Centers and Institutes in the Research University

Abstract

Introduction In recent years, and have played an increasingly important role in the conduct of at major universities. They have served as an important organizational locus for attracting funding from federal, state, industrial, and nonprofit foundation sources of support. The literature that addresses the formation, organization, roles, and performance of and has often focused on the problems in managing these and ho they have failed live up their potential [8]. University-based and have been criticized as failing foster interdisciplinary cooperation [4, 8, 11], of lacking visibility [9], and of falling to harness the intellectual potential of university [8, p. 4] On the other hand, Geiger has argued that and have been the decisive factor in the postwar expansion of the university system [7 p. 3] and have taken a leading role in developing big science projects. The purpose of this article is review the role of and within major universities. We will first present the major issues and controversies that these present, then discuss the results of survey concerning and at the fastest-growing universities, and finally offer conclusions and recommendations on how and can best be used promote the mission of the university. Definitions of Centers and Institutes Research and institutes, or what are commonly referred in the literature as organized units (ORUs) [5, 7, 8, 16] (a term which we believe carries less meaning university faculty and administrators than research centers), comprise an extremely broad array of academic organizational entities. The Research Centers Directory [2] lists more than ten thousand centers, most of which are university-based. Large universities often have more than sixty such centers; some have as many as two hundred [2, 8]. The specific nomenclature and defining characteristics of and vary considerably across universities. Although Geiger [7] characterizes institutes as being ideally further from academic departments than centers in terms of a continuum of funders' programmatic interests, in our experience universities do not consistently distinguish between these two terms. For the purposes here, centers and institutes will be used interchangeably. The only characteristic that seems fairly consistent across universities is tha and have as their primary mission the conduct of research. Beyond this simplistic generalization, they vary enormously across a number of dimensions, some of which include: * size of external support and staff; * the proportion of faculty versus professional staff researchers; * level of separation from academic departments; * level of integration with the university; * level of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary focus; * relative emphasis on applied research. At one end of the spectrum are the small or that essentially focus on a faculty member's or a department's special interests. These may or may not have external funding, may have been formed on the basis of a single grant, may operate out of a faculty member's office, usually have no permanent staff, and may rely solely on graduate assistants for the conduct of research. The major defining factors for these types of are official recognition from the university or from the department; perhaps, but not necessarily, a separate budget; a sign on the office; and letterhead. These or are frequently unknown other faculty and academic administrators and sometimes only exist in the minds of the faculty members. Though they may b listed among the more than ten thousand entries in the Research Centers Directory [2], they rarely have any impact on an institution or discipline, and for our purposes here these types of will not be discussed. …