From the Deseret News article Prophetic guidance, emphasis on students is more important for BYU than lofty new research status. As the title states, BYU will soon join UofU and Utah State as an R1 research university, but the focus will remain on the students. From the article:
BYU appears poised to become an R-1 research school, but Elder Ronald A. Rasband tells the annual University Conference that President Russell M. Nelson’s leadership is the ‘strategic asset’ that ‘shapes and strengthens this university’
For the first time, Brigham Young University is now classified as a top American research institution, but it did not seek the designation and it is neither the school’s mission nor its biggest advantage, leaders said Monday during the annual University Conference on the campus in Provo, Utah.
BYU’s biggest advantage is the leadership of the chairman of the BYU Board of Trustees, President Russell M. Nelson, the prophet and president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said Elder Ronald A. Rasband, a member of the board’s executive committee and is a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.
I assume the new ranking will give an increased status to my alma mater. But I really don't know since most of my professional and academic career has been in Utah. Perhaps some of our well-traveled Cassius University faculty could weigh in on this.
I don't know who assigns these categories or how they do it. In practice there are two big issues affecting how much research one can do at a university.
The first is teaching load. How much do you have to teach? Having to do twelve hours per week of lecturing amounts to teaching full-time, because preparing lectures, setting papers or exercises, and grading will multiply class time by enough of a factor that you will really be busy. Only if you have been giving the same four courses many times year after year, and are demotivated enough to just repeat them all mindlessly, will you get through a four-course load each semester with any time to spare.
Senior faculty at MIT and Harvard, in contrast, normally teach just one course per semester, with three hours of lecture time in total each week. That still multiplies up to maybe more like nine or twelve hours of work on the course each week, if they're making effort to teach the course well. And they have a continuing motivation to do that, because of the second factor.
The second big factor is the kind of doctoral students and post-docs you can attract to your research group. You may get one or two students who are in grad school mainly to delay facing the job market and who have to be pushed along every week, or you may have a powerhouse team of young geniuses with scholarships to whom you assign questions once a month and they come back to tell you that your idea turned out not to work—and explain to you the idea that did. With a team like that, a bit of expert guidance from the supervisor can be a powerful multiplier, but a student team like that would probably be impressively productive even with a mere figurehead nominally leading the team. Students like that often go to places like MIT or Harvard, and once there, they tend to join the groups of the professors who give the most interesting lectures.
If an institution is producing enough significant research to get a reputation for that, then it will gradually attract the kind of students, and new faculty, who will sustain and enhance its research productivity. It can be hard to get there, though. Competition for talent is fierce.
The teaching load is more controllable. If you give your faculty more time for research, they can think and write—and submit grant proposals. If each professor is doing a lot less teaching, though, you've got to pay a lot more staff to run your undergrad program. If you skimp by making inexpensive grad students and adjuncts teach a lot of your undergrads, to free up professors for research, these junior lecturers are going to be exhausted because it takes a new lecturer far more time to prepare a class than an experienced lecturer needs, and even the undergrads will start to notice that they're not getting quite the level of enlightenment out of their lectures that they expected when they paid their tuition fees.
If they can solve the age-old problem of turning matter into Mormonism, it will be worth the lessened emphasis on Ensign Peak Investments with tithing funds in the short run.
The Spaceship Nauvoo must not be limited in its steeple size!
American Council on Education wrote:New, clear R1 threshold: The R1 methodology has changed significantly over time, with the 2005 update adding a 10-metric formula that involved a normative, relative, and complicated process that left an unclear line between the R1 and R2 designations. This methodology also put institutions in competition with one another to gain entrance into an R1 designation that was capped at a certain number. In the 2025 Carnegie Classifications, the updated methodology will use a clear threshold to define the highest research designation: $50 million in total research spending and 70 research doctorates. In the new methodology, any institution that meets the threshold will be classified as R1: Very High Research Spending and Doctorate Production. The R2 threshold, with that classification now called “High Research Spending and Doctorate Production,” will not change from the current level of $5 million in research spending and 20 research doctorates.
American Council on Education wrote:New, clear R1 threshold: The R1 methodology has changed significantly over time, with the 2005 update adding a 10-metric formula that involved a normative, relative, and complicated process that left an unclear line between the R1 and R2 designations. This methodology also put institutions in competition with one another to gain entrance into an R1 designation that was capped at a certain number. In the 2025 Carnegie Classifications, the updated methodology will use a clear threshold to define the highest research designation: $50 million in total research spending and 70 research doctorates. In the new methodology, any institution that meets the threshold will be classified as R1: Very High Research Spending and Doctorate Production. The R2 threshold, with that classification now called “High Research Spending and Doctorate Production,” will not change from the current level of $5 million in research spending and 20 research doctorates.
If those are the criteria then I reckon all German universities must be R1 by considerable margins, like factors of two to four or more. It’s a different system here.
If those are the criteria then I reckon all German universities must be R1 by considerable margins, like factors of two to four or more. It’s a different system here.
Yeah, Germany believes in education, whereas the US can't make up its mind.
As an R1 research institute, one can only imaging some of the most rigorous studies that will be conducted:
1) Happiness and spiritual strength with using the right hand vs left hand to take the sacrament.
2) The use of tobacco to heal wounds in cattle
3) Does adding zucchini to baked foods increase flavor?
4) How paying tithing is bringing Africa out of poverty.
5) Increasing satisfaction while wearing garments during intimacy.
6) Discovering Lamanite DNA in the Middle East
7) Green Tea and how all who drink it will die
