David McIlroy’s laboratory is held together by tin foil and duct tape.
“If this particular piece of foil weren’t on this device, I have a bunch of electronics that would start screeching from the radio waves that would be released,” said McIlroy, a material researcher and professor of physics.
Laboratories are always jungles of makeshift parts — that’s an inherent part of doing original work, he said. But not all of McIlroy’s lab is supposed to look that way.
Part of a larger piece of equipment, a pump leaking oil, sits propped up on a cinder block. McIlroy said replacing the pump would cost $300. But any leftover grant money needs to be saved for a bigger break, so it can’t be fixed.
“Everything here was built by grants,” McIlroy said. “And every single one of these pieces of equipment is just waiting to break.”
Grants are finite, which he said means he has to set money aside for repairs. He has no safety net.
Connor Bunderson | Argonaut
Nathan Dice performing research for Solid State Physics with an emphasis on Nonoscale Physics Tuesday afternoon.
McIlroy said he hopes to see support for gaps between grants and other barriers to research addressed as part of University of Idaho President Chuck Staben’s goals for the university’s research capabilities.
To measure the quality of the university’s research capabilities, Staben said he wants to work to achieve R1 status according to the Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education. Staben said his goal is to reach R1 status by 2025.
R1 status classifies a group of colleges considered to have the highest research activity in the country. UI currently ranks as an R2 university, while the other colleges in Idaho are R3 institutions.
“Many of these R1 schools are the ‘usual suspects,’ expensive private and Ivy League schools,” Staben said. “But some aren’t so different from us.”
Staben said the University of Arkansas is comparable to UI and has made the list of R1 institutions.
“We’re not terrifically far from those numbers,” Staben said. “Of course, everyone else is going to grow those numbers too, so we have some catch-up to do.”
Staben obtained his bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and worked at Stanford and the University of Kentucky — all R1 institutes.
The research classification takes into account a variety of factors, including the number of doctorates awarded by the school and number of research faculty employed.
Staben said this goal does not mean UI will strive for an unbalanced focus on STEM majors. The goal is just one of the goals in the university strategic plan, and he said achieving R1 status will also require social science research. He said only a few colleges, like the College of Business and Economics, will have a small role to play in reaching the goal.
Staben said while the goal will lead some faculty to devote less time to teaching and more to research, other faculty may devote more time to teaching.
“For certain people, specialization would make a lot of sense,” said Barrie Robison, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “I have some colleagues I would absolutely divert their efforts entirely to research. If they’re excellent at something, they should do more of it.”
The increase in research expenditures in order to obtain R1 status has many faculty interested.
At his State of the University address earlier this month, Staben announced the university had surpassed $100 million in research expenditures, a major milestone toward the goal.
“We’re in a constant state of chasing money,” McIlroy said.
McIlroy said all of his research, like most researchers’ work, is funded by grants he and his students apply for, not by the university.
“Every researcher is like a small company where each lab is trying to stay afloat on its own,” McIlroy said.
Patrick Hrdlicka, vice chair of Faculty Senate, said federal funding levels are declining, making it more difficult to obtain grants from usual sources like the National Science Institute, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.
“We are trying in an increasingly competitive environment to grow our relative stature,” Hrdlicka said. “So of course there are some reservations.”
Hrdlicka said he thinks working toward an R1 status is a good goal.
“Is it possible? Yes,” Hrdlicka said. “But it will require funding, focus and reallocation.”
Chemistry professor Frank Cheng’s money problem is the university’s low pay for teaching assistants.
“I’ll get funding for projects, but can’t get the students to promote from teaching assistant to research assistant,” Cheng said. “Our stipend is so low, our students who graduate here don’t take our teaching or research assistantships, and that creates a vicious cycle.”
Cheng said students don’t need to go far to find higher pay.
He said UI’s chemistry department pays about $14,000 a year, while the chemistry department at Washington State University pays teaching assistants around $26,000 annually. In research, UI competes with Montana State and Utah State, which Cheng said have chemistry departments that pay teaching assistants about $20,000.
He said prospective teaching assistants have even told him that they turned down a position at UI because of the low stipend. He said sometimes a graduate student can’t be found for a position, so undergraduates are given the work instead.
Unable to hire graduates from his own college, growth in freshman enrollment is a moot point for Cheng when it comes to growing research capability.
However, Staben said increasing enrollment furthers the goal in other ways.
“When we grow our revenues — and where that is most under our control is through growing enrollment — we’ll be able to support more teaching and research assistants,” Staben said.
McIlroy said there are many other places where more money could help the research goal. He said extra funds could go to larger start-up packages for new faculty to begin research, higher salaries to attract and retain faculty and improve facilities in which researchers work. He said it could also go to hiring staff for more specific jobs.
McIlroy said he does the work a technician would do at many other universities. He said he is the only person in his lab who knows the machines graduate students use well enough to know how to repair them.
“Grad students come and go,” McIlroy said. “I’m the only consistency.”
Nishant Mohan can be reached at [email protected]