Institution Building
To strengthen our position as one of the world’s premier academic research institutions, Johns Hopkins must marshal the required resources, policies, and arrangements to support the advancement of our academic mission.
This includes gathering information and creating processes that appropriately inform our decision making; fortifying our competitiveness for federal and other research funding; and growing our endowment through philanthropy and other sources of investment.
Through these efforts, we will build an even stronger university, one that is able to invest strategically in our core academic priorities and the groundbreaking discoveries of tomorrow.
The Goals
Strengthen the institutional, budgetary, technological, and policy frameworks necessary to set priorities, allocate resources, and realize the highest standards of academic excellence.
To meet the challenges before us and strengthen our position as one of the world’s premier academic institutions, the university will need to construct processes and mechanisms that empower informed and considered decision making; increase capacity for data generation, aggregation, and analysis; and allocate resources in a manner that aligns with our principles and mission.
Since the first Ten by Twenty progress report, the university has undertaken a range of such initiatives, from charting a course for improved diversity and inclusion, to combating sexual assault, to committing to greater sustainability. As we move forward, we must continue to adhere to best practices, prioritize self-evaluation and informed decision making, and safeguard our commitments to innovation and excellence.
Reinforce our position as the leading university recipient of competitively funded federal research support, while increasing the amount of annual research investment from other sources with appropriate cost recovery.
Federal funding fuels our institution. However, we are operating in a time of undeniable fiscal uncertainty, and so our reliance on federally sponsored research funding leaves us vulnerable to further reductions. The university must continue to develop forward-looking strategies to enhance our competitiveness for federal funding while we diversify our relationships with nonfederal resources for research support.
To this end, the university is constantly expanding its connections with new partners. Our pledge to bring knowledge to the world through our discoveries means we are working closer than ever with the private sector to support the entrepreneurship of our researchers. And we’ve combined forces with the state of Maryland’s E-Nnovation program, which is bringing fresh investments to our faculty and programming.
Develop the resource base necessary to support investments in key academic priorities.
Johns Hopkins’ bequest creating the institutions that bear his name was the first of many extraordinary acts of philanthropy in the history of Johns Hopkins University. These commitments have launched lifesaving innovations, fueled fundamental discoveries, and touched the lives of countless students. Even so, the university faces considerable resource challenges, with a relatively modest endowment and smaller pools of funding at the central or divisional level. The university must calibrate its approach to the financial framework of our university, coupling new lines of revenue with targeted initiatives for cost control.
The university is grateful for the philanthropy of its donors, which has made the last two fiscal years the most successful fundraising years in the university’s history. The Rising to the Challenge campaign has been so successful that we extended it by a year in March 2016, and to date it has raised more than $4.6 billion toward its $5 billion goal. We also saw more involvement than ever from our alumni, including Michael Bloomberg’s unprecedented $300 million gift to mark the 100th anniversary of the Bloomberg School of Public Health to tackle significant public health challenges here in the United States. The university has also remained the top recipient of federal research dollars for the 37th year, and that’s especially significant at a time when federal research commitments are decreasing across the board. Each of these endeavors has been focused on empowering and investing in the people who make up Hopkins, a focus that will only grow.