Why have undergraduate institutions generated more science majors per faculty member than research oriented institutions? Is the level of research activity at undergraduate institutions declining? What can foundations do to improve the climate for research? Questions such as these were discussed at ``Academic Excellence: Conference on the Role of Research in the Natural Sciences at Undergraduate Institutions,'' a conference that I had the pleasure of attending at Fermilab, June 25--26, 2001. The conference was sponsored by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, the Robert A. Welch Foundation, the W. M. Keck Foundation, the M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust, and Research Corporation.

The conference was based on the results of a survey of 136 predominantly undergraduate institutions. Many presidents, provosts and other academic leaders of the surveyed institutions, representatives of various scientific societies, editors of scientific journals, and representatives from other foundations and funding agencies were in attendance. One of the highlights was the visit and half hour talk from Congressman Vern Ehlers, one of two physicists in the U.S. House of Representatives. In addition, there was time set aside for smaller group discussions, and many opportunities for informal discussions among the attendees. The purpose of this editorial is to give you my personal reflections on the conference. Readers who wish more detailed information should obtain the sourcebook of data from the survey¹ and a book² that interprets the findings of the survey.

The sciences were divided into astronomy, biosciences, chemistry, geosciences, and physics. There was no discussion of mathematics, computer science, psychology or engineering. Some people noted that these omissions may have led to some misleading conclusions. Besides the survey of 136 institutions, the study made use of publicly available data from 1115 predominantly undergraduate institutions. Comparisons between the data from the survey and data for all predominantly undergraduate institutions showed that the surveyed institutions was representative.

From the very beginning the stated assumption was that research with students at predominantly undergraduate institutions was important. The importance of publishing this research, including having students as co-authors, was also stressed. In addition, the impression was given that this activity was the most important component of the education of future scientists. The focus on research is both a strength and a weakness of this study. This narrow focus allowed the detailed collection of significant data in a reasonable time, which helped provide a reasonable picture of trends in undergraduate science research over the past decade. On the other hand, omitting most of the rest of the educational process made it difficult to put the role of undergraduate research in context. Curriculum development and research into improved instruction was barely mentioned. The interaction of in and out of classroom activities was discussed only briefly by some of the speakers. The importance of mathematics, computer science, and the non-scientific component of a student's education and its relationship to research activities was not discussed.

The other dominant theme of the conference is that predominantly undergraduate institutions are very important, if not the most important source, of scientific talent in the United States. The justification for this view comes from data on the origins of science Ph.D.'s and the fact that predominantly undergraduate institutions have a larger percentage of students majoring in science.

Essentially all the survey institutions engaged in research with students, many of their faculty had external funding, and many published their results. The mean rate of publication was 0.4 papers per science faculty member per year. The cost per publication based on internal and external funding sources was about $36,000 per paper. The major concern coming out of the study is that although the number of natural science faculty has increased by about 20% in the last decade, the number of grant applications has remained flat and in some cases, such as for many NSF programs, decreased. The foundations are thus concerned that there might be a decline in research activity at predominantly undergraduate institutions. This concern seemed to permeate the meeting. The cause for the apparent decline was linked to faculty time pressures, which were further linked to faculty spending time (some would say too much time) on introducing information technology into their courses and on curriculum development. Also mentioned was the pressure from family commitments. Much of the time during the informal group meetings was spent on discussing ways of handling the time pressures, ways of rewarding faculty who work on research with students, and other issues of faculty development and evaluation. One idea that arose is that the government and foundations should fund many more teacher-scholar post-doctoral scientists to work in predominantly undergraduate institutions to provide a better environment for research activity, to provide faculty more time to devote to research, and to provide on the job teacher training to the post-docs.

One striking result of the survey was the diversity of the institutions in terms of resources and quality of students as measured by test scores. Although the analysis of the data placed all the institutions into various clusters based on roughly shared characteristics, I found it difficult to draw any general conclusions from this analysis. The major conclusion seemed to be that the quality of the students and the strength of an institution's resources was a factor, but not the dominant factor for success in producing science majors. This conclusion might become even more evident if research institutions were added to the study.

The most useful information for many was that there appears to be a fairly large amount of money available to faculty at predominantly undergraduate institutions for their research and that these resources may be underutilized at present. In particular, programs available to predominantly undergraduate institutions in the U.S. include the Major Research Instrumentation and Research at Undergraduate Institution programs at the NSF, the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society (which funds chemists, physicists, geologists, and other scientists), and the AREA awards from NIH for biomedical research. There also are regional funding agencies.

Although the focus of the conference was on predominantly undergraduate institutions, many of the issues are relevant to all higher education institutions. If research with undergraduates is important for producing future scientists, then the research oriented universities also should increase the level of research involvement with their own undergraduates. Research universities generally have a very low rate of producing graduates who later obtain Ph.D.'s. Carl Wieman³ has pointed out that the study done by the National Task Force on Undergraduate Physics Education showed that personal contact was a significant factor in producing physical science majors. Wieman urged research universities to work harder to recruit more majors in physics. The data from the Academic Excellence study strongly suggests that involving students in research is a way of producing more majors, who are more committed to a scientific career.

The conference did not provide many unexpected results nor change anybody's perspective. Almost everybody in attendance believed in the importance of scientific research with students. The conference will have been useful if it encourages administrators and science department chairs at undergraduate institutions to find more ways to make it easier for their faculty to engage in research.

The conference did provide further impetus to one of my own goals, namely to bring together the teaching and research activities of physicists as much as possible. As I have said in many arenas, I would like to see less of a division between AAPT and APS, and I hope that more physicists will become members of both organizations. To this end I would like to see more articles in AJP on current research written in a way that is useful for teaching at various levels.

Jan Tobochnik, Editor

1. ``Academic Excellence, The Sourcebook: A study of the role of research in the natural sciences at undergraduate institutions,'' Research Corp., 2001.

2. ``Academic Excellence, The role of research in the physical sciences at undergraduate institutions,'' Michael Doyle, ed., Research Corp., 2001.

3. Carl Wieman, ``A modest proposal: Recruit undergraduate majors,'' APS News, May 2001.