Director INSIGHTS: A Message from Elena Irwin

Director INSIGHTS: A Message from Elena Irwin

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November 10, 2020

Recently, a group of us wrapped up a $20 million NSF proposal that includes 40 researchers and educators from Ohio State, nine other universities and 25 community partners. If funded, we would study Great Lakes water pollution through a coupled human-natural systems lens with a focus on environmental justice and broadening the participation from impacted communities.

Proposals like this definitely take a village. They also require the PI/co-PIs to step outside their disciplinary areas of expertise to integrate all the pieces. How well-equipped are we as faculty and Ohio State as an institution to pursue large, complex, highly interdisciplinary proposals? It depends. In some parts of the university, large proposals with multiple partners are not uncommon and a $20 million proposal is even modest. For many faculty, however, incentives to engage in large-scale interdisciplinary proposals are woefully lacking.

Faculty are expected to teach and do research. In some cases, this requires substantial external funds (support for instrumentation and lab personnel), and here incentives are reasonably well-aligned. In many other disciplines, one can do meaningful, impactful research without the headache of a large grant or any grant. Smaller grants require less time and less coordination with others and often bring in a commensurate level of resources for an individual PI with a higher likelihood of funding. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. economist to do the cost-benefit analysis that the extra headaches of a large, complex grant proposal simply aren’t worth it.

The three biggest barriers to faculty pursuing these larger opportunities are lack of support, time and disciplinary alignment. The first two can be addressed with more resources. The third requires culture change.

Professional support for proposal development is critical and extends well beyond someone to collect biosketches (as critical as that indeed is). There is an art to writing a compelling project management plan. To develop a budget for a large proposal is daunting. The expertise that is needed to write a successful proposal often includes other aspects, including workforce development and engaging underrepresented groups. With investments by the Office of Research, colleges, centers and even some departments, Ohio State has come a long way toward providing this support, but it is uneven across units and more is needed; we need nothing short of a small army of proposal development specialists.

Addressing the second barrier, lack of time, is seemingly straightforward. “Buying time” well-ahead of deadlines so that PIs can thoughtfully lead the development of these large-scale proposals is ideal. But getting busy faculty to prioritize their time for proposal development when the deadline is not imminent is a different matter. Admittedly, many of us could use time management coaching on how to do this better.

The biggest hurdle, by far, is lack of disciplinary alignment. No investments of support or time will yield the dividends sought without addressing this challenge. Academic units, journals and professional associations reinforce a rewards structure that strongly favors disciplinary contributions in proven journals over interdisciplinary proposals and projects. Senior colleagues undervalue non-traditional contributions of junior faculty — including publications outside the “right” journals and collaborations with community stakeholders that aren’t “scholarly enough.” Stepping off this well-worn path may mean eschewing one’s own colleagues and undermining disciplinary-based networks critical for promotion and tenure and successful placement of graduate students. For most, the message is clear: Focus on disciplinary contributions and minimize riskier investments of time and effort, including involvement in large interdisciplinary projects that have a low probability of being funded, and if funded, will yield uncertain benefits in disciplinary success.  

Faculty who engage in interdisciplinary work typically do so only after tenure and may even wait until they are promoted to full professor. When I asked a colleague why he decided to step into interdisciplinary research after a strong career as an applied economist, he said, “I wanted to be an expert in a topic. As soon as I chose a topic first rather than my discipline first, I entered a much larger interdisciplinary world.”

This comment is revealing. How many faculty would choose topic first if the risks and rewards to doing so were similar to those associated with choosing discipline first?

Through the Discovery Themes Initiative, Ohio State made an enormous investment in hiring over 170 new interdisciplinary faculty. We’ve sparked the cultural change that is needed, but there is much more to do. But this is not only the work of administrators — it is the work of all of us.

Look around you, your department, your college, your discipline. Where are there opportunities for you to broaden your definition of excellence to include interdisciplinary collaborations, journal publications outside your discipline, community engagement? How can you support a junior colleague who may be pursuing scholarship outside the narrow confines of your discipline? How can you advocate for broadening participation in your discipline by moving away from a culture of exclusion to inclusion? 

By broadening our academic norms, we will not only change the incentives that are needed to encourage faculty to take on large, interdisciplinary grant proposals, we will transform the culture of Ohio State — to be the progressive, out-of-the-box kind of place that thrives on diversity of scholarship, thought and people. With COVID-19 upending the basic ways in which we teach and interact, an election that has given us the first woman and woman of color as our vice president, social mandates for dismantling systematic racism and addressing climate change, and a new Ohio State president who is charting an ambitious path that will require new ways of doing things, we can’t afford to let this moment pass. Now is the time.

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