10/9/2011: Moira Kiltie of the VP for Research and Faculty Development office announces UO's 2012 Summer research award program:
The purpose of the SRA program is to stimulate research by providingThis could be as much as $110,000 - for a faculty that numbers 660. Wow, that's more than $150 each! Meanwhile UO has increased spending on police by about $1 million a year. We are paying $150,000 for the NCAA investigation. The athletic department spends $120,000 on free cars for the assistant coaches.
faculty with sustained time for scholarly and academic endeavor.
Proposals may be submitted by faculty who meet the eligibility criteria.
Up to twenty awards in the amount of $5,500 each will be granted.
Awardees will be notified on or about February 15, 2012.
Now it appears even this modest summer research award program for the faculty has been gutted. The new renamed policy is here. One notable change?
Funds may NOT be requested 1) to replace or fund faculty salary or stipend,Which sort of makes it tough for the humanities profs. Meanwhile the free cars for the athletic department and VP's roll on. If you know if any faculty were involved in this decision, or if it was just another Johnson Hall putsch, please post a comment.
She's managed to piss off the humanities *and* the science faculty?
ReplyDeleteImpressive isn't it. That is no mean feat. Rarely accomplished even in a dysfunctional setting such as ours!
DeleteUOMatters, you are behind the times. Espy eliminated the stipend last year. It's just that last year nobody noticed--unless you were actually applying and read the fine print.
ReplyDeleteWhat's different this year is that even more changes have been introduced: new emphases for the program, a whole new category for people who can make up work for a GTF (again, too bad for folks in the humanities!), and the fantasy of matching research monies from departments and institutes.
NTTFs are eligible now, which is great. But the total number is only 20, and the money (again, unless you can find an excuse for a GTF) is the same.
This time there was a great big roll-out though, so maybe, just maybe Espy will experience a little backlash.
which is great?
DeleteIt was a putsch, no question.
ReplyDeleteDoes any one know what similar programs are like at other universities? (Structure, $) Especially other AAU universities?
ReplyDeleteHer office has emphasized zero support for faculty salaries, research center directors included. There must be a numbers-crunching reason behind it - what is it?
ReplyDeleteWould salary dollars get included in the F&A rate calculation?
DeleteGeneral Dog on these issues says:
Delete1. The second thing that appalled the dog when the dog first became a duck was the incredibly paltry size of the summer research fund for faculty. At other Universities that employed dogs (temporarily), of similar size as UO, the research pot was on order of 200-400K (you can google on faculty summer research program/awards to find what other universities do).
When this dog first arrived, the pot was 80K and it hasn't got much larger. The dog actually served on a couple of early rounds of review proposals for this program and found those reviews to be biased and amateur.
Overall, this is the one thing that a university with an under-salaried faculty can actually do which is to devote more resources to enhance the probability that an individual faculty member can get a month of summer salary. The UO has not been good at doing this.
2. Dog reminds of the legacy ICC model we have which was meant to initiate and catalyze emerge interdisciplinary centers of research and "excellence" (which is all good), but that ICC model should have been changed in the mid 1990s when most of the institutes were well established. Currently we are paying a large price in lack of infrastructure, lack of computing support (tho this is changing for the better), lack of available summer research money, etc, etc, because in my view, integrated over long time scales, too much ICC return when back to institutes without proper oversite. Much of that then was used to offer very expensive startup packages, somewhat under the assumption that high start packages equated with the most talented faculty (I don't believe this personally but there is no institute for dogs, only dog houses).
The bottom line is that over the last 20 years, I don't believe that the ICC model was equitable for the bulk of campus. Others will argue differently. Nonetheless, this is the legacy that Espy has inherited.
3. The office of the VPR inherited much (well a shitload if you want to be precise) of obligated debt due to Linton promises - some associated with the new LISB building. Its gonna take 3-4 years, most likely, for this obligated debt to get sorted out and processed.
In sum, I think mostly what is going on now, in 2012, is the accumulated manifestation of a legacy based ICC model that now is not very relevant to a campus that is now as large as ours.
P.S. Personally I think the new approach is BAD (no faculty
salary for summer) and also GOOD (incentives to improve graduate student funding) and I believe the latter is more of a priority with the new VPR than the former. This might be the right approach given our graduate school enrollment problem. I am sure from the individual faculty view its probably the wrong approach which is then contributing to the anti-ESPY sentiment. As I said before, I think this is unfair on the timescale it has
emerged.
Dog, I am all for improving graduate student funding, but this is a bass-ackwards way of doing it. For those faculty whose research does not have a meaningful role for graduate students to play (e.g., most humanists), it's a waste of both the faculty and the student's time to come up with something to play this game. Students should receive better funding for their research, as should faculty--plain and simple.
DeleteAnd this Cat has served also, perhaps more recently, on the SRA review cmte. They come in from all fields and only a handful are represented on the committee itself, so there's an element of arbitrariness to the review process. But no more so than any other field-open fellowship cmte, I'd wager. And certainly I witnessed no obvious bias.
Dog, the institutes get less than 25% of grant indirects. With that money, the institutes are expected to pay for pre and post-grant administration, accounting, purchasing, travel, IT, etc. With the high OPE, it is not enough money to provide good support.
DeleteDog says
Deleteyes that is the current situation, but over the past 20 years
that 25% has fluctuated a lot and has not been totally uniform
among the institutes, even though JTM tried to make in uniform
when he was VPR
There is also no question that one of the funding problems here is exactly the high OPE for members, postdocs, programmers, researches, in these institutes. Indeed, I got my own (non-institute) funding problems now because the damn OPE never seems
to stop growing.
So
1) consistent with what I said about changing legacy - we need now, in my opinion only, much better centralized services for
the institutes rather than making each institute do its own thing - in the past that might have been sense but I think
the world is different now.
2) there is no 3
Dog to Cat
DeleteYes, I agree this new emphasis penalizes people in the humanities.
My bias window was in the early 1990's - I imagine and hope
things have changed. In my term of service it was mostly a departmental allocation procedure amongst the humanities and social sciences.
Dog, I sort of agree that some centralization of services is needed. But one fear is that the VPR will fund these services and then remove the ICC to the institutes, making them make requests for use of ICC funds. In some ways this is good, but it also then makes a group successful if they can pitch 'big ideas' to the VPR, rather than being good at getting external funding. So it could lead to not giving resources to those best able to bring it in (reducing the overall funding) and lead to vacuous buzzword initiatives being funded. So not a worry about centralization directly, but what it could unintentionally lead to.
DeleteDog says
Deleteagreed this needs to be done in a balanced and sensible way -
and also agreed we don't need any more Lintonesque favoritism