@Alabama68
Unfortunately, that’s difficult to do. Research is expensive and capital campaigns is not the way to achieve research funding. Research is too expensive. It can hire professors who will bring in the research funds or go towards scholarships. Achieving a national reputation in research is a long, difficult, and very competitive process.
Fortunately, Alabama is still a fine research university.
I believe “da plan” is to use a portion of the capital campaign to increase faculty (UA’s student to faculty ratio has increased, as it’s increased undergraduate enrollment), but also GA/TA grad student positions. Building up it’s grad school programs will help lead to more research funding, which leads to building up it’s grad school program, which leads to more research funding…
Of course, all of the research universities are competing for the same research funding. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. 
Hiring proven principal investigators (PI’s), should lead to an increase in research funding (and in grad student enrollment).
What’s are the external sources of research funding?
http://profiles.asee.org/profiles/6799/screen/29?school_name=The+University+of+Alabama
Total external funding is about $21.6M for Engineering
Federal =$14M
State= $6.5M
Industry = $1.0M
“Other” = $0.1M
Overall research funding is about $53M a year.
https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=report&fice=1051&id=h2
Federal government: $26M
State and local government: $7.1M
Institution funds: $16.6M
Almost 1/3 of research funding comes from institutional funds (which is typical).
More importantly, nationally, a significant amount of research funding goes into Medical/Bio and Agricultural research. UA doesn’t have an associated med school, or agricultural program (Auburn gets $48M a year in funding for the agricultural sciences), which makes it’s harder to compete with it’s peers in overall research funding. Something to keep in mind if you start comparing UA to other schools…
Was on Insider Higher Ed the other day, and up popped a pretty prominent ad recruiting new faculty (“More than 300 New Faculty Positions Being Added”). The link to the ad takes you here: https://www.ua.edu/opportunities/.