Extra Pay for Faculty? Philip V. Spina, CRA 29 Mar 1995 11:49 EST
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 - ************************************************************** 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 **************************************************************