Brain drain at University of Arizona costs $128 million

Over the past five years, the University of Arizona has lost about $128 million in grant money because faculty members have left for greener pastures, better labs or more money.

Judd Slivka
The Arizona Republic

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0226lostgrants26.html

Now, Gov. Janet Napolitano is requesting about $5 million on behalf of the university to stanch the bleeding by paying more to key faculty members. The issue is before the Legislature, and the prognosis is murky.

Last year, legislators approved a long-term plan to spend more than $400 million on universities to enhance research and attract and keep top new people. But in the meantime, UA continues to lose key faculty members.

It’s not a new phenomenon – UA once lost a Nobel Prize winner the year before he was awarded the prize – but it has been happening more often.

The university is the state’s pre-eminent research institution, bringing in nearly $500 million in research grants and awards last year. But it has been losing faculty and researchers at a fast pace: 346 faculty in the past five years, 192 of them who brought in a total of $128 million to the university in grants and awards.

In recent years, the colleges of business, education, engineering and mines, fine arts, law, pharmacy, science, social and behavioral sciences, libraries, and medicine all have dealt with trying to retain 5 percent of their total faculty.

Arizona State University also has problems with the loss of up-and-coming researchers but not to UA’s extent. ASU researchers last year brought in about $130 million. Despite its lesser stature as a research institution, ASU President Michael Crow made the retention of top faculty a priority last year. Northern Arizona University is primarily a residential undergraduate university and has even less of a problem, although Napolitano’s budget includes a request for $1.5 million for faculty retention at NAU.

Ripe for the picking

Although UA and ASU are attracting promising faculty, such as ASU’s hiring of renowned bioscientist George Poste, both schools still must work hard to keep talented faculty. The UA’s own provost notes it has been ripe for the picking.

Some notable departures from UA:

• A team of researchers who left the chemistry department is now bringing in millions for Georgia Tech.

• A management and information systems researcher got a shiny new lab to bring business to Brigham Young University.

• A professor in the optics department and his entire staff of 24.

• A former head of UA’s top-rated hydrology department, who departed for the University of California-Irvine with his team of 14 researchers, including three UA faculty.

Vicki Chandler is one of the university’s all-stars. She and three other professors in the plant sciences department have brought in $17 million in the past 18 months.

"Facilities are key," she says. "Every week I get a call from somewhere asking me if I want to start a center. Research space is what can keep a person."

Outside of the white-hot biosciences, though, the university is still being nibbled away at. The management information systems department lost Professor Olivia Liu Sheng, a former department head, who left for BYU last year.

To a university that needs every research dollar it can get, a loss like Liu Sheng, whose research interests were the profitable areas of knowledge management and business intelligence, is painful.

"Once you lose someone like that," says Jay Nunamaker, a management information systems professor, "it takes three or four years to replace them. To hire them. To get their lab set up. To really get their research going."

Evidence of that is less than a mile away, in the crammed, twisty hallways of Steward Observatory.

"Within a short period, we lost all of our theoretical physics faculty," says Marcia Rieke, a professor of astronomy who has brought in $26 million in grants in the past five years with her work on cameras for space missions. "It meant that the observational people had to step in and pick up classes to teach, and it had a big effect on our ability to recruit graduate students. It’s hard to do that when you don’t have a theoretical base. You can’t get a well-rounded education."

Rieke and her husband are faculty in UA’s astronomy department. And they’ve been wooed and courted, three or four times a year until a few years ago when they let it be known they weren’t leaving. The interest from prospective employers is still there, however.

"I know that if we wanted to move, I wouldn’t have trouble finding a job," Rieke says.

Cancer researcher Dave Alberts knows the same thing. He has been offered other directorships before. But he hasn’t left. It was a grant he wrote that helped him get the building the department’s housed in, with its offices that look out on the Santa Catalinas and its six new labs. His role, he says, sitting in his Southwest moderne office, is to develop people. And he knows some will leave. In the past two years, both co-directors of the cancer center have taken jobs as directors of other cancer centers.

Alberts has brought in more grants in the past five years, more than $37 million, than any other UA faculty member. He’s the director of the cancer prevention and control program at the university’s Cancer Center. He has the good hair, soft hands and flawless skin that belie being a 64-year-old man who has spent half of his life in Arizona. He has the walk and the authority not to have a computer in his office, because he’s too busy.

His corner office, his position, is what assistant professors aspire to. Alberts came to UA 30 years ago. Now the director, he has watched a steady stream of talented faculty leave.

"You’re always going to have junior faculty who catch fire," Alberts says. "You’re always going to have faculty who do outstanding work. If they’re doing the work they’re capable of, well, where there’s a will, there’s a way. You find a way to get them funded."

Depending on research

But all too often at the University of Arizona in the past five years, there hasn’t been a way to get people funded, and other universities have taken advantage of that, raiding some of the university’s most respected departments.

UA is caught in a circle. Its administration tried to set aside money last year for key faculty retention, but it was cut when the state budget went into the tank.

"If you intensify the research agenda, then you need more lab space," says Nunamaker, a management information systems professor who has brought in about $16 million over the past five years and who, before he made it known he didn’t want to leave Tucson, would get five job offers a year. "And then lab space becomes as important as the money they’re going to pay you. That group that went to Georgia Tech? They got all the lab space they needed."