There are some efforts in this vein within academia, but they are very weak in the United States. The U.S. Research Software Engineer Association (https://us-rse.org/) represents one such attempt at increasing awareness about the need for dedicated software engineers in scientific research and advocates for a formal recognition that software engineers are essential to the scientific process.
Realistically though even if the necessity of research software engineering were acknowledged at the institutional level at the bulk of universities, there would still be the problem of universities paying way below market rate for software engineering talent...
To some degree, universities alone cannot effect the change needed to establish a professional class of software engineers that collaborate with researchers. Funding agencies such as the NIH and NSF are also responsible, and need to lead in this regard.
In terms of tangible results, Princeton at least has created a dedicated team of software engineers as part of their research computing unit (https://researchcomputing.princeton.edu/software-engineering).
Realistically though even if the necessity of research software engineering were acknowledged at the institutional level at the bulk of universities, there would still be the problem of universities paying way below market rate for software engineering talent...
To some degree, universities alone cannot effect the change needed to establish a professional class of software engineers that collaborate with researchers. Funding agencies such as the NIH and NSF are also responsible, and need to lead in this regard.