On Wed, 19 Aug 1998, William Campbell wrote:

> For years, I've been computing the number of proposals submitted per faculty
> member (i.e., dividing the number of proposals submitted in a given year by
> FTE) in each of our three colleges and including these data in my annual
> report.  Makes a very graphic representation of comparative grant activity, I
> think.  The differences are startling.  My university is college-oriented, so
> those are the units I compare.  One could easily use the same method to compare
> departments, divisions, whatever.
>
Yes, I have no doubt that this method yields interesting results. But we
didn't just want to compare averages.  We have roughly the same number of
submissions as faculty members, but all of those submissions actually came
from less than one-fourth of the faculty, and there is a large overlap
from year to year, so that perhaps 60-70% rarely or never submit a
proposal.  This is the sort of thing I was hoping to compare across
campuses.

As you might suspect, we are trying to understand these numbers in order
to come up with a strategy (and probably to defend that strategy also)
with the aim of increasing not just the number of submissions overall, but
the base from which it comes each year.

Thanks for the information, please keep it coming!

Rick Francis
Manager of Grant Information
University of Toledo