espite all the hype put out by the state’s universities, the fact remains that Virginia is distinctly an “also ran” when it comes to research and development.
In fact, its leading R&D institution, Virginia Tech, is losing ground. It fell from 42nd to 46th place in the Survey of Research and Development Expenditures at Universities conducted by the National Science Foundation released Oct. 1. Tech lost $7 million in R&D funding in the past year, making total R&D spending $373 million.
To find other Old Dominion schools, you have to go pretty far down the list. U.Va. ranked No. 70 with $258 million in funding. Virginia Commonwealth University, despite all the attention focused on R&D by former President Eugene Trani, ranks 108th with piddling $149 million in spending. That’s pretty modest, to say the least, and shows that VCU still hasn’t quite graduated from the ranks of the commuter school.
None of this is particularly impressive, especially in VCU’s case. Trani made a big deal of pushing the Virginia Biotechnology Research Park down near the MCV campus in downtown Richmond.
The state’s and Richmond’s R&D status was supposed to have gotten a big boost when Philip Morris USA built a $350 million R&D center there. And Trani risked his school’s reputation by entering into highly restrictive R&D deals with Philip Morris that brought a dunning by his faculty and a national black eye to the school’s reputation.
After all this, one wonders, “Where’s the Beef?”
The leading schools are the usual ones, Johns Hopkins ($1.6 billion), University of California at San Francisco ($885 million) followed by Wisconsin, San Diego, UCLA and so on. Regionally, Duke makes a decent showing in the No. 7 spot at $767 million. Except for Duke, the Top 7 saw their R&D funding increase from 2007 to 2008.
True, we’re just coming out of the worst recession since the Great Depression and that has to account for some of the lackluster showing. But NSF data shows that federal funding for R&D actually plateaued in 2004, or halfway through the administration of George W. Bush.
Those were pretty good economic times. Yet I remember doing a cover story for Chief Executive magazine around then that was based on a survey of what 500 or so CEOs at top companies felt about Bush’s performance. He got a mediocre “C plus.” One big reason was his lack of concern about R&D. Many of the CEOs operate globally and have to compete with well-funded researchers in Asia and Europe and were very concerned about the U.S. losing ground in competitiveness.
Back to Virginia, I remember organizing a survey of the Old Dominion’s tech performance at a regional business magazine earlier this decade. It wasn’t all that impressive. Universities didn’t account for many patents. Most were obtained by the Navy or Philip Morris and neither institution is particularly “Virginian.”
It’s hard to tell where gubernatorial candidates Bob McDonnell are on this issue. Republican McDonnell says he wants to create jobs, but he seems more intent on drilling for gas and oil miles off the coast than boosting state college labs. Democrat Creigh Deeds has run a confused, reactive campaign and doesn’t seem to weigh in on the issue. But he doesn’t seem to weigh in on any issue other than McDonnell’s master’s thesis back in the 1980s.
So, next time you hear some bombast about how great Virginia is doing, keep the NSF survey in mind.
Peter Galuszka
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