There are a bunch of federally-funded programs that are designed to support students and faculty who are at teaching-focused institutions. Let’s talk about it by busting out a new taxonomic term that we’ll probably be seeing more of in the future. Basically any university that doesn’t have R1-ish level of annual research spending is called an “Emerging Research Institution (ERI)” according to the CHIPS and Science Act.)

With this new bunch of cash, NSF and other federal agencies are charged with making sure that “ERIs” are getting our share of the research pie. Which makes sense from an effectiveness standpoint because a lot of these institutions that don’t traditionally rake in huge amounts of federal dollars are very good at what they do, and it can be highly effective to spend more funds to leverage our expertise. And reaching students at these institutions is essential for actually moving the needle on broadening participation. There’s a good argument to be made that the failure to identify the importance of Regional Public Universities can explain why the graduate training programs and professoriates of PWIs remain so darn W.

As funding agencies are looking to ramp up programs that are funding the broad array of ERIs out there across the higher education landscape, I have one huge request:

Could you develop these programs so they are designed to leverage our strengths instead of attempting to rectify what the conditions that research community tends to regard as our weaknesses? Could we have strengths-based funding for our institutions instead of deficit-based programs?