Research universities had many challenges even before the COVID-19 pandemic started. These were many faceted and involved mainly funding shortages, public relations issues, student demographic issues, lack of faculty diversity, administrative bloat, unnecessary competitions and, varied delivery of teaching methodologies. These were being dealt with piece-meal and were considered primary issues that were in most university strategic plans. COVID-19 changed all that in one fell swoop. We now have challenges that are primarily a threat to the very survival of research universities as we know it.

As I see it, post-pandemic era will force us into working on three primary challenges:

a) Reclaiming Trust and Relevance – Even before the pandemic hit, most research universities were dealing with issues of trust in relation to expertise that governmental entities relied on to serve the public. There was a general perception that universities have become elitist and distant from the urban/rural divide that had plagued our political landscape. To the same extent, universities were also dealing with the question of relevance as far as public funding was concerned among the legislators and the public. Post- pandemic these two issues will coincide to create many new challenges to the survivability of research universities.

b) Recruiting and Retaining Personnel (Students and Faculty) within Academia – Demographic shifts have already forced universities to seek changes within the student recruitment (undergraduate and graduate) policies and the lack of outreach to the diverse groups that we have to cater to. These issues have only become more significant with the changing national demographics and the international supply of students within the last few years. Coupled with this is the fact that our faculty/staff diversity in many universities have not kept pace with the current times. Moving forward recruiting good students and faculty/staff and retaining them within the academia will be a formidable challenge to all public research universities.

c) Finding Funds for Creative Endeavors and Infrastructure– There has been a clear recognition for more than a decade that our federal funding scenario has not kept pace with the competitions that we have with nations abroad who seem to spend more as a percent of their GDP in research at universities. This has become more of an issue as our economy is still buffeted by the pandemic effects. Research in many areas that are beneficial to humanity still requires adequate funding and infrastructure which only the research universities are capable of addressing because of the intellectual capabilities that rest in them. This fact will require sustained lobbying of our legislators who need to think strategically in deploying limited resources for maximum benefit.

All three of the above challenges can be met by public research universities as we have clearly shown in the past. Public research universities at at cross roads with respect to what they can take on and accomplish with considerations to the local situations first and national implications in the overall picture. We have to remain vigilant in that we should not come across as elitist and has to be ingrained within the communities that we serve so that our relevance is very clear and transparent. We need to remain impartial arbiters of all of the nation’s problems and help find appropriate solutions to them.

Ever since World War II, the American economy has been bolstered by public funding of basic research, which translated to many advancements in our daily life. Vannevar Bush’s 1945 document “Science: The Endless Frontier” helped establish the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Health (NIH) and later the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as funding agencies to university researchers in the U.S. There is incontrovertible evidence that such a strategy has kept this country at the pinnacle of innovations and assuring an economic advantage that no other country could match for at least the past six decades since 1945. Our present course of science funding seems to imperil our advantages in this regard.

At the height of the federal R&D spending on science in the early 1970s, 1.2% of GDP was spent on it. However, ever since then an erosion of spending has occurred, and in 2016 the spending was down to 0.8%.  This is a troubling trend since the federal R&D is what sustains almost all the basic research in this country.  Whereas 70% of aggregate R&D was federal in the 1960s, now it is only 29%.  Although the 71% of total R&D is now industrial, it is mostly developmental (D) instead of research (R). Private sector funding is mostly short-term for the immediate development of a product, and seldom fund long-term research or support risky endeavors.  Basic R&D, supported by the federal government has been the bulwark of our economic engine that propelled us to the envy of the world.  The seed corn of our innovation is federal R&D funding, which in time translates to technologies that keep us at the forefront. To date, we have fallen to 10^th place in total R&D investments among the OECD nations. China, India, Korea and other developing nations are outpacing our investments and it is predicted that at the current rates, China will surpass USA by 2025. This will be tantamount to squandering our existing advantages in sustaining innovation that stimulates new discoveries and leads to job growth.

Let us consider a few examples of investments that have provided huge returns as far as our economic prosperity is concerned.

• The first example is from the digital technology improvements that have simplified a lot of our daily activities. It is no surprise to point out that we now live in a digital world where every aspect of our daily lives are tracked, stored and measured. The iPhone is one device we rely on every day to conduct our daily life. Yet, not many people realize how many of the components of this elegant device were developed through government funded research. Practically, every major element in it is a result of university or federal laboratory research. The economist Mariana Mazzucato elegantly pointed this out in her book “The Entrepreneurial State”.
• A second example worth noting is the evolution of the “hydro-fracking” technology and the resulting abundance of natural gas resources that has changed our country from an overall importer to the largest exporter of natural gas.  This technology was seeded by grants from the Department of Energy in the 1960’s and further refined through both university and industry research. This has certainly made us much less reliant on foreign imports and also revolutionized our chemical and petrochemical industry.
• A third example is the on-going revolution in genomics. Starting with the delineation of the structure of DNA, there have been continual efforts at determining the genomes of various species. A majority of these basic research efforts were publicly funded through the National Institutes of Health and assisted by private foundations. As a result, we have now reached the stage of determining our entire genetic composition at prices as low as a few hundred dollars. The primacy of public funded research in understanding various diseases and their treatment is undeniable.

As I pointed our earlier, most of the funding for basic research from federal sources has been continually declining for the last three decades.  The industry funding has not made up for this lack of resources.  The universities have been increasingly spending their scarce resources to stem the tide, but with little effect. The recent NSF document (https://ncsesdata. nsf.gov/herd/2016/ ) clearly showed that this is the case. Universities cannot sustain this effort any longer due to both steady disinvestment of public funding by States and increasing financial pressures on universities. As spelled out in the 2012 National Research Academy report “Research Universities and the Future of America: Ten Breakthrough Actions Vital to Our Nation’s Prosperity and Security”, there has to be a complete re-think of the priorities of the U.S. legislative and executive branches on how much extra and sustained spending on basic research has to be maintained in the coming decade so that we retain our inherent advantages in the scientific and technological fronts.

Of late, we have witnessed a spate of state legislators file bills to alter or eliminate faculty tenure at public research universities. This started with unbridled attacks on faculty tenure in Wisconsin and more recently in both Missouri and Iowa. It is worth exploring the reasons behind this trend and what we, as university representatives, can do to dispel the misconceptions regarding tenure.  In Iowa and North Carolina, bills have been filed to make sure that future tenure-track faculty will have to identify their political affiliations, ostensibly to make sure that there is balance of viewpoints in the faculty ranks in academia. To me, these are symptomatic of the on-going attack on academic freedom that we have enjoyed since the research universities came into being in this country.

All fields of research involve creativity and are typically unbiased since they ultimately are searching for what we call universal truth. For this to occur, we must allow researchers to go into all areas of investigation unfettered. Since the beginning of modern civilization, and scientific renaissance, universities and their scientists and engineers have been looked upon as unbiased arbiters of all prevalent ideas. Rulers, both benevolent and malevolent, have depended on university folks to investigate claims made by common folk. In some cases, scientists had to give their lives for speaking the truth. Those kinds of repercussions led university faculty in this country to ask for protection of academic freedom through a process called tenure. Tenure was a concept rooted in providing a probationary period for faculty to show their academic worth. However, even when tenure is obtained faculty must be certain that their work should not only be of value to the society and the institution they work for, but also be able to criticize when inconsistencies arise without fear of professional repercussions. It is not a job security issue, but more a privilege to work on all aspects of research, if they are valuable to the society. To apply a litmus test to what kind of research one can engage in would defeat the very lofty ideals a university aspires to.

In these modern times, when we have such polarization of political views among the public, it should be anticipated that any work coming out of a university will have its supporters and detractors. However, if faculty do their work without regard to who the audience is, then the results of their work is simply an evaluation of the truth.  The concept of tenure is attacked from many sides, the politicians, students, administrators and other faculty. The very institution of a University is under attack these days because of a perverse anti-intellectualism that has taken root in the civil society. To a large extent, the universities themselves are at fault for this because of their ivory tower mentalities that have alienated them from the common citizens. Nevertheless,  the university is still the only unbiased arbiter of ideas in the present society.

How do we make ourselves relevant in this post-truth world, when facts are twisted into “fake” news when they do not comport with the views of one side or the other?  First and foremost, university researchers are not very good at communicating their ideas to the public.  The output of research (generally funded by tax payer dollars) should not be shrouded in secrecy, but rather open to the public at large.  This has been a problem since peer-reviewed research output tends to be controlled by large publishing houses which limit their easy availability; this has caused angst among the legislators who apportion money towards the conduct of such research. Secondly, public trust in funded research is shaken by isolated, but highly publicized cases of research misconduct and other issues. Universities should be prepared to not only sanction such individuals, but also assure the public that tenure is not a license to bend scientific facts. Thirdly, a just and fair amount of job security should be defended as part of the non-monetary compensation just as it is for civil servants, especially in this era of social media communications which involve, in many cases egregious cases of assault on moral character without due process.

So, to conclude this blog, my plea is that academic freedom and tenure should be defended at all costs if our university faculty must be productive partners in the civil society and be successful in their quest for scientific truth and creative activities that benefit the public at large. I exhort my administrative colleagues to be wary of attacks on this fundamental principle and be prepared to defend it, when needed.

A commonly heard refrain nowadays in the higher education (HE) community is that the enterprise is in grave turmoil and deep trouble. Let me state for the record that I do not believe the situation is that catastrophic.  In this blog, I will provide my rationale for this assertion.

Universities are essential parts of the rich fabric and tapestry of life that we have created ever since the advent of human civilization.  Whereas it began as the favored arena of the elites and royals, it has now become the place where commoners have the ability to participate in learned discourses about the civil and practical aspects of arts, humanities and sciences. In the United States, it was accepted since the early eighteenth century that university is a public good.  One only has to see the tremendous influence of land grant universities in this country.  It has been shown that 75 % of students get their higher education from public universities. Moreover, the majority (60 %) of research expenditures in the United States are also in public research universities.  The best and brightest from all over the world still aspire to get their advanced degrees from the U.S. universities.  Research output, measured in journal articles, citations and awards (e.g. Nobel prizes) still show that the U.S. outpaces other countries.  Innovation as measured by new ideas and start-ups is still led by the U.S.  The country also leads the world in the overall research and development expenditures, a significant portion of it (basic and applied research) is spent in the top 110 Tier 1 universities.  Federal investment in research is healthy, but well short of its peak during the second half of the twentieth century.

So, why do we hear that HE is fraying at its edges? There are severe problems constraining the HE system.  Perhaps the most significant ones are questions of student access at major public and private universities due to selective and limited admissions policies, affordability because of continuous increase in tuition and fees, poor outcomes (graduation rates, student debt) and inadequate skills and professional preparations imparted to students for jobs in the 21^st century economy. There are several other issues that are also of concern. We have a very large cohort of enterprising faculty that are aging and ready to retire, while the young faculty that replace them are held back due to low pay-scales, weak retirement benefits and lack of research dollars and infrastructure to conduct research. There are also challenges to the academic freedom environment that scare faculty from taking on controversial topics of research.

Despite the above-mentioned drawbacks and inadequacies, the U.S. HE system is still the best that most other nations are trying to emulate.  We still produce the largest world share of journal articles, the most number of innovations and discoveries, the largest share of Nobel prizes and high quality students at both the undergraduate and graduate level.  We can do all this because of the non-interference of the government in the HE enterprise that allows for creativity to flourish.  The competitive spirit that is encouraged in our HE institutions and the blue-sky thinking (academic freedom) prevalent among researchers contribute to the high productivity that is our hallmark. Most of our HE institutions consider enhancing the economic and cultural prosperity of the society as their primary mission.  These environments are not available elsewhere in the world and, as such, our HE system is unique.  For the foreseeable future, I cannot see this changing.  Even with all the challenges and vicissitudes that we see, our HE system will endure for many more decades to come. I do not see the catastrophic atrophy that are predicted by some for the HE system in general.

Public research universities have primarily three missions – educate the citizenry, be of service to the society and, do research that benefits all of mankind. This has remained the three pillars for more than 150 years since, President Lincoln established the public university system in the United States through the Morrill Act.  However, over the past decade of the 21^st century, we have seen a retrenchment from higher education by most State governments and loss of accessibility for needy students because of higher tuition and fees.  We have also seen nonetheless increasing enrollment and greater reliance on universities for assistance in solving many societal issues via research.  The universities have realized that they have to change their business models that will diversify their revenue streams to move away from heavy reliance on state funds.  Public-private partnerships (PPP) are being increasingly used as the mechanism of alternative funding.

So, how does PPP provide resources to help universities?

1. Focus on an innovation ecosystem – For several reasons, mostly economic, private industries have also divested from basic and applied research, focusing primarily on product development and, therefore relying on university research for innovative ideas.  This has created a conundrum; universities have become the innovation part of the industry ecosystem as well as the source of manpower requirements for industry. Thus, PPP could be useful in fostering Research Parks at universities to enhance the innovation ecosystem in many different ways.
2. Focus on Philanthropic activities – Public research universities, by their very nature, are nonprofit organizations but they are being asked to help the business sector which is mainly profit-oriented. Yet, the PPP can be mutually beneficial as the economic interests intersect talent development which public universities are uniquely qualified to do. In this respect industry can take on a philanthropic role in helping universities develop that talent pipeline.
3. Catalyzing federal investments – Just as it is well known, federal investments in basic and applied research at universities have been declining over the last three decades.  Industry participation can help in reversing this trend when they pool the resources with federal investments. For example, advanced manufacturing, healthcare delivery, solving environmental and social problems can be substantially enhanced if industry joins federal and state investments in these efforts.
4. Research, Facilities and Infrastructure development –  Public universities lack the ability to invest in developing modern equipment since States have pulled back on such infrastructure funds.  Industries can help to develop those by leveraging existing State investments and simultaneously benefit from such efforts.  Research efforts at universities can substantially benefit private industry research if the right conditions exist; this would require working on special agreements especially on intellectual property and data sharing.
5. Privatizing university maintenance activities – Substantial savings in university activities can be realized in areas such as dining, landscaping, building maintenance, enrollment management, online education, assessment, and testing, housing, media, and marketing if these are done through PPPs. The savings can then be redirected to research and teaching within the universities to foster growth and innovation.

PPPs are very useful in allowing universities to consider changing the operations via offsetting the current fiscal pressures while, at the same time delivering expanded services, building new facilities, realizing cost reductions, enhancing teaching efforts, and improving the research innovation ecosystem.

Public research universities have an important societal mission and that is to help ameliorate the societal and economic conditions of the taxpayers who pay their bills. It is a major activity engaged by the faculty, staff, and students as a part of their research, service, and teaching missions within a university. This role requires that the researchers compete effectively for research dollars, both public and private. Public research dollars come mainly from the federal government that provide both basic and applied research funds. However, most of the developmental funds are provided by the industry. Private foundations support mainly fundamental research especially in the areas of medical and technological advances. In the United States, $456 billion has been spent in both research and development efforts in 2014. Of these 18% is basic, 20% applied and 62% developmental. All of the basic funds are provided by the federal agencies and so is a small portion of the applied funds. However, all of the developmental and a large portion of the applied funds are provided by industry and private sources. The universities are capable of competing very well for the basic and applied funds, but have been much effective in competing for developmental funds. The unfortunate reality of years of economic downturn and sequestration efforts has been to slowly wilt away the funds available for basic research. Today the U.S. government spends only 2.3% of its GDP for research, which places it 10^th among the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations of the world. Industry has also stopped supporting basic research (otherwise called “blue-sky” research) in favor of only “goal-oriented, development” research. They have divested themselves of research for research-sake and shuttered most of the well-known laboratories and relying more on university basic research to power the innovations. With reduced federal support the universities are ill equipped to fill that void for the industry. We are thus at crossroads with diminished support for fundamental research and increased need for innovation to maintain our scientific enterprise. Thus, the pre-eminence that the country had enjoyed in scientific research is starting to be challenged. Business as usual in research universities is no longer feasible; they have to re-invent themselves to adapt to the modern reality. What can these universities do?

The research staff at any land-grant, public university has the mission of being of service to the society at large. This translates directly to the ability to do research on three different scales to benefit the society. They can work on local problems, national security interests and global issues. On all of these scales, problems can vary from scientific or technological to social issues as well as the creative arts. The existence and promotion of academic freedom allows faculty and staff to engage in any form of investigation and discovery that pertains to the issues at hand.

In order for modern public research universities to be strategic in its investments and establishing priorities, one has to accept a new paradigm, viz., setting oneself apart from the pack and ensuring that there is enough bench depth to assure success within progressively diminishing resources. The new paradigm for setting priorities must be based on a few core principles:

• Indeed any public research university should be aware of its primary mission to be that of working on problems that benefit the society at large.
• Advancing the science and liberal arts should be a primary driver, even in the face of adverse reactions to “knowledge for knowledge-sake” without any likelihood of immediate tangible benefits being apparent.
• Universities should evaluate their existing strengths and then develop a sound long-term strategic plan instead of limited 5 to 10-year plans that are the current norm.
• Faculty, and not the administration should dominate the setting up of these strategic plans and priorities; however, frequent consultation between the two groups should lead to strategic revisions when needed.
• Many different processes can be employed to develop strategic objectives such as, for example:
  • Focus on Grand Challenges that are global in scope.
  • Focus on trans-disciplinary research programs.
  • Focus on cluster hiring faculty and staff to support these initiatives.
  • Focus on economic development at the core of all initiatives.
• Universities should also focus on contextual problems, viz., those that are probably only relevant in the local or regional interest in the immediate future.
• Universities should band together on regional scales to share large scale, expensive equipment that are necessary for teamwork.
• Universities should resist the implementation of burdensome regulatory compliance requirements and allow more time for researchers to spend on their creative endeavors.
• A heavy focus should be placed on providing the necessary climate so that the young researchers will stay for a longer time to execute strategic priorities and not necessarily find greener pastures elsewhere.
• Current resource limitations should not be contemplated in a strategic plan that envisages long-term growth. Resources should be allocated later based on the strategic vision.

The public research universities in the United States got their start with the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1869. It was one of the most momentous acts signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln when he was in the midst of prosecuting the Civil War. States were tasked to provide education, service, and research assistance to transform a mostly agrarian society into a modern industrial society. Later the designations of sea grant and space grant made some of the universities even more relevant. The three pillars of such universities were teaching, research and service. Today there are land grant universities in every state and many of them are in the front-lines of research activity.

During the second half of the 20^th century, many of these same universities received further support from the federal government as investments in research grew after World War II. These universities were the engines of creativity and invention along with the prominent private universities that had existed for a longer time. Over time, these investments in higher education have provided the impetus to substantial economic development activities led by major research universities in many states. Thus, economic development became the fourth rail of a public university mission.

Beginning in the mid 1980’s, we have seen a substantial reduction in investments in federally supported university research. This can be partially attributed to flawed planning and forethought towards science funding, weak economic outlook, and increased federal debt. At the same time, competition from other developing nations has increased and our own scientific enterprise is being challenged to be more innovative. Our scientists and their productivity are still the envy of the world and we have maintained our superiority in science and technological endeavors. Industry, on the other hand, have started to divest their internal “blue-sky” research efforts and focused more on product development alone. We have also witnessed a slow but sure decline in state support of public research universities all over the nation. This disinvestment in public support of higher education has eroded our capability to innovate and provided ample opportunities for other competing nations to catch up with us. Under the increased pressure of less federal funding for research and state support of higher education, universities throughout the country have found themselves at crossroads with respect to the need to reinvent them and seek new directions of development.

So, how do you reinvent the universities of today for the 21^st century? I suggest a ten-point formula for “reinventing” the modern research university:

1. Universities need to rethink disciplinary boundaries and encourage gradual transformations to multidisciplinary structures with no clear departmental distinctions. In other words, we need to go back to the original definition of a University. Most of the present-day and future problems are necessarily of a multidisciplinary nature and we need to encourage faculty and students to think along those lines.
2. Universities should admit students with no home department or college affiliation and allow them to design their own curriculum and course content to fit their own desires. The federal government should encourage such efforts by tying federal student aid to such university initiatives.
3. University leaders should play a major role in rebuilding the “trust” factor between academia, government, and industry, which at present is broken. This should also lead to a better articulation of the “relevance” of public research universities to the taxpayers who fund them.
4. Universities should strive to procure more independence in setting proper and affordable tuition. The federal student aid should be tied to state support of higher education, graduation rates and, mid-career earning potentials of its graduates.
5. Universities should proactively design regional co-operations among themselves and reduce duplication of efforts. On-line education initiatives can surely help in this regard.
6. The top tier universities should work constructively together to undertake solving global issues and attract the best and brightest from all nations to do so. In this respect, some lower tier universities should be relegated to teaching and service related activities only.
7. Universities should encourage the faculty to move from incremental research and strive for “blue-sky, innovative” research. This would also require that national federal funding agencies are encouraged to move from relying too much on “peer review”. In other words, we need to rethink the norms of “peer” review in establishing funding priorities.
8. Industry and foundations that support “applied + development” research should be encouraged to rely more on university faculty to fulfill their mission of goal-oriented research. This will necessarily require reinventing intellectual property (IP) policies to make them “smarter”. Research incubators should be promoted at universities on a regional scale to excel in particular facets of research. Faculty entrepreneurship should be encouraged via reconsideration of promotion and tenure policies.
9. Academic freedom and tenure should be reinforced so that faculties are empowered to work on all types of research and destroy dogmas. Similarly, undue emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines at the expense of “liberal” arts (arts, humanities, and social sciences) should be moderated to produce truly “global” citizens.
10. Graduate education should be totally restructured to move from the post World War II paradigm that most universities are clinging to and making it worthless for many students.