Can UVa compete in research-

Brian McNeill / Charlottesville Daily Progress
Published: December 15, 2007

The price tag of the University of Virginia's ambitions to become a top-ranked research institution may be as high as $2 billion over the next decade.

A major report by the Washington Advisory Group consulting firm found that UVa will have to spend an estimated $1 billion over the next five to seven years to hire rising star faculty researchers in an effort to improve the overall quality of its research.

Doubling that investment over the next 10 years, the consultants concluded, would put UVa on track to outpace competing universities.

"UVa is unusual among American universities in that it has one of the best undergraduate programs in the country and only modest standing as a research university," wrote the consultants. "UVa's [Board of Visitors], administration, and faculty are wisely embarking on a campaign to rectify this situation.

The stated goal is to join the ranks of the top 20 or so universities that excel in both research and education."

The consultants, hired by UVa in January, spent six months reviewing UVa's various departments of engineering, life sciences, medical research and more.

 The firm's final 52-page report, issued internally within UVa in September, lays out 33 recommendations to boost UVa's research standing, one of which suggests eliminating a department.

Though U.S. News & World Report ranked UVa as the nation's 24th best university, UVa's key research indicator - federal research dollars - was ranked No. 47, according to the report.

The university did not place among the top 100 on the Academic Ranking of World Universities in 2006, the report added.

Among the report's conclusions are recommendations that UVa spend more of its endowment on research; single out and focus resources on distinct areas of research - such as radio astronomy and environmental science - that UVa does particularly well; and substantially increase the number of physics, math and biology faculty members.

Dr. Tim Garson, UVa's provost, said the report largely validated the university's own internal long-range plans and will provide input for ongoing future planning.

However, Garson said, any final decisions about how UVa moves forward will be made by the Board of Visitors. Nothing in the consultants' report, he said, is necessarily going to happen.

"You take the entire thing and you digest it," Garson said. "Any input from reasoned people is helpful, but it doesn't mean you have to take it all."

A few of the report's recommendations are controversial. For example, the consultants suggest that UVa seriously consider eliminating its department of civil engineering.

The civil engineering department, they wrote, may no longer be viable. "The problems of CE are severe," they said. "It is too small to be effective. Its largest group, the one on transportation, has only five members. Two of its three research areas have almost no external funding. Left alone, this department will continue to decline and may soon pass the point of no return. We recommend, as mentioned above, that [the School of Engineering and Applied Science] phase CE out altogether."

The chairman of the civil engineering department, Michael J. Demetsky, declined to comment on the consultants' report. However, James Smith, a civil engineering professor of environmental and water resources, said the department is not concerned about its unflattering portrait in the report.

"They looked at a snapshot of a couple years, but that's just not going to give you an accurate picture of what's going on now," Smith said. The civil engineering department, Smith said, has recently hired three new faculty members and is on a better footing than when the consultants wrote the report.

The consultants also identified UVa's department of aerospace engineering as a "troubled department" that needs "early management attention." Half of the aerospace engineering faculty members do not receive research funding, the consultants found.

The department's leadership, meanwhile, appears to be allowing the field to "die by attrition" while undergraduate interest in the major remains fairly strong. "The situation," the consultants wrote, "is messy."

UVa spokeswoman Carol Wood said there are no plans to phase out the civil or aerospace engineering departments.

"It is a consultant's report," she said. "Nothing they recommend will necessarily happen. It's just a set of their recommendations."

The aerospace engineering department, she added, has seen a recent boost from Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's Nov. 20 announcement that Rolls Royce's opening of a new facility in Virginia would be accompanied by expanded aerospace research at UVa.