In February, UVM achieved R1 status—joining the most-elite rank of research institutions categorized by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. It’s a recognition earned by less than 3 percent of U.S  colleges and universities, representing sustained and robust research for the public good. Established in 1973, the classification has become a coveted benchmark for schools at the forefront of innovation and discovery.

One of the key leaders of the work to achieve R1 at UVM has been Kirk Dombrowski, the university’s Vice President for Research and Economic Development and a professor in the Department of Anthropology.  “This really is a moment of transformation for the university,” Dombrowski says, “and a result of decades of investment in meaningful research, outstanding faculty, and many kinds of innovation.”

UVM science writer Joshua Brown sat down with Dombrowski to learn more about what this transformation looks like and where it might lead.

What does R1 mean for—and about—UVM?

Dombrowski: UVM has always prided itself on a teacher-scholar model, and if we are going to be serious about that, then scholarship is half of that work. So R1 is a measure, fit to modern university systems, asking: what’s the mass of scholarship happening at your university? And it measures surrogates for that, like how much time are we paying people to spend on research or scholarship? And how big is our investment in the next generation of scholars, in producing Ph.D.s? Getting to R1 is partly about scale—we have a lot of research going on across campus! And achieving R1 status is a validation of our robust teacher-scholar model that’s hard to validate in other ways.

What could R1 allow UVM to accomplish that we haven’t been able to do in the past?

The big question is talent. How much talent can we attract? R1 puts us on a more equal footing with our peers in recruiting that next generation of highly talented faculty and students. Scholars, graduating today with a Ph.D., see an R1 designation as a sign that a university is serious about research and scholarship. For many graduate students, the belief is that if you want to work at an R1, you have to graduate from an R1. There are other knock-on benefits too. Being an R1 is an advantage for opening doors to certain large foundations, like the Ford Foundation, or others that are invitation-only, that provide major funding. R1 makes us credible as an applicant in that space to say: we have the kind of infrastructure, partnership programs, and scale that would allow us to succeed with very large grants.

When you imagine UVM’s best flight path, in terms of our research endeavor, over the next, say, five years, what are you seeing?

The big outcome is that we should see more large-scale projects—like centers and major infrastructure grants—that bring more interdisciplinary science and scholarship to our campus. This will provide greater levels of support for our graduate students. We’ll have a larger, more competitive, vibrant, scholarly space on campus. It won’t turn the grass blue or suddenly put skyscrapers on our campus. We’ll look like we look, but we should feel different over the next 10 years in in terms of opportunity and excitement. And that trickles down directly to the undergraduate experience. If you get the best faculty, with a great scholarly ecosystem, you get the best students.

Step back from the higher ed space for a minute and imagine some smart ninth-grade kid who asks, “what is the point of research? Why should I care?”

You know, “research” polls terribly among high school students. If you say to students, “Do you want to go to a research university?” they’re like, “Oh no, I don’t think so.” And that’s because they went to high school, right? In high school, we taught them that research is writing a 15-page paper that has to have 35 sources cited in some particular way. Then they get slaughtered because their thesis statement wasn’t like the one on the worksheet. Or we taught them: go to a chemistry lab and you’re going to have to repeat this set of facts and draw this diagram in this pre-set way—about an experiment whose outcome has already been determined. Who wants to do that?

But if you say to students, “Would you like to go to a college where you sit, listening in class all day? Or to a college where you’re part of an R&D team trying to cure cancer?”  Then they say, “I will do the R&D any day.” We’ve introduced them to research! If you say to them, “Would you like to work in a behavioral pharmacology lab? We’re going to be working with rats in a series of experiments, trying to figure out how cognition works. This will help us understand emotional development that we can translate into improving things from AI to early childhood education.” Students will do that in a second.

Did you as a young scholar have a moment where you realized that research was exciting for you?

As a kid, I was constantly building things. In my backyard, we tried to build a hydrofoil surfboard for behind a boat; it must have been the late ’70s or early ’80s. It never worked, just for the record! I nearly broke my neck, but we wanted to figure out: can we make something that would, in theory, rise up out of the water? Now you look out on Lake Champlain, they’re all over.

What’s in UVM’s research enterprise that is compelling to a traditional chamber of commerce perspective, or a fiscally conservative state legislator who’s saying, “Okay, research is nice, but show me the money.”

We’ve added a hundred million dollars a year in university research spending since I got here. We were at about $120 million; now we’re above $220 million. That’s economic impact. Research brings in high-paying jobs, highly educated people, and economic energy. Research lays the groundwork for Burlington and Vermont to be the kind of high-tech, high-impact space that every community is trying to attract. We know that our business and engineering students are snapped up by tech companies around here. And if we could make more, they would take more! OnLogic, Beta, and other fast-growing companies here are eager for our graduates. They just keep saying to me, “How can you make more?” That’s a way that keeps those companies here, makes them viable here, and creates innovation.

We want to help build up Burlington as a “knowledge town.” Everyone knows what a country town looks like, or a university town, an industrial town, a company town, or post-industrial town. What we are trying to think of is: what is a knowledge town? When I was a kid, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a parking lot. It was one of the most economically depressed areas in the world. But Cambridge leaned into the work that was going on at Harvard and MIT and brought that out to build a biotech industry that is unprecedented in the world. It’s created prosperity; it made Boston functional. Now the economy that’s around those universities is ten times the size of the universities themselves.

You suggest that research and scholarship are largely synonymous. Let me push back on that a little bit. When you think about “research,” how much is that defined by a STEM vocabulary—science and engineering? And how much of “scholarship” is the domain of the humanities—history, English, art?

I’m a cultural anthropologist by training. There’s a classic called Laboratory Life, by Bruno Latour, an anthropologist. The book is an ethnography of Jonas Salk’s lab. Latour treated Salk and other scientists like the primates that we all are. He went in and he wrote down what they did. He just sat and studied the work and the workers of the lab the way you would as an anthropologist.

Latour’s conclusion is that this lab is a place that takes lab coats, paper, chemicals, ink, typewriters, mice, human help, and coffee—and turns them into sentences.  Salk objected, saying, “No, we don’t make sentences here; we make knowledge, we make science.” And Latour said, “Well, no, really, you make sentences. They come out as papers and lectures.” And in a way he was right: at the end of the day, what comes out of the university? We don’t make vaccines here. We don’t make cars here. Every car in our parking lot, none of them were made at UVM, right? What we make here is understanding of the world—published in articles and books and studies. Our engineers write papers and books, and our anthropologists write papers and books, and our English professors write papers and books. That’s what we do.

I don’t think the chasm between the sciences and the humanities is real. It’s an easy target. It’s a scapegoat for different levels of different funding and market forces within the university, right? There are subjects that fall out of favor in a student market sense. And there are things that become popular, and it’s easy to give them labels and see one as some higher calling. And I just don’t buy it. More Americans buy history books than buy engineering books by far. There’s a lot of rhetoric about how these things are opposed, and there’s a lot of hurt feelings about the way that market forces are working within universities. I get that piece, but I don’t think it’s because somehow there’s something so different going on one side than on the other.

Anything else that we should know?

I have no idea what we should all know, but I’m glad I work at a place dedicated to that idea. Achieving R1 is a great moment for us. This is a celebration of the work of hundreds of people in all kinds of spaces at UVM. The recipe was simple: make it fun to go after competitive grants; build the infrastructure around folks who want to do research and scholarship; support the people who are dying for this chance; then get out of the way of the people who have been hungry for this bigger stage, these new opportunities to learn and explore. This is why they became professors.