Challenges to the Partnership between Research and Education

The current model for a “professor” of engineering at a Carnegie research university assumes the professor is a scholar, teacher, advisor and university citizen. The financial underpinning of this model rests on revenue generation through tuition (teaching credits), research grants and endowment draw to various degrees depending on the institution and its resources. Several factors are challenging this model: resistance to increases in tuition rates, reduced success rates on proposals and more university cost sharing, more demands on teaching at the undergraduate level, federally mandated compliance, and tenure itself. Unless research is more tightly connected to education, it will become more difficult to sustain the “professor” model in its classical sense.