October 9, 2007
Described as early as 1813 as a place "where all the useful sciences should be taught," U.Va. is recommitting itself to science as it rounds out its second century. A Commission on the Future of the University has identified science and technology (among other areas -- the Commission's recommendations address what is learned and taught broadly) for attention now to build strength and further distinguish U.Va. The core reasons: determination to push forward the frontiers of knowledge in research that contributes to Virginia's and the nation's vitality, to use scarce resources effectively and efficiently, and to adopt the best known practices to deliver to students at all levels education and training second to none.
Last week, the Board of Visitors put its weight behind a comprehensive approach to enhancing the sciences when it approved three major research buildings for the sciences -- one for Medicine, one for Engineering, and one for the sciences in the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Together, these buildings will add more than 195,000 square feet of research space to the already planned Engineering and Medical space, bringing the total capacity now being designed or built to some 300,000 square feet.
Buildings for research pose complex challenges. Academic construction can be painfully slow. One new building now under construction (MR 6, now named the Carter-Harrison Building, for cancer, study of the immune system, and infectious diseases) was first approved in 1999. Another (480 Ray C. Hunt Drive, first conceived as a model site for flexible research uses, since redesigned for specific research uses) was first proposed in 2002. Even without design changes during construction, unexpected construction delays, and additions, inflation alone has driven up the cost of both projects.
The new buildings just authorized must move timely and under tighter construction discipline than any projects ever before attempted. Scientists here needed them a decade ago when neither the state nor the University had money for projects of this kind and scale. Accordingly, University planners will work under a tight schedule for design (one year). Rather than beginning from scratch, they will analyze how other universities that have built major facilities in this time have done it, and adopt the most economical and best validated models to deliver these buildings on time and within reasonable cost limits.
That we must move in this direction and do it without mid-course design changes and delays comes as no surprise. Board and faculty leaders have heard advice from consultants and Commission members as we have worked toward a functional plan; from leaders of other universities, our competitors, as recently as Friday afternoon in the Rotunda's Dome Room; and from members of our own science faculty -- all convinced that the next step must include appropriate buildings. The larger commitment involves both faculty stars and significant commitments to buildings for their work. The goal is to cultivate new or additional stars, including many already on our faculties but working in antiquated or too-small laboratories.
Hunter Rawlings III, former president of Cornell University and now a half-year professor of classics here, perhaps said it best on Friday. "The way you bring great scientists and develop great scientists in these very expensive fields is you have to build the buildings for them," Mr. Rawlings said. "That's the only way you're going to be successful."
The conversation about how to accomplish these goals has in some sense gone on here for decades. Serious work toward them began in the late 1990s during the Virginia 2020 planning process. Among other priorities, VA2020 defined the current multi-school initiatives in nanoscale technologies, morphogenesis, and digital technologies. Since about 1998, we have explored constructing adaptive research and technology buildings -- structures designed to change as science needs change. In fact, we received state authorization to begin planning one such building (MR6) in 1999. Five years later, the Board of Visitors launched a program to attract world-class or "star" scientists who would have the capacity to distinguish U.Va. in the sciences and to accelerate achievement in our science programs.
These two initiatives -- hiring and cultivating extraordinary scientists and providing efficient research buildings when they are needed -- are the core elements of the plan disclosed to the Board last week. No single strategy meets every need. Adequate support for graduate students, including those not supported by research grants, growth in research sufficient to meet Virginia's and the nation's needs, and careful indexing to other universities' accomplishments, including their rates of growth in sponsored research, are essential if these two core strategies are to support the success to which President Rawlings referred.
During four hiring cycles, the "star" hires strategy (i.e., hiring members of the national academies or comparably distinguished scientists) has produced better than solid results. It has also underscored the urgency of the need for more and better research space. With special funding from the Board, we have attracted six extraordinary scientists, each of whom enriches the academic enterprise significantly.
Joseph Campbell in Engineering is an expert in integrated optics. Among other things, his research seeks or has generated more efficient ways to transfer data over fiber-optic networks for telephones, advances in night-vision technology, and development of tiny biological sensors that can monitor the presence of bioterrorism substances such as anthrax.
Stephen Rich in Public Health Sciences (Medicine) studies, among other topics, genetic predispositions to diabetes and its complications, with the ultimate purpose of preventing the disease.
John Yates in Chemistry (College and Graduate School) is one of the top surface chemists in the world. He studies global warming, solar cells, and chemical detectors.
Mark Yeager in Physiology (Medicine) studies the structural biology of membrane proteins with the goal of enabling researchers to see the structure of cell membranes and to develop drugs to fit specific structures.
Bernard and Christine Thisse in Cell Biology (Medicine), developmental biologists and geneticists who pioneered analysis of the genome of the zebrafish, apply their earlier work to understanding human birth defects, the formation of organs, and regenerative medicine.
Professors Campbell, Rich, Yeager, Yates, and the Thisses have relocated research groups and laboratories as they came here, or are doing that now. Together, they are expected to bring some $40 million in research funding new to us during the next three years. By any measure, growth of this kind matters to U.Va. and to Virginia.
The problem posed to the Board last week was how to grow more rapidly than we have -- to grow as rapidly as the best of our peer universities do, and particularly how to build and support both stars from other research centers and stars (at all academic levels and across all of the disciplines) who are already here. Put simply, we can recruit stars if we succeed in designing and building the facilities they need to maintain pace with competing universities and to achieve excellence in their work. The same strategy strengthens faculty members who are already here.
No one strategy (i.e., hire stars, build flexible and adaptive buildings, support graduate students) meets every need. Together, however, multiple strategies, including buildings that reach completion on time and within authorized prices and a comprehensive star strategy, can: that is the message from other universities that have done it. Hiring and cultivating stars will add value to any discipline. This is what all effective deans and department chairs strive to do. Delayed or missing facilities undercut excellence, especially so when so many competing universities deliver them on time.
Our options are changing now. What was impossible (or seemed so) in earlier years is possible now -- 2007 and 1999 or 2002 or 2004 are different eras so far as growing serious science is concerned. Prior to the Restructuring in 2005 and 2006, we lacked the state support and internal financial clout to build science facilities competitive with those built at Yale, Michigan, Berkeley, and, as we heard on Friday, at UNC-Chapel Hill and at Cornell during the last three to five years. Between Restructuring and our hard-won AAA bond ratings, we have financial options now (institutional bonding, strategic use of overheads intended for facilities, philanthropic giving, other generated income that is not restricted in use) that either did not exist previously or required complex, slow approvals. The years since the late 1990s have seen major advances in the design and pace of science construction, especially in the kinds of facilities that faculty members and students need for science in the College of Arts and Sciences, in Engineering, and in the basic sciences that support Medicine.
Our new provost, Dr. Tim Garson, is charged with moving us to the next level and revamping our plans to make them sufficiently, which is to say, realistically, comprehensive. At the same time, he and Leonard Sandridge are close to completing the work of the Planning Commission created last winter to complete the products of the Board of Visitors' Special Committee on Planning, chaired by John Wynne, the vice rector.
Political scientists and historians sometimes identify destiny moments when persons or institutions choose either to move dramatically forward or accept decline. People here have never accepted mediocrity as a standard. In good times and bad, we have worked together to achieve excellence despite financial constraints, sometimes ambivalent state support and appropriations, and the challenges of two decades of the most dynamic progress made in modern times in science. Broadening the plan; acknowledging that no one strategy is complete and sufficient to address hard and large problems; discovering better, timely ways to design and build superb buildings -- these are building blocks for the visions of faculty members who have sat together to strategize on how best to choose leaders, of the Board members and administrators and state officials who found how to make Restructuring a reality, and ultimately of our founder. Jefferson believed that all learning, all science, is useful. Reread the summary above of the work now done here by Professors Campbell, Rich, Yates, Yeager, and the Thisses. If anyone still doubts that science is useful, indeed essential, their work must surely change that view. Then imagine a university addressing "all the useful sciences," for our time and for the future. The work will be hard and demanding. The possibilities inspire awe.
John T. Casteen III