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 second Ten by Twenty progress report, the university has undertaken a range of initiatives to strengthen the institution, from streamlining student services using modern technology, to divesting from thermal coal, to making Johns Hopkins a more equitable place to learn, work, and live. 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 sources for research support.
To this end, the university is constantly expanding its connections with new partners in order to stay true to its founding principles, investing more money in research and development than any other American university. The university has also remained the top recipient of federal research dollars for the 39th year, a fact especially significant at a time when federal research commitments are decreasing across the board. Our pledge to bring knowledge to the world means we are working closer than ever with the private sector to support the entrepreneurship of our researchers. And we continue to show that an investment in Hopkins’ innovation is an investment in pushing the boundaries of our imagination with two historic long-term space exploration missions.
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 that impact its ability to maintain its extraordinary scholarly output. The university must always be calibrating its financial framework, coupling new investments and lines of revenue with targeted initiatives for cost control.
The university is deeply grateful for the philanthropy of its donors, who have made the last two fiscal years the most successful fundraising years in the university’s history. In October 2018, we marked the conclusion of the Rising to the Challenge campaign, which set records for participation as well as total dollars raised by securing more than $6 billion. Our fundraising has positioned Johns Hopkins as a leader in multidisciplinary research and patient care, while significantly strengthening financial support for faculty and students and reaffirming Hopkins’ commitment to the city and people of Baltimore. A good example is FastForward U Homewood, which supports student research and innovation and deepens our relationship to a neighborhood near the Homewood campus. In each of these endeavors, our focus has been on empowering and investing in the people who make up Hopkins, a focus that will only grow.