Good Ideas

This is a proposal for building trust in the scholarly enterprise of public universities. We sometimes refer to this as the “research mission” of an institution like Michigan State University, where I work, but I mean it to include all of those artistic and creative endeavors we enjoy in theaters, galleries, and recital halls, as well as work we might recognize as the stewardship of knowledge that takes place in archives, libraries, and museums.

My proposal is that we recommit to a simple message for communicating about scholarship which is this: look to us when you need good ideas. We are in the business of making them, testing them, putting them through their paces in ways that ensure they can benefit many people, and presenting them in ways that expand opportunities for others. You can count on us for all kinds of good ideas when you need them, spanning the many disciplines one finds in a university setting. Got PFAS in your groundwater? We’ll get to work on an idea for cleaning that up. Need a little joy during the holidays? We’ve got a little Mozart prepared for you. Both of these are good ideas. They make the lives of people better. And there are tens of thousands more like these, enough to include everybody, to respond to many areas of need, to thrill and delight, to engage and inspire, to solve and implement.

I have come to understand the need for this view in my institutional role as an Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Education at Michigan State. At MSU, we are fortunate to enjoy a broadly favorable reputation from the public at large. Not that our institution hasn’t made some fairly high-profile mistakes, mind you. It has. But we also consistently provide a service to the public that builds trust in the teaching and learning mission of this university. Folks in Michigan and beyond know MSU is a place where they and their family members can learn. Tens of thousands of them do it each year, and it has been going on for over a century.

The teaching and learning mission is so powerful as an aspect of the institution’s identity that nearly everyone on campus can relate to it in some way. Even if you are not teaching a class yourself, it is not hard to understand your work as benefiting the student experience in some fashion. Everyone from the folks who work on student accounts in Financial Aid to the folks who keep the heating system running in the Physical Plant can see their work as making MSU a place where students can learn. But what about the research mission? Can folks feel connected to that too?

In my experience, far fewer people on campus feel themselves to be a part of the scholarly enterprise of the university. Internal to our institutions, that is a matter of organizational culture that I think we’ve badly mishandled.

But we can fix it. The differentiation of roles in the university is no different than it is in relation to teaching and learning, but somehow research, art, scholarship seem out of reach or reserved for just a few people on the campus. And that’s a real problem. Because it also means that scholarly work is less widely understood and valued. What is research anyway? Why do we spend so much time on it? What is the point of it?

All of these questions accrue and, as they do, they position scholarship as less central to the University’s purpose in the public imagination too. At MSU, we are in fact, far better at engaging the public in a fan experience than we are at engaging them in conversation about our scholarly contributions to the State and its people. This is to say nothing about the contributions to knowledge that our scholars make over their careers. From my perspective, this is a big opportunity lost.

I honestly think we bring tremendous value to the world in the form of good ideas. And before I lose those with a critical view of university culture let me assure you: mine is not a view that comes through rose-colored glasses.

My proposal to talk about scholarship in terms of good ideas is NOT primarily a P.R. campaign, though I understand how it can function as one. My proposal is grounded in the ethical principles of transparency and reciprocity. We owe it to the public to be more transparent about some things related to research. And we should also work harder to make our research mission to exhibit the reciprocity that teaching and learning, or even university athletics, does. That is: folks whose tax and tuition dollars support research should feel like they benefit from it. We should worry about that more and work on it much harder than we do today.

One of the things we need to be more transparent about is that research costs money and it does not make money. Ever. Off and even on campus, there are a lot of misconceptions about this and these misconceptions are harmful in that they fuel assumptions about the relative value of various kinds of activities with what is frankly a lot of hand-waving, at best, and subterfuge, at worst.

So let’s be clear: research is something we spend money on, not something we make money on. Even when our research revenues increase, our costs increase more. For example, getting grants is great for expanding capacity to do research but it doesn’t mean we are realizing more at the end of the day from it. We are, in fact, doing the opposite most of the time. This is true even though Federal grants come with “indirect” funds that help to offset some of the infrastructure and personnel costs associated with research.

STEM research tends to cost more than other forms of scholarship and art, not less. We spend more on it, dollar for dollar, than other areas. This means that to function, universities need to redistribute money from higher-margin (not profit, but the amount over the cost of providing the service) areas to fund research and scholarship. The lion’s share of this need for redistribution is attributable to STEM research, in particular. It simply costs a lot of money to do it well.

This leads to one more important thing we need to be more honest and transparent about: where does the money for redistribution to research come from? The answer at most public institutions is the general fund, of which the largest revenue share these days is tuition dollars. State appropriations have decreased dramatically over the last 30 years as a share of public institutions’ budgets. Those funds used to play a much bigger role in funding the research mission while keeping tuition costs low. This is no longer true.

Within the economy of the university, the greatest contributors of tuition dollars and revenue come from those units that offer general education courses — the kinds of courses that thousands of students take, usually in their first two years of a four year degree. And pound for pound, units in the Arts & Humanities tend to be the biggest marginal contributors to the university. Yes, you heard that right. Colleges like mine — Arts & Letters — fund the rest of the university not the other way around. We generate the margin that drives the mission. Last year, our marginal contribution to the general fund was three to one. That means we made three bucks for every dollar the Provost spent on our College. This is, by far, the biggest ROI among the colleges at my university.

The data I’m citing here about the university budget is public knowledge. But it also runs counter to what most people have assumed and/or continue to think about how the university works. And so it is, curiously, something of a secret too. STEM loses money and the Humanities subsidizes STEM? Yes. And in case you are wondering, you can add the Medical Schools (the M in STEM) to the list of net recipients vs. contributors as well.

So what does being transparent about the budget have to do with research and good ideas? First, let me say that the conditions I am describing are not just at my institution. They are true to varying degrees at every research institution. Research costs money it doesn’t make money. It is why tuition costs more at research institutions. It is why, at Michigan State, you must pay three times the cost of a credit hour to take Algebra than you would at Lansing Community College (and maybe even with the same instructor!). It is for that reason, we should be more accountable to the public with regard to our research spending. Because the premium students and parents are paying is what funds research, along with the tax dollars from state appropriations and federal grant programs.

The folks paying tuition are paying not only for an education but also for good ideas. Many may not know it, because we have been less than transparent and honest about it. But I think that if we were more up front and clear, and if we worked toward being responsible with every dollar we spend after acknowledging, ourselves, where the money comes from, we could (re)build trust in the research mission of our public institutions. We might even restore some of the public funding that has been cut from State budgets and transferred to tuition bills.

The way to do that, I believe, is by talking about good ideas, how they are built and tested and presented to a wide audience, and how much they cost. And in the teeth of a global pandemic, we might have our best shot in a generation to do it. Because the public has turned to us for good ideas in this time. Not only for things like accurate and reliable tests and vaccines, but also to solve problems related to medical supply distribution, sanitation, to facilitate and optimize rapid shifts in learning for schools, to focus on decreasing bandwidth latency so that we can have more people learning, meeting, and even playing music online… and a host of other problems that, in a pandemic, need solving.

The public has also looked to us for ideas about how our lives are changing, how we can maintain our sense of community and shared humanity at a distance, how our language and cultural practices are changing in the short and long term. We are learning to live differently now and people all over the world need good ideas.

My proposal, my vision, is ultimately a simple one: we should be the first place folks think to look for good ideas. Just like we look to the grocery store when we need food, universities are where anyone can go and feel confident that there will be ideas to meet their needs. We are that place for our local community, our State, our Country, for each other.