The University’s cutting-edge researchers in education and the biological sciences have helped net the school $43 million in federal grants and contracts so far this year, $14 million ahead of where research coffers were during the same period of the last fiscal year, July 2000 to December 2000.
The number of federal grants secured also rose from 283 in fiscal year 2000-01 to 319 in the same period this year.
Richard Linton, vice president for research and graduate studies, said the school should be extremely proud of the gains but must realize they could be offset if the Oregon University System cuts its research funding to cover a looming budget shortfall.
“We attract external dollars with the OUS appropriation,” Linton said. “If state investment backs away, we’ll have trouble sustaining this rate of progress.”
The rate of progress — and the number of researchers working to sustain it — is meager when compared with comparable institutions, such as the University of Washington or the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. OUS identified these and six other schools as comparable to the University because of a shared educational mission.
The University of Washington, for example, attracted an additional $65 million in grants and contracts during the first six months of the most recent fiscal year. But Alvin Kwirma, vice provost for research at the school, said the school has many grant-seeking departments that the University of Oregon lacks, such as a medical school and a public health school. Kwirma said the public health school alone typically yields $50 million each year, or $7 million more than the University of Oregon has secured so far this year. He said UW also has 15,000 more students than the University.
“We are a larger and much more broadly based institution,” he said. “The UO has a much more isolated but excellent group of players in the research arena.”
One of those players is associate economics professor Bill Harbaugh, who has landed a score of grants in the last decade. The most recent was a $340,000, 3-year grant awarded by the National Science Foundation in 2001 for Harbaugh’s research into bargaining behavior among elementary and junior high school students.
He said competition for grants is intense and to secure one a proposal “must be interesting to those who review the grant requests. If it’s a request from the NSF, for example, it must contribute to the social good. This can be tenuous, though.”
The University also relies on larger contributions from federal sources than comparable schools, on average. The government affairs office here lobbied U.S. senators and representatives from Oregon for $1.8 million of the president’s budget last fiscal year.
“In the state of Oregon, research in universities for all intents and purposes is barely funded,” federal affairs director Betsy Boyd said. “For us to be able to get large pieces of equipment … we need to look for other ways to finance them. Earmarks enable us to get funds we couldn’t get through the competitive or state route.”