Morgan State University’s Bold Journey Toward Elite R1 Research Status

FDr. David K. Wilsonor Morgan State University president Dr. David K. Wilson, the quest to attain R1 status – the highest designation a university can get for its research enterprise – is about more than just attaining some sort of higher education seal of approval. 

Rather, it’s about attracting world-class faculty, creating more research opportunities for students, and coming up with new innovations that benefit everyday people – particularly those in Baltimore, where the sprawling HBCU campus is located. 

“We’ve been very intentional about this,” Wilson told Diverse during a recent interview in his fourth-floor office at Truth Hall.

“We’re not pursuing R1 for R1’s sake,” Wilson says. “We are pursuing it for these kinds of opportunities that will come to our students, that will come to our communities here in Baltimore.”

Wilson reveals that when he initially set out in 2018 to achieve R1 status for Morgan State, he didn’t fully understand what it took for an institution to earn the designation. 

“I have to be frank, we didn’t really know what that meant in terms of how institutions got there,” says Wilson, who was one of 18 college or university presidents who took part in a recent project to simplify the research classification system for universities, officially known as the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The group’s work came to fruition in February, when the Carnegie Foundation and the American Council on Education published a new version of the system.
 

But if the process to become an R1 was difficult even for a veteran university president to see, that’s largely because the process was so arcane. From 2005 to 2021, for instance, the classification system considered 10 different variables.

“The previous methodology was a little bit of a black box in terms of how it works and how an institution got to be R1. And I think as a result of that there were institutions that were not exactly sure what they needed to do to be R1,” says Sara Gast, deputy executive director for the Carnegie Classifications. Developed by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education in 1973, the classification system is now housed within the American Council on Education, or ACE, a non-profit association that advocates for higher education policy on behalf of colleges and universities.

With the revised classification system, Gast says, the threshold for becoming an R1 is clearer and simpler. In order to attain R1 status, an institution must do two things: 1) spend at least $50 million annually on research and 2) award at least 70 research doctorates per year.

Figures provided by Morgan State show the university has been gradually approaching those benchmarks in recent years. For instance, whereas Morgan State spent $13 million on research in 2018, the figure stood at $43.9 million in 2023 and was expected to surpass $50 million for 2024.

“We’re knocking on the door to being an R1,” says Dr. Willie E. May, vice president of research and economic development at Morgan State.

Under Wilson’s tenure, Morgan State has already become an R2 – or “high” research spending and doctoral producing school – under the Carnegie system. R1 signifies “very high” research spending and doctoral production.

Making history

If Morgan State achieves R1 status, it would become just the second HBCU to do so. Howard University, located in Washington, D.C., became the first HBCU to attain R1 status in February when the latest Carnegie classifications were released.

“Achieving R1 status would place Morgan among the nation’s most research-intensive universities, but more than that, it would affirm what so many of us already know— that HBCUs are leaders in shaping knowledge production and driving innovation,” says Dr. Royel M. Johnson, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California and an expert on HBCUs. “Frankly, many more HBCUs would already be R1 if not for decades of systemic underfunding and structural inequities,” Johnson says.

“If Morgan gets there, it could open major doors—more federal research funding, stronger faculty recruitment, and expanded graduate programs.," he adds.   “But it also sends a powerful message: that Black institutions belong at the center of knowledge creation, not on the margins.”

In a profound show of confidence in his students, Wilson proffered that a person could walk the campus and find undergraduates who could articulate the significance of their university’s quest for R1 status “more persuasively than their president can.”

That proved correct. Reece Winmond, a senior who is majoring in electrical engineering, nailed the answer during an impromptu interview.

"A Leveling of the Playing Field”

I believe the R1 status would help us expand our knowledge as undergraduate students in terms of both industry and now transitioning into research, having that versatility to be able to choose if they want to go into academia or industry,” says Winmond, adding that the topic of research has become more relevant on campus in recent years.

“More labs are trying to recruit people, more labs are trying to get students interested in doing research and doing graduate programs,” says Winmond, who was working with a small vehicle in the hallway as part of a project to develop a fully autonomous wheelchair for airport travelers to get to their departure gates on their own instead of relying on airport personnel. The autonomous wheelchair project is one of several that Wilson points to as an example of how Morgan State’s research projects can benefit everyday people.
 

A progress report for 2018-2023 – and other university sources – lists a series of research feats at Morgan State. Those feats include getting an HBCU record high 13 patents in 2023. The university won a series of multimillion-dollar federal grants for projects that span the social as well as physical sciences. One project is meant to strengthen Maryland’s oyster industry. 

Morgan State is home to eight research centers of excellence that focus on a range of issues, from cybersecurity and urban violence to health equity and climate research. 

Dr. Kevin Kornegay, director of the Cybersecurity Assurance and Policy Center – one of the eight research centers – says R1 status would bring a certain higher education “street cred” that puts Morgan State in the company of other R1 institutions.

“It’s almost like a leveling of the playing field, so to speak,” says Kornegay, as he showed a visitor the Center of Reverse Engineering and Assured Microelectronics, otherwise known as the CREAM lab, which was filled with electronic devices that students use to study how the devices are susceptible to enemy attacks.

“Our job is to create an environment and train the students so that they can learn how to defend,” Kornegay adds. When Wilson began to argue in recent years that it was time for at least one HBCU to become an R1, not everyone thought it was an achievable goal.

“Many of us here were wondering what the heck he had been smoking,” May, the vice president of research, told Diverse.

Still, to make Wilson’s vision a reality, May tapped Wayne E. Swann, the director of technology transfer, to create a “digital twin” of the process used in the Carnegie Classification system. The idea was to develop a tool that would enable Morgan State leaders to use data to “reverse engineer” – as one of the school’s PR hacks put it – the process of achieving R1 status.

“It was a smart system,” May explains. “So, we used this tool to up our game.”

The tool – a dashboard of sorts – enabled the university to track where it stood in relation to others on various factors, such as investments in research. That information helped guide Morgan State’s spending priorities.

“We had already figured out that it took a minimum of $50 million to get there,” May recalls. At the same time, there were schools that were spending “hundreds of millions” on research expenditures but still hadn’t achieved R1 status. So, they began to look at what else Morgan State might be missing in comparison to R1schools.

Despite the usefulness of the tool, they kept the tool under wraps. “We didn’t share it with anyone,” May says. “It was our tool.”
 

Looking beyond

Wilson, who has served as president of Morgan State since 2010 and has already guided the institution from R3 to R2 status, is looking at positioning the university well for his successors.

“We’re in this with a long game,” Wilson says. “And at the end of my tenure, I would want to have left this institution in a position where under perhaps the next two presidents that would follow me, then Morgan would be invited to join the AAU, the Association of American Universities,” he says of the organization that boasts the nation’s top research universities.

“So, it’s not, ‘oh, get to R1 and then just park and celebrate.’ It is, ‘How do you build the infrastructure? How do you create these kinds of research opportunities where you get to R1 – and we will get to R1. I’m very hopeful of that,” Wilson says. “Based on the data right now, we are on the right track.”