It’s touted as a key component to the state’s economic policy agenda – turning the University of Rhode Island into a first-class research institution. But efforts to add research faculty have been hampered by URI’s limited budget, President Robert L. Carothers said.
The issue came up at the R.I. Economic Policy Council’s quarterly meeting on June 9, as part of a conversation on the council’s 2006 Science and Technology Scorecard. The council has long argued that making URI a top research institution and building partnerships to commercialize URI scientists’ research is crucial to the state’s economic future.
Seifert Systems Invests in Energy Efficiency to Strengthen Operations
For manufacturers, energy is more than just another operating expense. It plays a critical role…
Learn More
But without limited support from the state, Carothers said, URI has to draw most of its income from tuitions, and then focus its money on the courses that draw students to the school.
“Everybody I pull out of the faculty to do research is not teaching a student,” Carothers said. “Teaching students is what generates revenue.”
State Sen. William A. Walaska, D-Warwick, a council member, conceded that it’s difficult to provide the university with the funding necessary to make it highly competitive – particularly this year, when the state faces a large deficit.
“We’re not in a position to pay for new research faculty,” Walaska said. “Some kid from New Jersey is paying for it.”
Supporting the university has become one of the focal points of the state’s initiatives to spur economic development, particularly in the biotechnology sector.
Two years ago – in a move backed by Gov. Donald L. Carcieri and state economic development leaders – Rhode Island voters approved a $50 million bond to help finance a $140-million life sciences facility at URI.
Finding ways to strengthen the university’s research and innovation capabilities was also one of the recommendations of the Governor’s Science and Technology Council.
But despite gains, the university is still working to achieve the prominence that state leaders hope it will. A draft of the council’s new scorecard shows that URI has actually lost ground in terms of science and engineering expenditures, even as Brown University has made gains.
In the 1980s, URI was ranked among the top 100 universities by the National Science Foundation by that measure, but now it sits around 140 in the foundation’s most recent rankings. Once ranked lower than URI, Brown was on the verge of cracking the foundation’s top 100 in the foundation’s most recent rankings.
The success Brown has had in bolstering its research and development programs has yielded more licensing opportunities for the university than URI has, the council noted. While both schools’ licensing revenue has grown since the early 1990s, Brown had more than $3 million in revenue in 2005, while URI had about $1 million in revenue.
The scorecard did show some positive signs for Rhode Island’s research and development economy. Defense Department and university research helped Rhode Island to be ranked among the top 10 states by the NSF for research capacity, with about $3 per worker.
Also, in 2004, Rhode Island universities awarded nearly 3,000 science and technology degrees, better than the national average of slightly more than 2,000 degrees.
However, the scorecard showed that Rhode Island is lagging behind Massachusetts. In 2004 the Bay State was able to generate about $5 per worker in research and development money, and its universities awarded more than 3,500 science or technology degrees.
Gilbane Inc. CEO Paul J. Choquette Jr., who co-chairs the council with the governor, said that becoming more like Massachusetts – which benefits from the presence of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – is crucial to the state’s economic growth.
“One thing that the Economic Policy Council concluded early on was that we wanted [Rhode Island] to be more like Greater Boston and less like the old textile and costume jewelry economic base … that we have had in the past,” Choquette said. “But we’ve got a ways to go to catch Massachusetts.”
