The question of extra pay for faculty on grants continues to be a problem.

I know this because I have a Post-It flag on the page in my copy of A-21 -
Section J8 d (1) and (2).  The language makes it clear that charges for a
faculty member's time should be based on her/his "regular compensation".

The best description of what I believe is the intent of this found in the PHS
Grants Policy Statement which finds that overtime premiums are unallowable
for faculty at educational institutions (p. 7-13) and payments for intra-
university consultion are allowable "only in unusual circumstances" and when
the work crosses departmental lines and is in addition to the nnormal
university workload (p 7-5).

All of which misses the two fundamental issues - What are faculty paid to do?
And how do you measure/value it?

What are our faculty paid to do? - If a faculty member is paid to teach X
courses, should he/she be paid extra for working on grants?  What about
committee work?  Advising?  Professional Service?  And of course there is the
problem of X being a different value on each campus and in many cases even on
the SAME campus depending on academic discipline.  Well, I wish I could say
we had a clear workload definition but at least it is being discussed by our
faculty.

How do you measure/value it?  -  A-21 says that salary charges are  allowable
on the basis of percentage of effort and then actually admits that 100%
effort will be different at different institutions and even within an
institution.  So how much time is 10% anyway?

Tony B's solution is the one I typically use.  Reallocate a percentage of the
faculty member's time (and of course salary and fringe charges!) to the grant
and encourage the chair to use the "freed-up" departmental money to support
the activities of the faculty involved.  Best to check with your university's
finance folks before you actually suggest this.  I know of few places where
any released salary dollars simply disappear back to the general university
budget and have heard rumors that at some state schools (not Wright State
thank goodness!) that the money may even go back to the state treasury!

When all else fails to discourage the request, I use my fifth rule of
allowability.  Don't do anything you wouldn't want on the front page of your
local newspaper. Responding to a story of "Faculty gets extra $10K pay from
feds for working on grant to study  bat droppings" isn't fun.  It's
particularly bad if it's next to a story about layoffs at a local factory or
cuts to the food stamp program.

Good luck with this one!

Phil -

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Philip V. Spina, CRA
Director, Office of Research and Sponsored Programs
Wright State University
122 Allyn Hall
Dayton, Ohio 45435
(v) 513-873-2425
(f) 513-873-3781
xxxxxx@desire.wright.edu
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