Blog Five: Carnegie Highest Research Activity (R1)

Well…. I began my day (as I often do) with my phone by my side. I looked at my email: nothing. Then Facebook: there it was. “FIU achieved Carnegie Classification for Highest Research Activity (R1)”. I smiled and felt a wave of pride sweep through me. Ha! We have done it. Being Faculty Fellow in the Office of the Provost means I hear an awful lot about FIU in the context of other Florida public universities, the battle for resources, and the struggles we have as an urban, Hispanic Serving Institution.  These times of performance funding have meant that we are in direct and constant competition with one another; we are evaluated relative to other Florida universities. Which place in the Florida system hierarchy will FIU occupy? Who are we? Well, as of today, our place among the other Florida Research I Universities – at least vis a vis our Carnegie Highest Research Activity (R1) status – is secure.

Of course such contests do not define us and do not reflect who we are as an institution. Tallahassee’s rules of engagement only tell us so much. It is not the end of the story. Perhaps just the beginning. Each institution, like any person, is many-sided, multifaceted; its culture includes competing narratives and overlapping and divergent senses of purpose. FIU is, as I believe many of us know, betwixt and between. Neither here nor there. And yet both here and there.

Recently, FIU got more good news; this one quite different from the first mentioned above. One might say it is opposite news, if that is a thing. FIU will partner in a Mellon-funded multiyear project led by the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions entitled Hispanic Serving Institutions: Pathways to the Professoriate. The centerpiece of this project is the cooperation among three Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) [Cal State, Northridge, U of Texas, El Paso, and ourselves] and five Major Research Institutions (MRIs) [NYU, UPenn, U Cal, Berkeley, U Cal, Davis and Northwestern] in order to best prepare a handful of our humanities-oriented, undergraduate students for success in humanities PhD programs that ultimately lead to jobs in the professoriate. Our lucky group of FIU undergrads will be mentored both internally and externally as part of this pipeline program to the professoriate. From minority groups, these FIU undergrads not only will meet peers across Hispanic Serving Institutions (see above), but also will be paired up with History, Literature, Comp Lit, Art History, etc. professors from some of this country’s most elite PhD programs in the Humanities. Wow! Lucky them. They will even be followed into their post-grad years until (and likely after) they get tenure-track positions….

It struck me, and strikes me, that we – faculty at FIU – are involved in (and ultimately responsible for) both of these accolades and honors. On the one hand, we work at a major research university (so say Carnegie!!). On the other hand, our undergrads need mentoring by faculty at major research universities in order to succeed in the Humanities. How do we make sense of that? How can they both be true?

I suppose most of us, even those of us at FIU in Humanities fields with PhD programs (like me in History), would be hard-pressed to argue that this will not be hugely advantageous to our students. Of course it is. Yet, why not recruit students to FIU to get doctorates in History? We do that all of the time. Of course we do. This is a major research university all its own. Weird, no?

We, our FIU, (as our President likes to say) are both and all at once. We have a commuter population of undergrads, many of whom work full time, take care of family members and whose first language is not English. We also produce some of the most impressive research in the world, we have just achieved Carnegie Highest Research Activity (R1) status and produce PhDs in Humanities fields who get jobs at institutions equal or more elite than our own. We do do it all at FIU. We are educating the next generation of community, national and international leaders in their fields. There is much to embrace. And, our leaders, have to navigate waters that likely crash into one another all of the time: retention, graduation, first generation, and millions in research dollars, PhD production, etc.

Listen, I have been here a long time, I know that many of us continue to hope for a campus invitation from Princeton or Berkeley or Reed. That is understandable. FIU is not exactly what many of us imagined in graduate school. Yet, perhaps it is what we find so very satisfying as we grow into our professional selves. Where else can you mentor a first-generation student, smart as a whip, and ultimately see him or her thrive at UC-Davis or Northwestern and one day teach at an R1 institution, and graduate a PhD with a postdoc at UCLA all in a day’s work?

What do you think?

Rebecca