With further proposed cuts to higher education for 2010, the U’s ability to receive outside funding for research will suffer.
The fear is that without faculty members’ ability to receive these outside research grants, they will leave the U for another institution that has more stable funding, depriving the U of faculty to teach classes and fund the science and health science colleges, which are largely supported by outside research funding.
The Utah Legislature cut the U’s budget by 9 percent during the last session, and this year, without President Barack Obama’s one-time stimulus money to buffer the damage, the legislature might have to cut the U’s budget by as much as 17 percent.
Although it will not directly affect research funding, further cuts will impair the U’s ability to keep faculty to do research, said Paul Brinkman, vice president of academic affairs. Every year, other universities try to lure professors away from the U, and it is the responsibility of the U to have the capability to keep them here, he said.
“I can name off the top of my head five professors…that if we lose those five professors over the course of their careers, we will lose a quarter of a billion dollars of research funding brought into this state,” said U President Michael Young in an interview last month with Jeff Robinson with KCPW about the state budget cuts for 2010.
A recent study looked into a university’s output of peer-reviewed articles and how often the professors from that institution are cited in other papers. The study ranked the U 79th in the world out of at least 40,000, Young said in the KCPW interview. It is that quality of research and colleges at the U that attract other professors, he said.
Losing research funding and the faculty that brings in that funding also decreases the quality of education the U can provide, Young told KCPW.
Under the proposed 17 percent budget cut, it will become more difficult for departments to hold on to faculty members and staff. The U College of Science is one of the best in the world, and it is an essential part of research, bringing in millions of dollars every year, Young told KCPW. With this next round of cuts, the college will lose $1 million from its budget. It will have to fire every lab technician, so no one will be running the lab, and people will not be around for post-doctoral work and to help the researchers. The U will not have the necessary resources to do the research, thus losing funding.
“Just to give you an example of the consequences of that, that then makes it very difficult for those professors to be here,” Young told KCPW.
The budget cuts will affect the different departments in various ways. The School of Medicine has 23 separate departments, and it is up to the deans and chairs of those departments to handle the budgets for each, said Chris Nelson, spokesman for U health sciences. To his knowledge, with the cuts from the 2009-10 fiscal year, the School of Medicine has not had to let any research faculty members go, mainly because its funding usually comes from outside federal sources, such as the National Institutes of Health.
The U recently received $28 million in federal stimulus funding for 95 of 115 research projects that were proposed. There is also $15 million to $30 million in research funding the U receives from the Department of Energy, Young told KCPW. That money will not only pay the salaries for the researchers, but it will also return money to the state in the form of income taxes, he said.
As for what the future holds for the U, Brinkman and other school officials can only wait until the legislative session is over to know for sure what will happen.
“I wish I knew,” Brinkman said. “I’m not sure anyone does. We don’t know what is coming. We just have to watch as the future unfolds.”