Re: Academic vs. Finance Ruth Tallman 26 Feb 1999 15:47 EST
Jim, As the one who created the pelting of your mailbox with responses to my oversimplified survey, I feel the need to respond. Over half of the responses I have received have been sent directly to me. I will be summarizing the responses early next week. The beauty of using the reply key when responding to a request such as mine is that the subject line remains the same. If I'm not interested in what is being discussed, I delete by subject. Maybe you don't have that feature. And, yes, the survey was terribly simplified. I did that for two reasons: (1) I didn't want to take much of your time to respond and (2) as you have pointed out, the variety of institutions and structures is too numerous and complicated to analyze. However, we are in the age of cutbacks and restructuring. We're constantly being invaded by consulting firms who are reviewing our structure. They talk to one or two people, pull a recommendation from their bag and are gone. We need all the ammo we can get! I'm very, very pleased with the results for my purpose and very, very thankful to have the RESADM-L as a resource! Thank you for your input. Ruth -----Original Message----- From: James R. Brett [SMTP:xxxxxx@CSULB.EDU] Sent: Friday, February 26, 1999 5:27 AM To: xxxxxx@hrinet.org Subject: Re: Academic vs. Finance I am wondering if the 1,300 or so people reading the RESADM-L listserv could agree to have future polls of a general nature taken off-line. That would mean that questions likely to stimulate scores of responses would be posed as usual, but that respondants would reply not to the service, but directly to the inquiring colleague. I am sure that most pollers would be pleased to present the refined results to us (as we have seen this week ... thank you CSULA). It is a little unusual, I think, to have those polled subjected to each incremental answer to a survey. I am not claiming human subjects protection here, just asking for a little thoughtfulness about the inevitable pelting our email inboxes take every time someone asks a very broad and general question. With respect to the current survey on reporting lines, I have to believe that the response will defy correlation. Academic organization is highly ideosyncratic and personalized. A given structure will work well with one constellation of senior leaders and then become a problem when the constellation changes. The results will show institutions bringing in $3m, $30m and $300m using the same or similar apparent structure; institutions growing and institutions fading using the same organizational structure, etc. Sometimes state laws, institutional by-laws, and federal guidelines mesh in different ways. One should mention that the institutional faculty "culture" weighs in significantly in this. At Long Beach we have a Research Office, Sponsored Programs Office, Grants and Contracts Administration Office, a Central Development Office, and nearly a dozen local College and Special Unit Development offices. It produces harmony, light, peace, truth, Justice, and about $40m in g&c and $35m in gifts and donations. We often work very closely with one another to reasonably good results. At other institutions the division of labor has produced DMZ's, thin red lines, and an occasional divot on the face of the institution. So, at your institution, where is the authority vested for training faculty members in grant proposal writing technique, AND where is the responsibility for outcomes of that activity vested? It is a rhetorical question meant to demonstrate the need to look to function rather than form. Jim -- James R. Brett, Ph.D., Director Office of University Research California State University, Long Beach 562-985-4833 fax 985-8665 http://www.csulb.edu/~research ====================================================================== Instructions on how to use the RESADM-L Mailing List, including subscription information and a web-searchable archive, are available via our web site at http://www.hrinet.org (click on "Listserv Lists") ======================================================================