Twenty-four years ago, R. J. Woodrow wrote, in his book Management for Research in U.S. Universities (NCUBO, 1978), "Management for research covers primarily the provision of a nourishing climate, sound policies, supporting services of various kinds, financial systems, and organizational arrangements that will help research to flourish in a university." Much has changed in the national research environment over the past twenty-four years, but research continues to flourish best in a nourishing climate. Without an environment in which faculty, students, and staff feel that research and creative activity is supported, valued, and rewarded, even the most creative strategies will be insufficient to stimulate research. Climate is therefore a key element of the University’s research strategic plan.

For the remainder of this decade, two distinct research objectives loom large for the University. The first is the transition from the Carnegie "Doctoral Intensive" to "Doctoral Extensive" classification, based on the number of doctoral programs offered, number of doctoral degrees awarded annually, and federal funds obtained. The second is the broader objective of achieving excellence in research and creative activity across a wide breadth of disciplines. The second objective is necessary in order to achieve regional and national recognition as a research university, beyond the mere numbers of degrees and dollars, and to be nationally competitive in faculty recruitment and retention, graduate student recruitment, and research funding. But accomplishing the first objective greatly aids the second by providing additional resources to develop new programs and strengthen existing ones. This research strategic plan therefore addresses resource issues for graduate study and research with the specific goals of increasing the number of doctoral degrees granted and increasing the federal dollars secured in support of research. At the same time, this document is written with the principle of academic breadth and excellence firmly in mind, befitting a nationally competitive research university. We further recognize the important role of disciplines that do not necessarily refer to their scholarly activity as research, but rather as creative activity. Throughout this document, whenever reference is made to "research" alone, inclusion of creative activity is implicit. Moreover, the term includes the many applications of research such as those found in training, evaluation, and service projects. All such activities are highly valued at the University.

The University already employs a comprehensive planning process for new degree programs under the management of the Provost. This process involves considerable study and analysis at all levels preceding a setting of priorities for the campus, and it is imperative that the same process be used for setting our research priorities. At first glance, setting new doctoral degree priorities may appear synonymous with setting research priorities. But it is frequently necessary to stimulate research development at an early stage in order to determine whether a doctoral program is feasible, or even to determine whether there is capacity for research growth and external funding. There are many disciplines within the University in which research excellence can be achieved at minimal cost beyond the hiring of faculty. But in many areas, building research excellence and prestige are costly, and the University must make difficult choices in the same way it makes choices for costly doctoral programs. In the transition toward Research Extensive status, the defining of research foci within units is absolutely essential. The five-year plan of each academic unit must therefore articulate research foci and define the manner in which the unit will contribute to building excellence in research and creative activity. Each department, each center, each academy will declare in their academic plan what they will be known for, what their reputation will be based on. Such planning may be independent of degree planning, since many departments on campus should strive to achieve excellence in the absence of doctoral programs. On the other hand, developing sustainable research productivity is often a prerequisite to establishing a successful doctoral program. Following department-level planning, colleges will develop priorities for discussion, and the University will then set overall priorities for the allocation of resources, with the understanding that University resources may have to be distributed unequally. Tenure-track appointments, reappointments, and promotion and tenure decisions at each level, from assistant professors to endowed professors, must be based on research potential and must contribute to the research mission of the unit.

After the University establishes a set of priorities for new programs of research and creative activity, or for growth requiring new resources for existing programs, programs will be regularly evaluated to ensure that allocation of scarce resources leads to research excellence. Evaluation will include, among others, the following two measures of research output: (1) peer-reviewed publications or juried exhibitions/performances; and (2) external funding. Continuation of support will be based on evaluation outcomes.

Consistent with the University’s established priorities for research and creative activity, and as a general principle for research development, two groups of faculty will receive a higher priority for the allocation of University resources. The first is new faculty. In order to hire new faculty who will become respected researchers and who will attract nationally competitive funding within a reasonable period, we must give particular attention to their early research development. In certain disciplines, this will necessitate the provision of graduate research assistants, start-up funds, and the reduction of teaching loads. The second group is productive faculty who are "in between" externally-funded projects. Even the best researchers have unfunded periods, and we must provide discretionary resources to our productive researchers during such periods in order to maintain the competitive position of their laboratories while they are actively engaged in pursuing continuing external funding for the next phase of their research programs.

Whenever possible, the allocation of resources must serve as seed resources for future external funding in those areas where such funding is available. We will therefore put emphasis on proposal writing as well as funding success as the expected behavior of faculty who receive discretionary University resources. In those disciplines where external funding is not available or extremely scarce, we will expect to allocate University resources as a substitute for external funding, but we must always apply high standards in evaluating the quality and potential of the proposed work.

When salary reserves occur as a result of transferring salaries to externally funded projects, flexibility and creativity are strongly encouraged in using such funds to further stimulate research.

Major scientific equipment and instrumentation constitutes a principal asset and resource for the development of research. As a first priority, the University will use equipment funds as matching funds for equipment grant proposals rather than as outright purchases. Such use will require careful planning, sometimes far in advance, but will considerably leverage our limited funds. Proposals from departments that have equipment needs must include budget lines for equipment and/or equipment maintenance.

Graduate assistantships are of critical importance to the University’s development from two perspectives. First, graduate stipends are necessary to attract the best students and to thereby develop quality doctoral programs. Second, graduate assistants constitute the principal labor source for the research engine at virtually all research universities. So important is the involvement of students in research that the National Science Foundation requires research proposals to specifically address, and reviewers to consider, how well the proposed activity advances "discovery and understanding while promoting teaching, training, and learning." Thus, in order to attract the best faculty and to conduct nationally competitive research in support of our doctoral programs, we must offer nationally competitive graduate stipends and assign graduate assistants to our research faculty. Because research assistantships cannot be paid from state funds, it will be University policy that external proposal budgets from departments with graduate programs include assistantships when permitted by agency guidelines. In addition, we must vigorously seek additional graduate fellowship support from gift and other sources, allocating these scarce resources in a manner consistent with our definition of research priorities. This allocation process must again give priority to new faculty and faculty who are pursuing continuing external funding for the next phase of their research programs. Only in this way can we build the doctoral programs that will lead us to Research Extensive status.

Having recruited the most competitive graduate students, we must fully integrate them into the research enterprise. As we consider our objective of becoming a major research university with an emphasis on inter-disciplinary programs, it is useful to reflect on the importance of providing basic operating facilities while simultaneously building a sense of community within research groups. It is well known that successful research teams, and particularly those working in interdisciplinary areas, benefit from spontaneous group interaction. That interaction is maximized if team members have contiguous offices and research facilities. Substituting scheduled meetings for spontaneous group encounters, or locating team members in offices far from one another, detracts from spontaneity and creativity and is particularly deleterious for interdisciplinary teams, where communication is difficult under the best of circumstances. For graduate students, the need for community is particularly critical. Building community is aided by providing office space within the cluster of research labs or other research environments where students work and by having areas for gathering to promote spontaneous interactions among faculty, students, industrial partners, and other external contacts. Communal areas allow for brown-bag seminars, brainstorming, or just talking about the day’s experiments or other research activities. The sense of community that can result from such activities is absolutely critical for research excellence; separating faculty and students can seriously hamper research productivity. It is also essential to provide research students with basic offices and facilities. Increasingly, graduate students serve as important liaisons on externally funded projects and they need to be readily available to support the project principal investigator and, frequently, communicate with the research sponsor. Therefore, when renovating existing facilities or designing new ones, space for doctoral students will be included, as well as space that promotes team interaction and community building. Moreover, as with graduate fellowship support, the allocation of existing space will be consistent with the University’s definition of research priorities, and space for graduate students and team interaction will be emphasized.

Providing adequate time for research is one of the greatest hurdles that we must clear as we continue to build research programs. Because the transition to Research Extensive status will occur incrementally, we must initially increase the research component while maintaining the current teaching component of our workload. It is therefore important that unit workload statements reflect each unit's research plan and specifically address groups who merit special attention, who have unusual potential for research development, or who have proven track records in research, and that workload statements also consider the research priorities of interdisciplinary programs.

As we continue to develop as a research university, we must solidify the University’s research infrastructure so that we can continue to effectively support the efforts of faculty, staff, and students in the conduct of research and creative activity, consistent with our constraints as a state agency. Recent initiatives to provide an increased level of post-award support services within academic units have been highly successful and we will continue to develop those resources. For components of University infrastructure that can be supported as externally funded direct costs (e.g., vivarium, media and computing services, technicians, etc.), such costs must be included in proposal budgets.

As we move toward Research Extensive status, our library resources will play an increasingly important role for both research and graduate study. Faculty must conduct extensive literature searches for the preparation of competitive proposals as well as for research publications. Graduate students must also have access to significant research collections in order to pursue doctoral dissertation research. Library collection development strategies must therefore reflect the University’s research priorities, and it is essential that research faculty be fully represented on committees charged with collection development.

We expect that our principal sources of funding growth will be federal and business/industry. State/local government and private foundation funding is important, but those growth opportunities will probably not be comparable to federal and industry sources. Federal funding must at least be doubled; business and industry funding could more than double through increased marketing of our resources, strengths, and facilities to industry partners in the region, nationally, and abroad.

Federal funding can increase in two ways. First, from investigator-initiated proposals to peer-reviewed programs and second, from non-peer-reviewed sources including agency discretionary funds as well as politically directed funds. We will never attempt to substitute political influence for peer review, but we cannot ignore that many universities receive considerable funding from having Washington representatives work directly with senior agency officials and their congressional delegations. We will therefore continue to work with the North Carolina Congressional Delegation to both increase the University’s visibility and to seek funding from non-peer-reviewed sources.

In building external funding from investigator-initiated proposal submissions, we must maintain the strong participation by faculty as evidenced by the percentage of faculty submitting proposals. But at the same time, we must also focus on larger and more complex projects rather than just more proposals. The Office of Proposal Development will proactively support the formation of proposal teams for that purpose, particularly in interdisciplinary areas, and will provide additional support to faculty for project development in the form of mentoring and editing, as discussed below under Other Faculty Support.

Both the Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) and the Charlotte Research Institute will play critical roles in developing research relationships with business and industry, and OTT will continue to be the primary manager in navigating intellectual property issues in sponsored research and in commercializing the success of our research. The University clearly understands the strong connection between research excellence and economic development, and realizes the importance of a research university as an engine of economic development and in establishing "knowledge clusters." Our mission in this area is to foster long-term strategic industry-academic relationships in order to achieve objectives of public dissemination of information and improved economic development of the region and the state of North Carolina. These relationships inherently promote commercially based leading-edge innovation through collaboration in research, and further enable the transfer of new technological advances to the private sector. This transfer enhances the University's ability to recruit and support research faculty in emerging, high-impact technology fields; provides an additional source of funding to the University to augment its research; and provides additional practical experience to the University’s students in business development, marketing, contract development and negotiations, and intellectual property development and protection.

In order to achieve this mission, we must promote to industry our extensive resources, capacity, expertise, and objectives related to research. Both OTT and the Charlotte Research Institute will work closely with industry to cultivate key partnerships with UNC Charlotte researchers whose interests and expertise may be appropriately matched to a particular company's business focus and will facilitate the University's participation in leading industry, academic, and government consortia on related topics and issues. It will also promote access to research expertise and faculty interests, intellectual property available for licensing, and other critical information and links through its website.

As we seek to increase external funding, coordination of the University’s development, technology transfer, and research efforts is essential. To that end, the Vice Chancellor for Research and Federal Relations will work closely with OTT, the Charlotte Research Institute, and the Office of Development to ensure coordination of the University’s contacts with foundations and corporations.

As our funding grows, we must provide internal resources to fuel and sustain that growth. Larger projects have a much higher probability of generating unforeseen and unbudgeted resource needs in mid-project, for which most research universities provide some type of discretionary internal funds. Moreover, the larger teams that research universities assemble to manage and compete for projects must frequently be sustained in between grants; every research group will encounter a dry spell sooner or later. In addition, our need for proposal cost-sharing or cost-matching will increase proportionately.

Such resource needs argue strongly for a source of internal discretionary funds that can grow in relation to our success in obtaining external funds. Virtually every research university relies on a source of internal funds to service current growth and fuel future growth. The University will therefore establish a research development fund, indexed to our level of external funding. Moreover, we will monitor the allocation of research development funds at other peer institutions with external funding levels similar to ours to ensure that we are devoting appropriate resources to research development. Without such funds, our most successful researchers will find little incentive to develop or continue large-scale federally funded research activities and our current limited ability to provide matching funds will become even more serious.

To increase our success rate for peer-reviewed proposals, both federal and non-federal, we will institute a mentoring program for assistance in proposal development and/or a critical reading of the proposal before it leaves campus. We will recruit senior faculty from among our most talented writers, our most experienced awardees, and our most politically astute and well-connected researchers, and we will conduct workshops on mentoring for proposal development. We will also be proactive in assembling teams that can compete for large and/or interdisciplinary grants. In doing so, we will provide forums in which faculty can learn about each other’s interests and skills and in which opportunities and priorities can be assessed. Research retreats in broad areas that include multiple units (e.g., environmental science, social science, health and life science, etc.) can introduce faculty to similar or complementary research interests, can identify available resources or common resource needs, can suggest opportunities for research centers or institutes, and can foster project team formation. Larger proposal efforts involving teams frequently need resources, such as travel, consultants, and clerical or student wage support in order to produce a competitive proposal. Support for such efforts is critical to success, particularly in areas strategically important to the University’s research objectives and in interdisciplinary areas where both administrative and physical separations work against successful collaboration. These new efforts in mentoring and team-building will be implemented under the leadership of the Director of Proposal Development.

In addition to coordination and support provided by the Vice Chancellor for Research and Federal Relations, it is extremely important that each college provide support to faculty through a senior administrative position in the office of the dean. These individuals will be of critical importance in implementing the University’s research strategic plan.