In early 2025, forty-two institutions moved into or up through Carnegie's research classification tiers. Provost offices sent out congratulatory emails. Presidents announced the milestone in board presentations. Development offices cited it in donor materials. And in HR offices across the country, people went back to processing benefit enrollments and managing open requisitions — which is exactly the problem.
Carnegie research designation is not just an academic achievement. It is a workforce commitment. The research spending, doctoral degree production, and faculty productivity that earn R2 or R1 status don't happen without a specific kind of human infrastructure: research-support staff who know how to manage complex grant portfolios, faculty development pipelines that produce and retain productive scholars, administrative systems that can absorb the operational complexity of sponsored research, and succession depth in specialized roles that take years to develop. When universities treat Carnegie designation as a reputation milestone rather than a workforce milestone, they set themselves up for a quiet erosion they won't see coming until they're already in trouble.
I've watched it happen. I've also worked inside an institution that did it right. The difference isn't resources. It's whether the president and provost understand that research excellence is, at its core, a people strategy — and whether the HR function is equipped to lead that work.
The Celebration Problem
Here's the pattern I see repeatedly. A university has spent five to ten years building its research enterprise. A visionary provost, a productive cluster of faculty in two or three disciplines, a strategic investment in doctoral programs, and suddenly the institutional research numbers cross the thresholds that earn R2 status. The campus celebrates. The Carnegie announcement goes out. Everyone feels proud of what they've built.
What nobody discusses is that the institution just made an implicit promise — to the scholarly community, to potential faculty recruits, to doctoral applicants — that it can sustain and grow what it achieved. And sustaining research classification requires continuous investment in exactly the workforce infrastructure that got the institution there in the first place. The faculty who drove those research numbers are aging. The specialized staff who managed their grants and contracts are approaching retirement. The doctoral program coordinators who built enrollment are ready to move on. The research enterprise is a living system, and it requires constant renewal.
The universities that sustain R2 status are the ones that started building workforce succession and development infrastructure before they needed it. The universities that slip back — and some do — are the ones that treated research designation as an arrival rather than a foundation.
Research excellence is not a status you achieve. It is a workforce capacity you continuously build. The moment you stop investing in the people infrastructure behind it, you've started the countdown to losing it.
What the Metrics Measure — and What They Miss
Carnegie research classifications are based on research and development expenditure and doctoral degree production. Those are the published thresholds. What they don't measure — what they can't measure — is the fragility of the workforce producing those numbers.
When I look at a research university's workforce through a strategic lens, I'm asking different questions than the Carnegie methodology asks. I want to know: What percentage of active research grant volume is managed by staff in the last three years of their careers? How many of the faculty driving doctoral completion rates are within five years of retirement? How deep is your bench of qualified candidates for research compliance, grants management, and sponsored programs roles — roles that take two to three years to fully develop and can't be easily recruited from outside the institution? What is your succession depth in department chair positions in your high-research-output disciplines?
These are the workforce intelligence questions that determine whether your research status is durable or brittle. They're the questions most institutions don't ask because they're uncomfortable — they reveal how dependent on individual people and institutional memory the research enterprise actually is.
At the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, one of the most important things I learned was that certain administrative functions — particularly in research compliance and sponsored programs — were carried almost entirely by individuals who had built that expertise over fifteen or twenty years. When one left, the impact wasn't just a vacant position. It was a loss of institutional knowledge that had taken years to accumulate and that couldn't be filled by even an excellent external hire in less than eighteen months. We had a workforce risk sitting in plain sight that nobody had labeled as such.
The Three Workforce Gaps Behind Research Stagnation
In my work with research institutions, I've identified three recurring workforce gaps that most commonly undermine research sustainability. They're not inevitable, but they are predictable — and that means they're preventable.
The succession gap in specialized research administration. Grants and contracts management, research compliance, IRB administration, technology transfer, and sponsored programs are highly specialized functions that require deep domain knowledge. Unlike many administrative roles, these positions can't be quickly filled or developed. The average time for a new grants administrator to become fully productive in a complex research environment is eighteen to twenty-four months. Most institutions have no succession plans for these roles, and most haven't identified who on their current teams has the potential and interest to grow into senior positions. When a senior research administrator leaves — and they will — the impact on research operations is immediate and lasting.
The faculty development pipeline that stops at hire. Research universities invest enormously in faculty recruitment. Many invest very little in faculty development after hire. The assumption seems to be that once you've recruited a productive scholar, the productivity will continue on its own. But faculty careers evolve. Teaching loads shift. Administrative responsibilities accumulate. The scholars who drove your research numbers during their peak productive years gradually move into department leadership, institutional service, and the winding-down stage of a long career. Unless you're continuously developing the next cohort of research-active faculty — including mid-career faculty who may need reinvestment and early-career faculty who need mentorship and protected research time — your research pipeline quietly runs dry.
The leadership gap in research-intensive departments. Department chairs in high-research-output disciplines are among the most important leaders in a research university — and among the least developed. They are typically scholars who were excellent researchers and reluctant administrators, now managing budgets, personnel decisions, tenure processes, doctoral programs, and external relationships with minimal formal preparation. When those chairs are effective, their departments thrive. When they're not — when they're conflict-averse, or poor managers, or simply exhausted by administrative demands — research productivity suffers, faculty depart, and doctoral enrollment declines. The chair role is the linchpin of the research enterprise, and most universities treat its development as an afterthought.
Building Workforce Infrastructure for Research Durability
The good news is that none of this requires resources you don't already have. It requires directing existing resources with greater intention and foresight. Here is what the institutions doing this well actually do.
They conduct what I call a research workforce intelligence review — a systematic assessment of the workforce behind their research enterprise. Which positions are concentrated knowledge risks? Where is tenure and retirement creating predictable succession challenges? What is the current depth in your research administration pipeline? How is your faculty age distribution shifting, and what does that mean for research productivity over the next decade? This review isn't complicated. But it requires the HR function to think beyond compliance and benefits, and it requires senior leadership to engage with HR as a strategic partner rather than an administrative function.
They create deliberate succession pathways in research administration. This means identifying high-potential staff in grants management, compliance, and sponsored programs early, investing in their development before you need them in senior roles, and building structured learning relationships between experienced professionals and emerging ones. It means making these roles visible and valued in the institution's culture — not treating research administration as invisible infrastructure but as the backbone of the research mission.
They reinvest in mid-career faculty with intention. Research productivity follows a curve, and mid-career is the inflection point. Faculty who receive strategic support — course releases, research infrastructure, mentorship toward senior scholarly goals — continue producing. Faculty who feel invisible at mid-career often shift their energy toward administration, consulting, or departure. The institutions that understand this create formal mid-career investment programs, even modest ones, that send a clear message: we see your trajectory and we're investing in it.
They develop department chairs as a leadership cohort, not just as administrators. This means providing chairs with genuine management development — not just orientation to HR policies, but substantive preparation for the leadership dimensions of the role: managing performance, building departmental culture, navigating conflict, and developing faculty. It means creating peer networks among chairs so they learn from each other's experience. And it means giving chairs real feedback on their leadership effectiveness, not just their administrative compliance.
What This Asks of HR — and of Senior Leadership
I want to be direct about something. None of this happens if HR stays in its traditional lane. Workforce succession planning in research-intensive environments requires HR to have a sophisticated understanding of the research enterprise — the specialized roles, the career trajectories, the talent market dynamics, the knowledge risks embedded in key individuals. It requires HR to translate institutional research strategy into workforce implications. And it requires HR to have the credibility and relationships to bring those implications to the president, provost, and deans in a way that actually influences resource and planning decisions.
That's a different HR function than most universities have built. And it's a legitimate reason that external strategic advisory support can accelerate this work — not because internal HR isn't capable, but because bringing an outside perspective to workforce strategy, particularly in an environment where HR has historically been positioned as operational rather than strategic, can shift the conversation in ways that internal advocacy can't.
The universities that will sustain and grow their research status over the next decade are not going to be the ones that simply celebrated their Carnegie designation. They're going to be the ones that asked the harder question: now that we're here, what does it actually take to stay? The answer to that question is, at its core, a people strategy. And the time to build it is before you need it.