Caroline Chick Jarrold, head of the 10-member task force (left) and Fred Cate, Vice President for Research (right)
(Screenshot of Zoom)
An IU faculty task force is calling for a delay in the University’s research reorganization plan. The Bloomington Faculty Council (BFC) Task Force on Research Reorganization released the report this month and called the proposed changes “fundamentally flawed.” The report said that, “faculty expressed serious concerns about the lack of rationale, criteria and clarity regarding the proposed restructuring.”
In March, the Office of the Vice President for Research announced a plan to centralize the budget for research, eliminating Bloomington’s Vice Provost for Research and shifting decision-making from campuses to the system administration. The new plan also would evaluate research productivity using external funding as its main metric.
Task force chair Caroline Chick Jarrold said the group supports the plan’s stated goals: reducing inefficiencies and increasing external funding. However, she said the University’s plan fails to account for the needs and input of stakeholders.
“We’ve all felt the dysfunction between the Vice President for Research and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research over the last decade,” Jarrold said. “But rather than addressing the roots of the dysfunction or trying to find ways to resolve the inefficiencies and redundancies, the whole thing was discarded.”
Jarrold also expressed concern that some of IU Bloomington’s strongest programs would lose out if the value of research were determined primarily by external funding.
“There are a number of units on campus - Jacobs School of Music, or the law school, other units that have a lot of departments in the College of Arts and Sciences, the Kelley School of Business - they don't rely on external funding for their very high ranking and international reputation,” she said. “So that basically sidelines all of these units in terms of how they're going to be served by this restructuring.”
In an interview with Indiana Public Media last month, Vice President for Research Fred Cate defended the University’s external funding-oriented plan, emphasizing the benefit to departments.
“Research is typically very expensive,” Cate said. “We’re trying to really prioritize strategic opportunities there so that there'll be more support for graduate students, faculty, equipment and space necessary to do research.”
Cate was unavailable for another interview in time for the publication of this article, but he responded to the task force’s request to pause reorganization via email: “As the committee knew, the reorganization is largely finished, so there is not much to delay.”
Nonetheless, the task force report called on the administration to seek more input. “Even if the process has already begun, it is still essential that the leaders of this initiative gather this information and assess whether the structure will be effective in achieving the identified objectives, and/or whether the plan should be modified to better achieve these goals,” the report said.
“I'm a scientist, I think things should be data driven,” said Jarrold, a professor of chemistry. “And I think this whole process should have been data-driven.”
