Off the Launching Pad: Stimulating Proposal Development by Junior Faculty (Case Study‪)‬

The Challenge For research administrators, encouraging more proposal submissions is a constant challenge, and it is largely a game of numbers: The more proposals a given faculty member writes, the more likely s/he will find success. The higher the percentage of faculty who are actively developing proposals, the greater the growth in the university's research budget. Published data tracking the level of faculty activity in grant writing are scarce, but at many universities there is plenty of room for growth. A 1992 study of eight state colleges in New Jersey showed only 20% of the faculty were actively engaged in sponsored research that year (Monahan, 1993). At Virginia Tech, less than 50% of the combined research and teaching faculty submitted proposals in 2003, not a comforting ratio for a research university with ambitions to rise in the national rankings.