At the invitation of the National Science Board in early 1996, New Mexico State University (NMSU) participated in the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable's second university forum to address research issues. This document is a summary of four discussions held during the summer by a committee of fourteen people selected from the University Research Council to explore the specific set of questions posed by the Research Roundtable. The focus of the questions was on faculty responses to stresses related to the current and projected reduction in governmental support for research and scholarship. The Roundtable's objective is to develop a unified position paper from the responses of the invited universities which will be presented to key committees at the start of the 105th Congress.

Discussion Participants

Greg Butler, Co-chair Assistant Professor, Government	Kathy Brook, Co-chair Assistant Dean, Business
Kurt Anderson Professor, Astronomy	Mike Barnes Assistant Professor, Health Sciences
Mike Coombs Manager, Physical Science Laboratory	Gary Cunningham Associate Dean, Agricultural Experiment Station
Michael Hyman Associate Professor, Marketing	Eric Johnson Associate Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Ken Papp Department Head, Psychology	Tim Pettibone Dean, Graduate School
Roy Rodriguez Associate Dean, Education	Averett Tombes Vice President, Research and Economic Development
Carol Walker Associate Dean, Arts and Sciences	Mike Wolf Director, Computing and Networking

New Mexico State University (NMSU) is the land grant university among six public, four year institutions of higher education in New Mexico. The main campus is located at the intersection of Interstates 10 and 25 in the southern part of the state. The campus is adjacent to the Las Cruces metropolitan area, which with a population of 155,000 is one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the country, and is less than fifty miles from the border cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico with combined population exceeding 1.5 million.

NMSU's mission is to serve the people of the state through education, research, extension education and public services. To accomplish this, the university is organized into six colleges and the Graduate School, offering seventy-seven undergraduate degree programs, seventy-five graduate degree programs and four specialist in education programs. In 1995-96 there were more than 15,000 students enrolled in these programs, with more than 4,000 of these in graduate and professional degree programs. Implementation of the mission is the responsibility of about 1,800 faculty and professional staff and 1,400 classified staff.

Since 1963 the institution has held full accreditation by the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, and many colleges and departments are further accredited by organizations serving specific fields. New Mexico State University is rated a Carnegie I Research institution. It is classified as a minority institution under Title III of the Higher Education Act and is qualified as a member of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities. Among the public universities in the state, it has been designated as a research university, along with the University of New Mexico and New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

Funding for the university comes in the forms of tuition and fees paid by students, appropriations from the state legislature, grants and contracts and gifts. Tuition for New Mexico residents is relatively low and grants and contracts (measured per faculty member) are relatively high. A major research facility is the Physical Sciences Laboratory (PSL) whose establishment reflects the proximity of the university to White Sands Missile Range. In 1995-96 PSL accounted for about 28% of total research funding at NMSU.

Recent changes in the external environment affecting NMSU include a decline in student enrollments of about 4% over the last two years (following increases of 18% since 1985 and 42% since the mid-1970s). Under the state's funding formula for higher education declining enrollments result, with a lag, in declining state support. In anticipation of this, a review of all vacant positions is currently being conducted with the aim of eliminating enough vacant positions to address the decline in funding. Simultaneously, NMSU is experiencing declines in sponsored research activity especially as a result of federal government reductions in the Departments of Defense and Energy. Total funding received in 1995-96 was only $59 million, down from about $88 million in each of the two previous years. The 1995-96 decline was largest (absolutely and in percentage terms) in PSL and Engineering.

New Mexico State University has a tradition of decentralized administration and many see the "bottom-up" approach to planning as a strength of the campus. One manifestation of decentralization in the research area is the return of the majority of overhead funds to the colleges which generated them through their sponsored research endeavors. Decentralization has provided the flexibility for individual colleges and departments to pursue areas of strength and to respond to changing research opportunities and trends in their fields. It also has placed the locus of decision-making as close to the individual researcher as possible.

The arrival of a new university president in the fall of 1995 and concerns about the changing environment have resulted in a proposal for a strategic planning process which is now in the early stages of implementation.

Recommendations

• The development of a small number of general themes in future strategic planning initiatives could be beneficial to both the teaching and research activities of the university. The themes should articulate existing themes at the department and college levels and focus on the strengths of the institution in areas such as border issues and arid lands. The themes could be used to clarify the university's identity to its various constituencies and so could contribute to delineating the general role of the university in serving the public and the more specific contributions that the university can make to industry and government agencies interested in the university's research capabilities. However, care should be exercised so that the existing advantages associated with decentralization are not significantly reduced. Partnerships with stakeholders typically start at the level of the individual researcher and the department and researchers will need the flexibility to respond to changing opportunities.

• University-wide strategic planning should also be a mechanism for generating more data about the internal workings of the university and its environment. These data include the sources of support for various types of research, the uses of research funds in providing infrastructure directly or indirectly, the success of our graduates in finding employment in areas related to their education, the economic and social impact of the university on the state and local community and the causes of declining enrollments.

Financial resources at NMSU have been and continue to be limited. The situation is currently aggravated by declining enrollments which are reducing funding from tuition and from the legislature. The result is insufficient support of the library, computer and laboratory facilities. In addition, the university faces increasing burdens associated with accountability requirements and added responsibilities arising from regulations imposed by the state and federal governments and by funding agencies.

NMSU has responded to these challenges by encouraging researchers in their efforts to obtain external funding, including funding from non-traditional sources, and by seeking to minimize the impact of regulations on individual researchers. With respect to the former goal, the Office of Sponsored Programs and individual research centers regularly communicate with faculty concerning the availability of grants and several of the colleges conduct grant preparation seminars.

In response to the requirements for compliance with cost accounting standards (CAS), a committee of representatives of research entities on the campus met for about a year to discuss practices with respect to estimating costs and the treatment of direct and indirect costs. Then an effort was made to describe uniform procedures that would minimize the costs of compliance. More recently, the Office of Sponsored Programs has worked with research centers to address the problem of two or more units expending resources in the preparation of proposals where only one could be submitted to a sponsoring agency.

Recommendations

• Universities should work with funding agencies to reduce the costs of applying for funding. For example, the use of pre-proposals should be encouraged.

• In developing internal procedures associated with accountability and compliance with regulations, universities should seek to minimize the burdens placed on the individual researcher.

• Universities should encourage and support interactions between faculty and funding agencies, for example, via participation on proposal review panels.

While in the short run, research and teaching place conflicting demands on a faculty member's time, research is a fundamental component of the university's mission and in many ways it is complementary with the role of the university in education. Lack of public awareness of this relationship is a particular source of stress. The public is often not aware that research grants and contracts provide equipment, employment and "hands-on" learning for students, both graduate and undergraduate. Research, in fact, is a crucial component of graduate education. The research endeavor also supplies the university with better laboratories and equipment than it otherwise might have and produces expertise in the faculty, without which the educational enterprise would suffer. Active researchers are necessarily current in the knowledge of their fields, are aware of current problems and unanswered questions in their areas, and can bring the excitement of discovery to the classroom. As such, they are better prepared teachers. With the growing technological needs of employers and competition in the job market, it is increasingly necessary to have active researchers in the classroom. Research also makes faculty more aware of the areas of study most likely to provide the knowledge and skills sought by employers.

Faculty are facing increasingly high expectations with respect to their teaching performance as well as research and service. The rise in expectations is accompanied by increasingly complex classroom guidelines and regulations concerning syllabi, formal notifications of classroom rules and procedures, academic dishonesty policies, and requirements for accreditation and performance evaluation. Finally many students are ill prepared in terms of basic skills and analytical tools and they lack an understanding of the nature of a university, university level education and their own role in achieving academic success.

Recommendations

• Because of increasing demands with respect to quality teaching, recognition of teaching excellence is important and new tenure track faculty need to be aware of the weights given to teaching as well as research in promotion and tenure decisions.

• Universities should act to improve the public image of research by emphasizing the direct relationship between research and the educational mission of the university. This can be accomplished by improving the faculty and staff's own knowledge of research contributions and improving the existing university communications network. Successful examples of communications concerning research include the "Eye on Research" column in the local newspaper. The types of information to be conveyed to the public include examples of existing university research and public service activities that focus on improving education at the elementary and secondary levels and on making the resources of the university available to the public schools and data on the dollar amounts of wages and the number of students employed on research projects.

• Other recommendations include linking research centers to student employment on the university's home page and improving students' and parents' understanding of the role of faculty and the research mission of the university. The knowledge of our students would be enhanced through an orientation of students to the university which focuses on broad issues in addition to the mechanics of enrolling in courses and locating the library.

In addition to its complementarity to the university's education mission, research at New Mexico State University is an economic activity which draws external dollars into a relatively low income state and it generates long term (and sometimes short term) benefits for society both in New Mexico and in the larger world. By inviting community participation in presentations by distinguished lecturers and activities such as those at the campus observatory, NMSU has successfully built relationships with the immediate community. In addition, the Colleges of Agriculture and Home Economics and Education offer useful models of continuous dialogue with major stakeholders throughout New Mexico, the former through Cooperative Extension and advisory boards and the latter through its on-going relationships with school districts.

Recommendations

• Universities should increase public awareness of the role of research in economic development. Specifically, research funding is a source of summer pay for faculty as well as graduate and undergraduate students who live in the area. It generates demand for goods and services to support research and so provides a boost to the local economy. In addition, quality research programs are known to attract technology industries in similar areas around the country.

• Universities should ensure that their various constituencies are supportive of research by increasing awareness of the social, environmental and cultural benefits of research, including research in the humanities. This can be accomplished by educating the public about the applied nature of much of the research conducted using means such as the "Eye on Research" column and about the necessity for basic research, conducted initially for its own sake but ultimately for purposes that we can only begin to guess at now. The best advocates of the university's research role should be the faculty and staff themselves. However, to be good advocates the faculty must be well informed about the university's contributions not just in their own areas of expertise but throughout the campus. Some colleges make a concerted effort to convert every published academic article into a press release, informing the public as to the implications of the research for their own lives. This is an approach which assumes that no topic is so complicated that it can not be explained on some level to the nonspecialist.

• Universities should make available via a web page, a telephone number and a walk-in location, information about the expertise available within the university. This location should maintain a database of faculty with expertise in various areas and the willingness to share that expertise with the broader community. Also included should be a listing of experts available as consultants, expert witnesses, etc., and a speakers bureau list with topics. The intent of this recommendation is to share the university's talents with the public in a single location so that callers are not sent endlessly from place to place. This will require a commitment of resources to ensure that information is up-to-date and to follow-up to verify that questions have been answered.

• Universities should become more visibly involved in the local community with the goal of creating a better "town and gown" relationship. This may involve more active participation in the community as well as more recognition of the existing involvement of faculty and staff.

Community is a major theme of this report -- building an identifiable community of scholars on campus and communicating the mission of that community to the various stakeholders in the process. As such many of the foregoing recommendations are related to the subject of community.

Recommendations

• Universities should consider supporting more internal seminars and colloquia to encourage interactions among faculty, especially interdisciplinary interactions.

• Periodic mailings to faculty about ongoing and proposed research projects should continue and could be made more effective with a more advanced system of intracampus communication via the world wide web.