SUNY Chancellor Zimpher released her her $290,000 report on the SUNY Research Foundation today (A report was paid for with public funds, of course).
The report is a dismal, scathing indictment of the problems that secrecy, arrogance, and lack of accountability produce.
Some highlights from the report:
- In recent years, overall SUNY sponsored research has grown only by about 2%per year, even taking into account the significant ($100 million) special influx of American Recovery and Reimbursement Act (“ARRA”) dollars. During this same period, the top 20 institutional recipients of sponsored research funds in the nation increased their share of total NIH funding from 30% to 35%. But meanwhile, a number of SUNY campuses have actually declined in relative research ranking compared to peer institutions.
- the major conclusion that leaps out from this data is that--putting aside the remarkable achievement of Albany and CNSE--the overall SUNY sponsored research enterprise has grown only about 8% in four years, or 2% per year. Moreover, much of the SUNY increase, as the RF acknowledges, was due to an influx of ARRA dollars, about $100 million. Otherwise there has been very little growth. In 2009-2010, without the new legislation (Obama's stimulus funds) , the increase would have been 1.4%.
- The Research Foundation projects basically a flat trend in overall SUNY sponsored research between 2010 and 2015, with some major campuses declining.
- Overall, most participants agree that the SUNY-RF efforts in technology transfer have been only modestly successful, and disappointing overall.
- There are a number of gradients on which Universities customarily rate their success in technology transfer – and SUNY/RF rank poorly on most of them
- The median return (IP revenue divided by research expenditures) for the top 20
institutions was about 9%. SUNY’s realization was 1.3%! SUNY is by far the lowest of
any of the top 20 institutions studied.
- Significantly, it is not just that the SUNY-RF technology performance is not currently robust. This relative deficiency has existed for more than a decade, and there is not yet evidence of strong improvement.
- as to revenue, except for Stony Brook’s Reo Pro ($8.2 million of the total $10.0 million), a stable and large source of royalty revenue, the performance would be far worse. Overall, year after year, Stony Brook generates 90% or more of total SUNY royalty income. In effect, aside from one invention at one campus, the entire SUNY system and its $1 billion/year research enterprise produce no material licensing revenue. << One campus and two discoveries contribute 90% of funds from patent spinoffs.
Cuomo and his NYSUNY2020 just perpetuate this culture of failure. Does anyone really believe that spending $350,000,000 to rebuild the UB Medical School in a new location will actually fix this broken system, much less create thousands of jobs?
Hogan Report:
http://www.suny.edu/communications/pdf/Hogan%20Report%20on%20RF.pdf
