A survey of University of California faculty has found that nearly 60 percent of them believe that the "research environment" at University has deteriorated over the past five years, with 15 percent of the faculty saying the environment is "much worse" than five years ago. By contrast, only 8 percent of the faculty surveyed thought the environment had improved over the period. The chief contributors to a weakened research environment, survey respondents said, are inadequate staff support, lack of storage space, inadequate intramural funding, and a campus regulatory apparatus that faculty believe is making things more difficult for them.
Completed in May, the survey was produced by the Academic Senate's University Committee on Research Policy (UCORP). Working through UCLA's Survey Research Center, the committee sent out detailed questionnaires to 3,300 UC faculty and received responses from 2,400 or 72 percent of them. Faculty surveyed constituted a random sample in six disciplinary "clusters" across the campuses. One measure of how seriously the UC faculty took the subject of the survey is that 1,000 of the respondents took time to provide additional narrative commentaries on the research environment. The survey was funded largely through campus contributions - from Senate research committees and campus administrators - and to a smaller extent by UCOP's Office of Research.
"The University has suffered a $400 million cut in state funding in recent years in addition to accompanying cuts in federal funds," said UCORP chair Warren Gold of UC, San Francisco. "Yet, for all our familiarity with research problems, nobody had a handle on what these cuts have meant to research, either for the campuses or for the system as a whole." The UCORP survey, he said, was aimed at filling in this informational gap.
UC Provost Judson King said that the survey results will be folded into a report now being prepared by an Office of the President Task Force on the Research Climate. "We regard the UCORP report as quite valuable," he said, as a means of coming to an understanding of how faculty perceive the research environment. "To me the prime thing it does is to confirm that as we have come through these years of severe budget cuts . . . there's clearly been an impression among faculty that, in terms of doing research, things have gotten more difficult."
In overview, one of the notable things about the survey results was their consistency - across campuses, across professorial ranks, and in accordance with perceived problems. No campus jumped out as having a notably better or worse research environment than others and the types of problems reported on all campuses were remarkably consistent.
Difficulties do vary by discipline, however. The six disciplinary clusters used in the survey included such groupings as physical science/math and arts/humanities. While faculty in sciences and medicine reported the greatest decline in the research environment in recent years, faculty in the arts and humanities clearly perceive themselves as being more deprived of the basic resources necessary to undertake their research or creative work. As the report notes, "Even in areas that most UC faculty take for granted, such as telephones and personal computers, arts and humanities faculty lack basic support. One San Diego Humanities/Arts respondent wrote, 'Basic support for long-distance telephone, for example, crucial for research, has been taken away. I spend my own money on postage, telephone, FAX machine, software, because these things, once provided,no longer exist.'"
Arts and humanities faculty have never had access to the large research grants available in the natural sciences, of course, but one possible reason for the greater level of their current unhappiness may have to do with a decline in UC's intramural support.
"It's really clear that no one is getting as much intramural money as they used to," says UCORP member Henry Becker, a UC Irvine education professor who drafted the questions for the survey and performed the data analysis on it. Thirty-seven percent of UC faculty received at least $5,000 in intramural funds over the past three years, according to the survey and these funds are going disproportionately to junior faculty, as is generally supposed to be the case. However, the survey notes, "Twelve times as many faculty report having received fewer dollars from [campus research] and other faculty committees than report an increase in funding in the past three years . . . Roughly four times as many faculty report declining funding through ORUs and other research groups as report having received more money . . . and three times as many report declining funding from their dean or department chair." While proportionately more faculty in arts and humanities and social sciences receive intramural funds, their degree of dependence on these funds is so great, Becker says, that the decline in recent years is likely to have hit them especially hard.
One of the survey's sections concerned the adequacy of resources available to UC faculty. Across all campuses two items came up most frequently as being a source of dissatisfaction: lack of storage space and lack of departmental staff support. Though the former item was mentioned most frequently, UCI's Becker notes that this doesn't mean it is the resource issue faculty "are most upset about." Instead, it is probably the lack of staff support and the perceived impact of this on faculty time. "It's the fact that there isn't general departmental support for work that faculty must do," he says. "The result is that faculty have less time to do research." As one survey respondent noted: "I am an Associate Professor and spend 30% or more of my time on basic secretarial functions related to my teaching and advising responsibilities . . . The University is wasting the energy and skills of their faculty by drowning us in secretarial and clerical work that could and should be provided at a fraction of our salaries. My extreme frustration is shared by everyone in my department."
UCORP surveyed faculty for their attitudes about the campus regulatory environment - specifically about how they feel about campus Contracts & Grants, Human Subjects, Animal Care, and Bio-Safety offices. Contact with these offices is considerable: two-thirds of faculty -- and 80-90 percent of science and engineering faculty -- have dealt with contract and grant offices in the last three years, and about 30 percent of faculty have done human subjects research in the same period.
These operations, Becker notes, "believe what they're doing is implementing federal regulations, but what UC faculty perceive is that these offices are causing some of the problems." To take one example, of faculty who have had recent dealing with Contracts and Grants offices, slightly more than half characterize their experience as "favorable," while one-third give a "mixed" rating and 12 percent give an "unfavorable" rating. When, however, respondents who had trouble with C&G offices were asked about the source of their problems, three times as many reported seeing the University as the source of the problem, as opposed to the federal government.
The UCORP survey provides not only an overview of faculty perceptions
on the UC research environment, but a rich number of statistical
details, set forth in tables as well as narrative. The report
that has been issued is labeled "interim" because it
is the first of two that will be derived from the survey data.
The just-issued report, Becker says, represents a more quantitative
look at UC's research environment; upcoming, he says, will be
a more qualitative report, based on the thousands of pages of
narrative responses the committee received from UC faculty.