How Not To Succeed Despite Trying Very Hard: One Department's Story

BINGHAMTON, N.Y—A few years ago, the State University of New York at Binghamton wanted to put its biology department on the fast track for research. So it went out and hired John Baust, a 44-year-old cryobiologist from the University of Houston, to take it there. Baust arrived at the upstate New York school in January 1987 and quickly announced his goals: a doubling of the number of graduate students; a fourfold increase in outside funding, from less than $1 million to $4 million annually; and recognition by his peers that the department had climbed into the nation’s elite of academic research programs. He had a personal mission as well: to direct a new Center for Cryobiological Research, a lab created to advance his own work on how organisms adapt to subfreezing temperatures. Two years later, that ambitious effort has come crashing down around him. In October 1988 Baust resigned as department chair after receiving a vote of “no confidence” by a majority of the 29-member biology faculty. That action spawned a faculty investigation into aspects of his conduct during the hiring process and once he arrived at the school. And this past March, Baust suffered another heavy blow. The university pulled the plug on Baust’s cryobiology center, ending more than $70,000 in annual support. Its reason? The center had failed to attract a single dollar of outside funding. But Binghamton’s abortive attempt to break into the big-time illustrates more than the inability of one scientist to beef up a single research program. It demonstrates the overwhelming importance of outside funding, the need for consensus and gradual change, and the role that outside factors can play in any institution’s attempt to move up the academic ladder. Baust, who remains a tenured Professor of biology at the university, admits to feeling “embarrassed” by the entire affair. And he’s not the only one who’s been hurt by his failure to raise the status of the biology department at SUNY-Binghamton, a university with 12,000 students located an hour’s drive south of Syracuse, N.Y The episode has also left a bad taste in the mouths of most faculty members, who say that they just want to get on with their science and don’t care if they never move up into the ranks of a Berkeley or MIT. “I’ve never seen people so angry,” says veteran biology professor Arthur Frankel about Baust’s effect on a somewhat stodgy department. Baust annoyed People with his brusque manner, his claim to a choice parking space, and his ostentatious remodeling of his office. But in the end, Frankel says, the conflict between Baust and his colleagues came down to substance as well as style. “He would have got by if he’d had grants,” says Frankel. “You can’t hold people to a standard that you can’t meet yourself.” That standard is the ability to at- tract outside funding. It’s not enough to have a clear vision. “I don’t think you can build a department just by setting goals,” says Frankel. What you need, say those who have succeeded in raising the overall quality of their institution’s research, is a sustained commitment to excellence. “We tried to get stars but it was very hard,” says Lawrence Chasm, chair of the biology department at Columbia University. Chasm’s second strategy, that of recruiting promising young scientists rather than heavy hitters, has helped Columbia achieve the type of success of which Baust dreamed. Despite having three fewer faculty members than SUNY-Binghamton, Columbia’s biology department has enjoyed a near doubling of its level of federal funding in the past seven years, to almost $60 million, and a jump in its ranking by peers from 25th to the top dozen. Chasm says the secret to his department’s success is the careful recruitment of those capable of obtaining outside funding. It also helps to have a secure commitment from the university, including in Columbia’s case a new building and a steady growth in the number of new faculty. Binghamton officials tried to bypass that long-term rebuilding process by hiring Baust and asking him to carry the load. In addition to suf fering the fate of those who put all their eggs in one basket, they fell victim to forces beyond their control, including a sudden downturn in the state’s economy that resulted in trimmed support for higher education. Binghamton officials knew that the odds were high when they launched their drive to the top. And, after a formal search process, the committee emerged convinced that Baust was just the man to narrow those odds for them. So too, at first, was Stuart 0. Landry, a biology professor who has taught at Binghamton since 1963. But now Landry is one of Baust’s leading critics, and a member of the panel that submitted a critical report on Baust. “He seemed to have a genuine interest in the department,” says Landry, recalling his first meeting with Baust. “He had done his homework. He didn’t say: ‘I’m going to do this, I’m going to move in this direction.’ The idea was that he would try to move in new directions while maintaining what we had.” One new direction was to become a magnet for big-money grants. The department had recently lost its brightest star when the University of Florida wooed away Roy A. Jensen, a professor of microbiology and cell science. In Jensen’s 11 years at Binghamton he had been awarded $2.7 million in grants, by far the largest amount of any biologist at the university. He had also created and headed the university’s Center for Somatic Cell Genetics and Biochemistry. Jensen says he left because Florida offered him a new, bigger laboratory and generous support for his work. Such a package was not forthcoming from Binghamton, he notes. “The administration wouldn’t give me the faculty to work with to develop new grants. If they had do he that I wouldn’t have left.” Baust’s center was seen as a substitute for Jensen’s program. And Jensen contends that Baust wanted to keep it that way to avoid any competition. At one point, Jensen says, he became frustrated with the slow pace of construction of his new lab in Gainesville and told Baust he was thinking about staying at Binghamton. But Jensen says it “seemed apparent he [Baust] didn’t want to do anything” to tempt Jensen to stay. No Midas Touch Although his center was expected to fill the gap left by Jensen’s departure, Baust hasn’t come close to matching Jensen’s Midas touch. In fact, Binghamton has spent much more than it has received: $244,300 to create Baust’s center, on top of a starting salary of $76,000 and a $5,000 stipend forhis duties as chair, while neither Baust nor his center has received a single major grant since he arrived at Binghamton. That dearth of funding shouldn’t have surprised Binghamton official. Records at Houston show that, although Baust received a total of $338,143 in grants during his 11 years at Houston, he didn’t win any new grants after September 1, 1983. Baust, in response, says that those records don’t include an unspecified amount of corporate subsidies and support for equipment. Why didn’t anyone check into his track record? ‘They [the search committee members] were amateurs,” says one Binghamton biology professor. Admits Landry, “Our expectation was that we were dealing with a big-time grant operator.” Nathan W. Dean, vice provost for graduate studies and research, says that, on average, university research centers are expected to pull in at least three times their budget. For Baust’s center, that would have been $225,000 annually. Research centers in the physical and biomedical sciences, Dean adds, are expected to do even better. The three-year-old Binghamton Center for Developmental Psychobiology, for example, has brought in $948,401 since July 1, 1988, on an annual budget of $53,209. Dean says the state fund that supported Baust is seen as venture capital” for university-based centers, and that Binghamton officials cut off funding for Baust’s center because they didn’t think it would grow into a profitable operation. “It was the judgment of the [committee on organized and sponsored research] that the Center for Cryobiological Research has not succeeded and it didn’t see enough success in the future to warrant future investments,” he says. No one has accused Baust of fudging on his curriculum vitae. Faculty members say he just did what any eager job applicant might do— emphasize the good and omit the bad. In his 17-page resume, for instance, Baust listed four current grants and contracts and three that he had applied for. Baust didn’t mention the size of the grants, none of which accompanied him to Binghamton, and no one asked. Neither did anyone ask Joe R. Cowles, the chair of the University of Houston biology department, about Baust’s ability to win grants. “John wasn’t a very active recruiter of funds,” Cowles told The Scientist in a telephone interview. Yet Landry says that “I never heard anyone question that he [Baust] was a big grant operator. It never occurred to anyone.” Baust’s area of expertise was another strike against him. At its best, say experts, cryptobiology is a small field with limited potential for grants. Harold T. Meryman, a cryobiologist with the American Red Cross, says that he can count all the cryobiologists in the nation on his fingers, and that the potential for funding in cryobiology “never was much of anything.” But Baust’s funding woes, as se rious as they were, might not have been fatal if he had enjoyed better relations with his colleagues. Unfortunately, there was friction between Baust and many professors from the moment he arrived. “He was arrogant and had very little interest in what the faculty had to say, says Frankel. “He just didn’t listen to them.” Baust admits that he may have stepped on some toes. But he believes that his real problem was that some faculty felt threatened by the prospect of change. In a memo to the department shortly after he arrived, Baust asked all faculty to prepare a self-evaluation. It included such questions as, “How would you like to contribute?” and “Are you willing to work a bit harder and become a key contributor?” “I think the prospects of that kind of growth frighten a lot of people,” he says. Baust says the changes at Binghamton further splintered a faculty that had been assembled over time for a variety of reasons as the school grew from a college to a graduate university. “Some were hired for undergraduate teaching, some were hired almost solely for graduate studies,” he says. “It is a dichotomy.” Those inner tensions were exacerbated by outside forces. Within two years of his arrival, six administrators at the university who were instrumental in the development of Baust’s five-year plan had left, for various reasons. At the same time, New York Gov. Mario Cuomo launched a statewide austerity program resulting in cuts for the Graduate Research Initiative, which was to have provided financial support to bolster SUNY Binghamton. Faculty-members hope that the department’s new chair, Anna L. Tan-Wilson, can pick up the pieces left by Baust’s tumultuous reign. She was recruited internally in what is seen as a repudiation of the methods used to pick Baust. Some Goals Met But Baust isn’t about to apologize for what he has done. He says that his leadership has revitalized the department and that 80% of the goals in his five-year plan have been realized. He says the number of professors who submit grant proposals has jumped from less than one-third of the department to about three-quarters. Requests for grants have hit an all-time high of $7.3 million for the 10 months ending in February 1989, he notes, and the publication rate of Binghamton biologists has doubled. University officials concede that grant proposals have increased. But they can’t confirm his figures on publication rates, and they dispute his figures on the present number of doctoral candidates. Baust says there are currently 42 doctoral candidates, as many as existed throughout the university’s 20-year history while official records show there are 16 full-time Ph.D. students are pursuing Ph.D.s in biology. Whatever the actual numbers, faculty members feel that their department has paid a heavy price for those gains. Most view Baust’s short reign as an unfortunate episode that they would prefer to forget; some say it has left behind a lingering climate of ugliness and uncertainty. Baust says he now understands that change can be a difficult and painful process. “When an outside chair is brought in to light fires,” he says, “you can assume the fires will burn lots of fingers, including the ones who lit them.” For officials at Binghamton, the challenge is to keep the biology department from becoming consumed by those flames. Eric Anderson is editor of Pipe Dream the student newspaper at SUNY-Binghamton

How Not To Succeed Despite Trying Very Hard: One Department's Story

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