Rodin sees external research funding rise under tenure

Nearly $275 million may sound inexhaustible, but even a decade ago, when Penn received that amount in external research funding, it was modest compared to what the University's peer institutions had.

Furthermore, before that year, only two grants were available to undergraduates wishing to pursue research -- the Nassau and Rose Funds, both of which were administered by the vice provost for University Life.

But when University President Judith Rodin was officially inaugurated in October of 1994, she said that she wanted to create "a seamless experience between the classroom and the residence, between the playing field and the laboratory."

And that required improving research.

Since then, Penn's sponsored research has more than doubled.

Improvements were already on the horizon when Rodin ascended the presidency.

In 1992, the National Institutes of Health gave the University $90.5 million -- barely placing Penn in the top 10 NIH grant-receiving institutes. But by 1993, that number jumped to $117.6 million -- an increase of 29.9 percent that landed Penn in the top five.

Still, Rodin set increasing research at Penn as a top goal in one of her initial reports, dubbed "Penn Education of the Twenty-First Century." The plan aimed to streamline University resources for professors, provide better facilities for scientists and facilitate undergraduate research endeavors.

Improvements came rapidly.

By February -- barely four months after her official inauguration -- eight new undergraduate research grants were established through a joint effort of the College Alumni Society, the College of Arts and Sciences and various donors.

By 1996, Penn's total grant awards totaled $322.4 million. Two years later, they leapt to $413.1 million. In 2003, that number had grown to $703.5 million, according to Associate Vice President for Finance Andrew Rudczynski.

And Penn's rise in the NIH grants also continued. By 1998, Penn received $201 million from the government organization, making it second only to Johns Hopkins University.

Rodin tried to build on her initial success with the "Agenda for Excellence," the strategic plan implemented in 1996.

It aimed for respectable 2 percent annual research increases -- but in the 10-year period between 1992 and 2002, it has far outperformed this, seeing a 10 percent compounded growth rate, according to Rudczynski.

These research dollars did more than work towards new treatments for cancer and AIDS -- they also raised the prestige of Penn's graduate schools as central research hubs.

In 1993, Penn's medical school was ranked eighth by U.S. News and World Report. Nine years later, it had jumped four slots.

But professors do not see the numbers when conducting their research -- they see a better bureaucracy.

"Research was always highly valued and there was support for it," Geology Professor Hermann Pfefferkorn said. "The quality of the support has increased -- research administration has improved drastically under Rodin."

And while the raw numbers may favor science and engineering departments, humanities professors have also benefited from the extra research dollars. Humanities professors do not need expensive equipment or lab space to conduct research -- they need funded chairs and sabbaticals, English Professor Stuart Curran said.

And while much of Rodin's research initiatives were directed towards professors and research infrastructure, the unveiling of the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships in the fall of 2000 streamlined resources for young scholars, supporting them in their first foray into academic research.

Although research opportunities had existed before Rodin's reign, students often did not consider doing a project, Pfefferkorn said.

But despite the strides that have been made in the last decade, Rodin's research goals have faced some criticism.

Although goals to "increase" and "improve" usually spark school pride, Penn's emphasis on research made some wary.

In 1993, faculty members told the Visiting Committee on Undergraduate Education that professors needed to be more accessible to students and be more effective teachers instead of concentrating exclusively on research.

They criticized the University's tenure and reward system, saying that it exclusively promoted research, leaving good teachers by the promotional wayside.

And numerous controversies have sprung up over the years, challenging Rodin's conception of the role of research at a national institution and throwing Penn into the national spotlight.

Among the first of the crises to arise actually began in the early '80s, when now-Associate Professor Daniel Vining accepted a grant from the Pioneer Foundation. Over the course of a decade, Vining received over $100,000 in funds from the organization.

In 1994, he received a $6,500 grant to study the relationship between intelligence and birth rates among the various ethnic groups in Israel.

Ordinarily, such grants do not attract much attention. But University alumnus Harlan Girard was outraged.

He told the University Board of Trustees that the Pioneer Fund was a white supremacist organization that wished to promote eugenics. In the uproar that ensued, it was discovered that Penn had no ethics test for research sources.

After asking the vice provost for research to investigate the matter, Rodin defended the University's refusal to implement ethics tests.

"It is very hard to define a threshold of ethics that would be uniform across a variety of research projects," she told The Daily Pennsylvanian in 1994.

Despite the lack of formal ethics tests, Vining later said that he would refuse future Pioneer grants and "wished he had nothing to do with it."

But perhaps the most devastating crisis to strike the University's research system in recent years was the case of Jesse Gelsinger.

Gelsinger was an 18-year-old who suffered from a mild version of ornithine transcarbamylase, or OTC. The illness is usually fatal, but Gelsinger was able to control his disease through diet and medication. In 1999, he signed up for a genetic engineering experiment at Penn's Institute for Human Gene Therapy under the direction of James Wilson -- only to die four days after "healthy" genes were injected into his liver.

In the aftermath, the nation became embroiled in a debate about when -- and who -- should be involved in gene therapy trials and how to regulate such experiments.

The consequences were more concrete for the University -- Wilson stepped down as head of the IHGT, the Food and Drug Administration increased its oversight of Penn research and the University was forced to settle a lawsuit with Gelsinger's family.

Today, the Pioneer Fund fiasco and Gelsinger's death are not at the forefront of campus thought, but their occurrence can be felt in the school's research infrastructure -- just as Rodin's impact will likely be felt for years to come.

About this series Penn is a very different place now than it was back in 1994, when University President Judith Rodin first took the helm. And now that Rodin has announced that she will leave her position in June, the University is apt to see more changes in the future. For the next week and a half, The Daily Pennsylvanian will examine a variety of issues, events and people on and around campus that have been affected under Rodin's decade-long tenure. Topics will range from Penn's reputation in higher education to the build-up of retail around campus to expectations for Rodin's successor.

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