coe-staff: COE research highlighted in Register Guard article

[Leslie D Leve]

Hello COE Faculty and Staff:

I wanted to share a link to a front page story in Sunday’s Register Guard that highlights our College of Education. The article discusses the future of federal funding, and Dean Kamphaus and others interviewed for the article make it clear how important the COE is to the UO’s research infrastructure, and how, historically, support for research and development has been a bipartisan issue. Here’s a quote from the article:

"Today, faculty in the UO’s College of Education bring in the most federal dollars of any unit on campus — amounting to 36 percent of the UO’s annual federal award.”

Kudos to our entire faculty and staff for working together to bringing this prestige to the UO.

You can read the full Register Guard  story by clicking this link, http://registerguard.com/rg/news/local/35060797-75/university-of-oregons-federal-research-funding-in-doubt.html.csp  or by scrolling through the text below.

Best,
Leslie


***********
Leslie Leve, PhD
Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development
College of Education
Associate Director, Prevention Science Institute
University of Oregon

Phone: 541-346-9601
Web: https://education.uoregon.edu/users/leslie-leve

[Macintosh HD:Users:tjordan:Documents:current-jobs:__UO branding main:__UO Brand Elements Jun15:UO Business Papers:Electronic letterhead:UO Secondary Sig LH:UO Digital LH - COE:COE-3435-CGY11-4C.png]


University of Oregon’s federal research funding in doubt
Trump’s Cabinet picks and unscientific claims concern UO researchers; the school could lose as much as $100 million a year from the federal government

By Diane Dietz<mailto:DIANE.DIETZ%40REGISTERGUARD.COM>

The Register-Guard

Dec 18, 2016

The University of Oregon is awaiting the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump in the new year with a disconcerting level of uncertainty about his plans for federal funding of research.

The UO relies on about $100 million a year in federal grants out of $700 million in total annual revenues.

The money from federal agencies, including the U.S. departments of Education and Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation, mostly goes toward paying UO research staff members’ salaries.

Trump is hard to read when it comes to science. On the campaign trail, he repeatedly said the idea of climate change is a hoax and childhood vaccinations cause autism.

“Those are clearly statements that are not based on the best available science and what we would call the most likely factual information,” said David Conover, the UO vice president for research and innovation.

But Trump revealed very little about his plans for continuing, cutting or increasing federally funded research.

“There is a lot we don’t know right now,” said Betsy Boyd, who tracks federal affairs for the university. “There’s a lot to learn in the opening months of the administration.”

Some campus constituents hope Trump didn’t believe some of the claims he made during his presidential campaign — for example, about climate change and vaccines.

Others hope Washington’s inertia will blunt the effects of the president-elect’s decisions, should they hurt higher education.

“It is a more anxious time than usual in the college and around the campus,” said Randy Kamphaus, dean of the College of Education. “The anxiety is rooted in a great extent to the unknown. It generates a lot of worry.”

The UO is engaged in a lot of mostly federally funded science: 989 ongoing research grants involving 373 UO researchers.

The researchers are examining everything from quantum simulations of molecular networks to Spanish Civil War-era women activists to “bio-inspired” retinal implants, according to university documents.

The planned $1 billion Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact is expected to bring 30 additional scientists to the University of Oregon during the next 10 years. Some of a $500 million grant from Phil and Penny Knight would pay the scientists’ salaries, but the university is counting on the scientists snagging federal grants to pay their research teams and fund their experiments.

Today, faculty in the UO’s College of Education bring in the most federal dollars of any unit on campus — amounting to 36 percent of the UO’s annual federal award. So Trump’s suggestion of dismantling the U.S. Department of Education is “very problematic,” UO President Michael Schill warned at a recent Board of Trustees meeting.

“If you get rid of the Department of Education and those funding resources, that’s going to really hurt research at the university,” he said.

Federal agency budgets won’t change immediately. Congress passed a continuing resolution to keep the federal government operating at 2016 levels through April 2017. (The fiscal year normally would have ended on Sept. 30.)

That means it will be months before Trump’s budget priorities emerge, Boyd said.

Trump nominated Michigan philanthropist Betsy DeVos to be secretary of education. She’s a longtime activist on school choice, pushing for vouchers and charter schools at the lower grades, but it’s unclear what she’d have in mind for public colleges and universities — except for a general belief in reducing the federal government’s role in education.

Often it’s the undersecretary of education who takes the lead on higher education, and the undersecretary has not been named.

“We’ll have to wait and see what they actually are proposing,” Boyd said. “It’s a very large agency, and I would suspect there are large pieces of that agency that have bipartisan support. In practice, (dismantling) would have more to do with a surgical strike to certain parts of the agency rather than the entire department.”

Other areas of the federal research budget also may be upended. Trump nominated former Texas Gov. Rick Perry to be the energy secretary. The Trump transition team asked Department of Energy employees to disclose on a questionnaire their ties to climate change research. Some researchers were so spooked by the Trump team’s demands that they are downloading historic climate data to private servers to preserve it from Trump appointees, The Washington Post reported.

Federal dollars for researching climate change, sea level rise and ocean acidification are in doubt.

But, Conover points out, Trump met post-election with climate activist and former Vice President Al Gore. Trump also had an eight-minute telephone call with Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates on the subject of clean energy.

“He has already changed somewhat — moderated — that point of view with respect to climate change,” Conover said.

Most of the time, Congress has supported major spending on research. “Whether the president has been a Democrat or a Republican hasn’t really (made) any dramatic difference,” Conover said. “Support for research and development is generally a bipartisan issue.”

Trump may have his best chance to put his stamp on higher education during the 115th Congress, which convenes Jan. 3. Congressional leaders plan to tackle a reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, which will set the blueprint for spending — including education research spending — at colleges and universities for many years. The last reauthorization was in 2008.

The 432-page act also governs student loans and Pell grants, the college scorecard, requirements for federal reporting, accreditation and much more — and it’s all up in the air.

“The direction of federal policy for higher education, including funding of key programs, is highly uncertain,” according to Moody’s 2017 report on the higher education sector.

Universities across the United States fret about what Trump policies could mean to their efforts to recruit students from around the globe — particularly from China. Trump has repeatedly upset the Chinese government by calling for a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods and for speaking on the phone with the president of Taiwan, an apparent swipe at longstanding U.S. policy that does not recognize the island nation.

The biggest share of the UO’s 4,139 international students come from China. They’re important to the university’s financial health because they pay three times the tuition of Oregon residents — and so help to subsidize the education of local students.

The UO would have a lot to lose if China’s Ministry of Education blocked the United States as a study-abroad destination or if students decided that the United States was unfriendly and decided, for example, to study in Canada or Europe.

“The uncertainty around immigration policy changes could also discourage international students from enrolling in U.S. schools, which would place further pressure on net tuition revenue,” Moody’s said.

Congress is likely to defer to the proposals of its new commander-in-chief, Boyd said. But on the other hand, she said, congressmen of both parties build their reputations on certain policies that don’t necessarily change with the White House occupant.

Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate education committee, is a reliable supporter for the federal Pell grant, for example, which provides up to $5,815 annually, mostly to low-income students. “The stability in his role has been helpful,” Boyd said.

“The legislative process is all about checks and balances, slowing things down,” Boyd said. “At the risk of sounding like a -Pollyanna, the fact that the process is designed for multiple levels of review does mean that as the administration gets settled and priorities become known, there are going to be multiple opportunities for people and institutions to weigh in — at least as it relates to budgets and policies and where the underlying reason for the policy exists in law.

“I do think it’s important to take this one day at a time. We want to be prepared, but we don’t want to get ahead of the facts,” she said.

Kamphaus said he’s been reconnoitering with education deans from across the country and has heard assessments from Washington insiders.

“We should probably not anticipate any increases in education research funding, but some of the dire predications of a major drop in major research funding are probably equally unlikely,” is what Kamphaus has gleaned from the discussions.

“Hopefully,” he said. “it will be an uninteresting year.”



UO’s federal revenue sources

Ninety percent of the university’s research is paid for by the federal government. Here are the federal agencies that provide about $100 million a year to UO projects:

Department of Education: 36 percent of funding

Department of Health and Human Services: 34 percent

National Science Foundation: 17 percent

Department of Energy: 6 percent

Other: 7 percent

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