Paul Brockman on Why Research is Important to Universities

Image by iStock/Feodora Chiosea

In this episode of Lehigh University’s College of Business ilLUminate podcast, host Stephanie Veto talks with Dr. Paul Brockman about the importance of research at universities. Dr. Brockman is the senior associate dean for faculty and research, professor of finance and holds the Joseph R. Perella and Amy M. Perella Chair. His research centers on corporate decision-making. A member of the Lehigh community since 2009, Dr. Brockman also reflects on how research has grown at the university, including its recent designation as an R1 institution.

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Below is an edited excerpt from the conversation. Read the complete podcast transcript [PDF].

Veto: Why is it important that universities conduct research?

Brockman: First of all, I want to be very clear what I mean by research. I think back to the third grade when we would do what we call research projects that typically meant, at the time, reading through encyclopedia articles, through magazines, through books and then summarizing what we read, and then maybe expressing a personal opinion as part of the conclusion to a paper. So that's what we meant in general, at least at that time, what I had in my mind about what research entailed. 

From a university perspective, the form is similar to what I just described since grade school and high school, but the content is very, very different. When research professors talk about research or PhDs in general, what we're referring to is fundamental original research. 

For this type of research, the main criterion, which is a big hurdle, is that this type of research has to add new knowledge to whatever the academic discipline is that you're researching in. So research that has to make a significant contribution to your field of study. It has to be new. 

So I'd say from the perspective of human society, it'd be really impossible to overstate the importance of knowledge-producing research. From an individual university's perspective, let's say Lehigh, besides contributing to that increase in knowledge, the importance of research comes down to some pragmatic, some practical issues, such as it determines, to a large extent, the university status. 

Lehigh just this year moved from R1. We were in R2 up until this current year. R2 is considered high research activity. The R1 schools are about 140 to 150 of them, they're classified as very high research activity. So this is really what we're playing for on a pragmatic point of view. This is what gives us our status, our stature within the academic community.

Veto: Why is a university setting an ideal place for doing research instead of, say, being a part of some think tank or business? Why universities?

Brockman: Well, you might be surprised there's a lot of overlap between think tanks, research institutions, government agencies, particularly regulators, and what we do at the university, at a research institution. 

We have a lot of people that move back and forth among those different agencies. The modern research university really began just very briefly in the 19th century in Prussia before Germany was a country with the Humboldt University of Berlin in the early 1800s. And it was so successful and produced so much scientific research, particularly for the German chemical industry, that it was copied around Europe and then made its way over to the United States, particularly through Johns Hopkins and then MIT, the Ivy Leagues, Big 10 schools, big research schools, University of Chicago, Stanford, Berkeley, etc. 

And these institutions really have what I'll call a research ethos. And they're able to attract a critical mass of PhD-trained researchers. That's important for co-authorship.