Message from the President: UIF offers chance to boldly go to education’s cutting edge

In the next few weeks the University community will be invited to submit proposals for awards under the third round of the University Initiatives Fund (UIF). I urge you to seize the opportunity the UIF presents to work collaboratively and put forward your boldest, most far-reaching ideas.

The new round of the UIF awards include some revisions to the guidelines and procedures for submitting proposals. We are also initiating an evaluation of existing UIF projects and the program itself. Before I describe those further, I’d like to review the program and its goals.

The UIF was created to encourage and support cutting edge, transformative initiatives that will move our University forward. The fund allows us to take advantage of new opportunities necessary to keep this University among the premier research institutions in the country. These are opportunities that otherwise might be lost.

The UIF was established four years ago with the support of the University community. It works by reallocating University resources through a 1 percent assessment on all University operating budgets for five biennia. There have been two rounds of awards so far, one in 1997-1999 and one in 1999-2001. We are now entering the third round. The fund raises approximately $8 million each biennium. It is a testament to this community’s commitment to excellence, even at the cost of some budgetary pain.

Since its inception, the UIF has awarded about $16 million in permanent funding to 50 projects. Those projects have promoted our multiple missions of teaching, research and service. They have encouraged creativity and interdisciplinary collaboration. They have extended the reach of our research, served the broader community and positioned the UW as a national leader in emerging fields.

You only have to look at some of these projects to see that they are taking the UW in dynamic new directions.

The first round of the UIF established a new cross-disciplinary Center for Nanotechnology that is placing the UW as a national leader in this emerging field. This round funded a new undergraduate major in neurobiology that fills a significant gap in the science curriculum and extends to undergraduates the UW’s research strength in this important field. It launched an innovative project to speed up and simplify support services such as payroll, personnel, and purchasing using Web-based technologies.

The second round of the UIF created a program that will discover new ways in which educational technology can transform teaching and learning. This round established a center that merges world-class statistical research with outstanding social science to allow researchers to find new answers to pressing social problems. It funded a new graduate program in biomedical and health informatics that will address the fundamental transformation of medical and health care research and clinical decision-making and train students for research and teaching careers in information management for health care, health-care computing and public health.

All of these projects cut across colleges and schools. During the second round, awards were also given to proposals put forward by individual colleges and schools. Among the awards made under this category were highly innovative projects to: recruit undergraduates into teaching careers, support a multisite cancer data collection system to help with cancer research, and start a certificate program that will train UW graduate and professional students to work in international development. These unit-specific awards enable schools and colleges to achieve goals identified through their own strategic planning processes.

When I initiated the UIF, I promised periodic evaluations of the funded projects to make sure that we are spending the money wisely and that the projects are achieving their goals. Such evaluations are important because UIF money is so precious and the goals of the UIF so critical to the University’s future. Everyone in this community has the right to know that this money is being well spent.

Now that the UIF is entering its fourth year, we will initiate rigorous evaluations of the individual projects funded under UIF round one. We will also evaluate the success of the UIF program as a whole to see if there are improvements we can make as we move forward. The evaluations of individual UIF initiatives will become a regular part of the UIF process, with each project undergoing a four-year review.

For the individual evaluations, Provost Lee L. Huntsman and I will appoint review teams for each project. The teams will consist of several members, including at least one from outside the University. All will be recognized experts in the relevant fields. They will be asked to consider not only how successful the program is, but also how well it contributes to the larger UIF goals. Following a site visit, the teams will make recommendations to Provost Huntsman and me. These reviews will take place in academic year 2000-2001 and be reported back to the University community.

For the evaluation of the overall success of the UIF program, we plan to appoint an external review team composed of several members including the president or provost of a peer university, a distinguished faculty member of a peer university and a prominent citizen of Washington. The report of this committee will also be made available to the University community.

The UIF process and guidelines are works in progress. In the last round, we made changes and refinements in response to concerns raised by schools, colleges and units across campus. In this round there will be several changes and refinements to improve the process further that were made after wide consultation with deans, faculty and administrators. Those changes and refinements are as follows: