The Office of Research and Sponsored Projects celebrates its 100th anniversary of sponsored research administration at U-M this year.
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Annual research volume has grown from a few thousand dollars in the early 1920s to $1.62 billion in fiscal year 2020, making U-M the No. 1 public university in research volume, according to the National Science Foundation.
It began with an early appeal in 1916 by a determined engineering dean named Mortimer E. Cooley who urged a reluctant Board of Regents to form a department of sponsored research. Such an office would administer partnerships with industry and government that could offer practical experience for professors and students, provide funding and resources for U-M, and result in a product or discovery for both U-M and external sponsors.
Cooley and a group of engineering alumni approached the regents and President Harry Hutchins to act on this research support department. Bolstering their call were leading Michigan industrialists of the time: Horace Dodge, William Durant, Henry Ford, Herbert Dow, W.K. Kellogg and Joy Morton.
The regents established the Department of Engineering Research on Oct. 1, 1920.
The 1920s through the ’30s were spent primarily working with industry sponsors. By the 1940s, U-M began to partner with federal sponsors, broadening sponsored research beyond engineering to forestry, the physical sciences, architecture, medicine, mental health and public health.
In September 1959, the university created the vice president for research position with the purpose of leading and coordinating U-M’s laboratories and institutes.
During the 1960s, U-M engaged in defense and weapons research with the U.S. Department of Defense. U-M students responded to this with office sit-ins and protests as late as 1991 with the Persian Gulf War.
A retired assistant director, Dennis Cebulski, reflected on the technological advances from the 1960s to 2000s. In the early 1980s, his request for “one of those new things called an IBM personal computer” was met with resistance. “They will get cheaper. Let’s just wait,” he was told.
Another staff member’s suggestion to purchase a new groundbreaking computer was met with a bit more enthusiasm — until leadership heard the product and brand name was “Macintosh by Apple.”
“A product with such a silly name would surely be a waste of money and not last long,” a previous director remarked. Through perseverance, by 1984, staff members received two of the first Macintosh computers ever delivered to U-M.
In the first 50 years, proposals and contracts were composed on typewriters, or reproduced through offset printing through the 1960s, or by photocopying in the 1970s. By the mid-1980s, word processing programs were used to create the documents.
By 2009, proposals could be submitted to sponsors electronically, radically changing the paper delivery of proposals en masse to ORSP to submit to sponsors like the National Institutes of Health.
