Grants vs Contracts bedevils lots of us.

Fundamentally, any agreement you sign is a contract in the legal sense.
Hence, I use "agreement" consistently to cover both.

The Federal government differentiates legally: PL 95-224.  A grant is
"assistance", whereas a contract is "procurement".  Assistance is to help
the recipient do something it wants to do, to "accomplish a public purpose
of support or stimulation..." and must be authorized by statute;
Procurement is to obtain goods and services "for the direct benefit or use
of the Federal Government", i.e., to accomplish its mission, and no
statutary authorization is needed.  Grants follow grant regulations (OMB
Circulars and agency regulations), whild contracts follow Federal
Acquisition regulations.  Broadly, grant regulations are included by
reference and only a few references to a few accumulations gets the job
done, and the award is documented by a standardized form with a few blanks
filled in.  Contracts are complete in themselves, with everything specified
in the document; though some clauses are included by reference, they are
included individually, with specific optional wordings clearly identified.
Cooperative Agreements are like grants, except there is more governmental
involvement in the performance.  Beyond that, there is no legal difference
for the research administrator.
However, back in the 40's, and again later, the Comptroller General
determined that a grant had the properties of a contract that it was an
agreement enforcable at law.

HOWEVER, we cannot forget that there are to our faculty real semantic
differences, with significant qualatative and emotional connotations -- but
each person has a slightly different set of these!  Broadly, a "grant"
usually implies peer review of a different quality than a contract, and
therefore is considered "better" to many.  A grant gives the P.I. greater
leeway to make changes in tactics and strategy, so long as the original
goal is not changed, whereas the more precise specification of task in a
"contract" often leaves the P.I. with the feeling her professional freedom
has been restricted.  "Agreement" avoids using these semantically loaded
terms, unless you need to differentiate for technical reasons.

Even sponsors have heavy semantic loading in their uses of the words.  Most
eleemosynary or voluantary sponsors (foundations, etc.) use "grant" on the
theory that they are "helping" rather than "procuring", but their
agreements can be enforced in court under contract law.  But just yesterday
I had a commercial sponsor say, "This is contract research!" to mean that
our P.I. had no novel input into the scope of work, and therefore could not
possibly create an invention while performing it.

I strongly suggest that a research administrator not differentiate unless
there is a readon to refer to any technical difference that might arise;
otherwise you'll step on someone's ego!

Chuck

At 07:55 AM 10/22/97 -0400, you wrote:
>For internal tracking purposes, we are looking for clear-cut criteria for
>classing new sponsored projects as either grants or contracts.  In many
>cases this distinction is obvious; however, it is not always obvious in the
>mix of large and small, basic and applied sponsored projects that we perform.
>Our starting points are:
>1. What does the award document say?
>2. Who is the primary beneficiary?
>If the primary beneficiary is the sponsor, we consider the award a contract;
>if the primary beneficiary is more the public, we consider the award a grant.
>
>We would appreciate any input regarding solutions to this problem used at
>other institutions, or resource documents.
>
>
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