Managing University Research: Personnel and Organizational Policies

The terms “research” and “research and development” are used interchangeably in this paper. Any statement applying solely to basic research is identified as such. The explicit definitions are those of NSF and can be found in the data source cited in Table I.

This paper is part of a project supported by Grant No. GS-1059 from the National Science Foundation for the study of labor markets for scientific and academic personnel.

See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 1968 (Washington: U.S. G. P. O.), p. 525. Unless otherwise noted, data in this section are from this source.

National Science Foundation, American Science Manpower, 1966, NSF 68–7.

Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 1968, p. 133.

National Science Foundation, Federal Support to Universities and Colleges, NSF 67–14, pp. 38–39. Clark Kerr reported that federal funds for project research amounted to 20 to 50 percent of total expenditures for all purposes of the twenty leading recipients. The Uses of the University, Harvard, 1963, p. 55.

Ibid., p. 38.

In addition to published material, information on which the following sections are based was obtained from written responses to a series of questions directed to research administrators, supplemented by telephone conversations, and from one-day campus visits to Cornell, Michigan, Rochester, and Stanford. The other universities covered were Columbia, Cal Tech, Chicago, Harvard, Illinois, MIT, Minnesota, Princeton, Wisconsin, Yale, and, of course, Berkeley. Discussion was also held with representatives of various organizations at Berkeley interested in the problems of research and professional personnel.

Quoted in Herbert E. Longnecker, University Faculty Compensation Policies and Practices in the United States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), p. 6.

A classic statement of these changes is to be found in Kerr.

Jacques Barzun stresses this theme in The American University (New York: Harper, 1968).

Harvard figures are from the Report of the Committee on Recruitment and Retention of Faculty, John T. Dunlop, Chairman, May 1, 1968. Princeton figures are from Bowen William G. , The Federal Government and Princeton University, Princeton, January 1962, p. 282.

The clearest exception appears to be Princeton, which maintains the distinction between research staff and faculty, but provides the former with nearly the same perquisites as the latter in what is almost a “separate but equal” approach.

See Kruytbosch C. E. Messinger S. L. , “Unequal Peers,” American Behavioral Scientist (May 1968).

For a similar but more limited view, see Brown J. Douglas , “Academic Administration—An Industrial Relations View,” Labor Law Journal (August 1968). At Berkeley, more than twenty organizations claimed some right of group representation in 1968.