By guest contributor Anna Campana, Sr. Pre-Award Research Administrator, R1 Cancer Center, with Sarah Trimmer, Founder, The Optimum Department

Since World War II, federal research funding has flowed to universities through a stable set of rules — negotiated indirect cost rates, peer-reviewed merit ...

Most university leaders right now are making decisions with bad information. The metrics measure the wrong things. The faculty have turf to protect. Your peers are as lost as you are. And the federal environment isn't going to clarify on a timeline that helps anyone. So, what do you actually do?

Th...

I have spent the better part of two decades trying to do strategy work inside institutions that were not built to receive it. I learned to write the plans, map the processes, build the infrastructure, and make the case. What I could not do, and it took me longer than I would like to admit to underst...

Deborah Stone opens her book Policy Paradox with a provocation: policymaking is not a technical problem waiting for a rational solution. It is a contest over values, conducted through the language of facts. Efficiency, waste, return on investment - these are not neutral descriptions. They are argume...

On Overfunctioning, Urgency, and the Administrators Who Enable the System They Resent

This piece is the other side of a coin. In January, I wrote about the invisible labor that sustains academic departments; the unspoken contract by which research administrators absorb risk, compensate for structur...

Congress appropriated the money. It is not reaching investigators. That gap, between what is on paper and what is actually happening in labs and grant offices across the country is not an accident. It is the product of two decades of structural decisions universities made during good times, and an a...

Why strategy must come before planning and why getting the order wrong is the most common mistake in higher education.

This piece synthesizes and extends the series on strategy, planning, and organizational design in research-intensive higher education. It is designed to stand alone as a framework,...

What Ben Horowitz's survival manual teaches us about the moment universities are actually in

There's a genre of advice circulating right now aimed at university leaders scrambling to respond to federal funding cuts and administrative award delays. It goes something like this: diversify your revenue...

Guest Contributor: Anna Campana, Sr. Pre-Award Research Administrator, R1 Cancer Center

Plaintiffs suing the U.S. Government over grant terminations early in 2025 had initial success in getting federal courts to stay agency actions. However, after the last few U.S. Supreme Court decisions, these st...

Since NIH released NOT-OD-25-068 in February of last year, I’ve been obsessed with indirect cost recovery. I’m not an economist, and I don’t have visibility into university balance sheets - they’re not transparently shared. But it’s hard not to notice that universities often talk about indirect cost...

This is a follow-up to "The Unspoken Contract." Critiquing departmental dysfunction can sound like blaming faculty, and I want to be direct: I'm not. Faculty didn't design the soft money model, the incentive structures, or the operational gaps that research administrators spend their days compensati...

I have been thinking for a long time about whether, and how to say this out loud. Not because the problems are subtle, but because naming them plainly is uncomfortable in systems that depend on people silently absorbing strain. What follows is an attempt to explain why I am choosing to name them any...

Killing Sacred Cows — Part 4 of a series examining the unspoken norms, taboos, and protected assumptions in academic research that are rarely questioned, even when they undermine effectiveness and resilience. This series names those assumptions, puts them up for debate, and asks whether they still d...

Peter Drucker's The Discipline of Innovation makes a case that has held up for four decades: innovation is not a matter of luck or temperament. It is a structured, systematic process rooted in observation, analysis, and disciplined execution. Drucker identifies seven sources of innovation opportunit...

Why strategy disappears inside higher education institutions and what system-level moves actually look like.

This is Part 3 in a series on strategy, planning, and organizational design in higher education. Part 1 establishes the distinction between strategy and planning. Part 2 argues that strategi...

Why Thought Partnership Is Not a Luxury in Higher Education Right Now

This is Part 2 in a series on strategy, planning, and organizational design in higher education. Strategy vs. Strategic Planning: Why Winning Requires Deliberate Choice establishes the distinction between strategy and planning th...

If you work in research administration, you already know the truth: the job has expanded, but the resources have not. 

Research administrators are now expected to:

• Track federal policy shifts across multiple branches of government

• Interpret agency guidance that is often incomplete, incons

  ...

Killing Sacred Cows — Part 3 of a series examining the unspoken norms, taboos, and protected assumptions in academic research that are rarely questioned, even when they undermine effectiveness and resilience. This series names those assumptions, puts them up for debate, and asks whether they still d...

Killing Sacred Cows is a series examining the unspoken norms, taboos, and protected assumptions in academic research that are rarely questioned, even when they undermine effectiveness and resilience. This series names those assumptions, puts them up for debate, and asks whether they still deserve pr...

This is the first in a series examining structures and assumptions in academic research that have gone unquestioned long enough to feel permanent. The last several years have stress-tested a lot of them. Some didn't hold. This one is worth naming directly.

I want to be clear up front: this is not a...

There are phrases that seep into the lexicon of work, repeated so often they lose meaning. Or worse, they begin to reshape what we find acceptable. “The new normal.” “Lean operations” (almost always referring to headcount, not process improvement). And the one I cannot stomach anymore: “Doing more w...

There’s plenty to be said about the current volatility in federally funded research: unpredictable executive orders, shifting rules and compliance notices, and open threats of budget cuts or clawbacks. These developments are destabilizing and distracting.

Even without the recent noise from Washingt...

Why Good Operations Are More Like a Waltz Than a Race

When I named my company The Optimum Department, I knew the word “optimum” might raise eyebrows. In a world obsessed with productivity hacks, relentless optimization, and squeezing every last drop of efficiency from every process, “optimum” can s...