Ball State is experiencing a slight decline in external grants since drawing in $25.2 million during the 2002-2003 fiscal year.
External grant money supports the university's nationally recognized programs such as Freshman Connections, James Pyle, assistant vice president for research of the Office of Academic Research and Sponsored Programs, said.
Pyle said he considers the small drop in external money a resting period because the university has received large amounts of money in recent years.
"The last two years we've had about $25 million," Pyle said. "We may be down a little but we've had so much growth and it takes some catching up to."
Part of the decline in external grants coming into the university is the lack of proposals with large budgets, Pyle said. The research office handles proposals that ask for money ranging from $100 to $10 million.
"Sometimes we get a string of very large ambitious proposals," Pyle said. "We've had a pattern where there were more small proposals."
Pyle wrote a letter in the research office's December newsletter addressing the slump and suggesting ways to sponsor growth of external funds. However, the amount of funds has increased in the past month, he said. If the turnaround continues, then external grants will stay near the $25 million mark of the past two years.
The research office serves as a liaison between faculty, administrators and students who want to receive grant money and the organizations that are able to provide those funds. The office helps put together the project proposal and budget and also assists in finding the organizations that are most likely to provide funding.
The office helped coordinate the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation with Warren Watson, director of the Journalism Institute for Digital Education, to further the reach of the J-Ideas program.
Watson and his research colleague Christine Girton, assistant director of J-Ideas, were approached by the foundation and asked if they would organize a national meeting in Arlington, Va. to discuss a study on student attitudes toward the First Amendment as well as create a Web site on the topic.
"There's a lot of foundations that have money," Watson said. "You have to find the right foundation with the right project."
The drop in external money is minuscule and temporary, Pyle said. He expects the amount of external funds to remain high for years to come.
"Hopefully we're going to continue to see that kind of monetary volume and hopefully it will continue to grow as well," he said.
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