chancellor Carlos E. Santiago declared in September, pointing to continued reduction in state funding to higher education, intense competition for federal research dollars, under-utilization on campus of UW System-allocated research funds, and the trend in funded research toward public-private partnerships.
"We must act as entrepreneurs-people who own, launch, manage, and assume the risks of our ventures. We must quickly develop and implement a plan to ensure that our research dollars are invested strategically to earn a return in the form of support of further research in an ongoing, self-sustaining, and growing research enterprise." Just two months later, a bold plan was implemented: the Research Growth Initiative (RGI), whose development the chancellor placed in the hands of Vice Chancellor for Research and Dean of the Graduate School Abbas Ourmazd. If all goes as hoped, UWM's research funds will provide seed money for transforming promising ideas from faculty and staff into sustainable projects that compete successfully for extramural funding and provide strong returns on investment.
"The RGI is about providing broad access to research funds in a way that enhances our research and scholarly work," Ourmazd explained. "By moving away from 'legacy allocations,' anyone with a good research idea has an opportunity to receive RGI funds. Naturally, we hope that our enhanced national standing and competitiveness will allow us to increase our extramural funding, which, in turn, will enable us to increase our support for all kinds of scholarly and innovative work."
As this issue of Research Profile goes to press, the inaugural deadline for submission of proposals-January 23-is at hand.
Fall 2005 marked the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Graduate School in 1965, well-deserved recognition of the growing academic strength of UWM, founded nine years earlier from the merger of the Milwaukee campus of the Wisconsin State College and the local center of the University of Wisconsin Extension.
In 1967-'68, UWM faculty attracted 38 grants from outside sources worth a total of almost $1.2 million. By 2004-'05, extramural research funding was $23.0 million, having reached a high of $24.8 million in 2003-'04. Even with this 19-fold increase, Santiago warns that even greater growth is critical. "Either we act to significantly grow our funded research from its current $23 million to close to $100 million within 10 years, or we conduct business as usual, and our funded research will erode until we no longer are a major research university," he said in September. "That is our reality and that is our challenge."
