The meetings Thursday were the last in a series of six town hall meetings meant to provide IU faculty, staff and students a voice in the selection of associate vice president and vice provost for research, according to the website of the executive vice president for University Academic Affairs.
These meetings introduced faculty to Wade. Meetings last Wednesday and Monday introduced faculty to Michael McGinnis and David Reingold, respectively.
The selected candidate will be responsible for overseeing current internal funding programs, developing new external funding sources, overseeing current research development services and fostering high quality research.
Wade has served as interim associate vice president and vice provost for research since Sarita Soni retired from the position in May.
“My vision for (the office of the vice provost for research) starts with an understanding of what it takes to have a long and satisfying and highly productive and successful career as a scholar,” Wade said.
To have such a career, he added, one must compete for national resources, whether they’re from the government, foundations or corporations.
Faculty members wary of competing for national resources miss out, not only on opportunities for national funding, but also on opportunities for national recognition and induction into national organizations.
Both IU’s Strategic Plan and IU-Bloomington’s Strategic Plan encourage faculty to identify multiple grand challenges and major, widespread problems that are best identified and tackled by multidisciplinary teams of researchers during the next few years.
Wade was asked about his approach to grand challenges.
“What separates a grand challenge from what you may call the daily life of a scholar is that it has a conspicuous public good or social good component to solve one of society’s problems,” he said.
Funding sources, either the government, foundations or corporations, already look for a public good or social good component in research proposals, Wade said. Grand challenge proposals, therefore, do not differ much from typical research proposals, Wade said.
Though Wade said he does not take issue with the entire grand challenges portions of the strategic plans, he said he does take issue with the collaborative components of them.
The grand challenges portions of the strategic plans encourage faculty to work with partners outside of the IU community. Wade, however, said he fears many of those partners are weak.
“It looks like, ‘I’ve got one part of the car over here and another over here and, maybe, by putting the parts of the car together, I will at least get a car that will get me back and forth to work,’” he said. “That’s not synergy. That’s not getting more than the sum of its parts. That’s actually getting less than the sum of its parts.”
Wade said he proposes that staff from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research survey faculty about their ideas for research, as well as the progress they’ve already made on their ideas, and then bundle related ideas together, calling the bundle a grand challenge.
“I think that groups come up with ideas that are really grand within their discipline or within disciplines near their discipline,” he said. “But to get a real grand challenge that gets the whole campus or larger groups on the campus together, I think you really need somebody looking at a whole bunch of proposals and bundling them together.”
Wade also responded to faculty who raised concerns of grand challenges’ excessive focus on natural and mathematical sciences and lack of focus on the arts and ?humanities.
“I think if you couple people in arts and humanities with scientists, that gives the scientists an edge in their competition for resources,” he said.
