CAS Policy Committee Overview on Centers and Institutes

(passed April 30, 2001)

It is resolved that this document be adopted, as it expresses our current view, and be sent to the FSEC for university-wide consideration.

 

Action Item 1: Chain of Command for Centers and Institutes

Background: Centers and Institutes often cross-traditional departmental and college boundaries in terms of the primary appointments of the faculty who are members of the Centers/Institutes. To further complicate this issue, financial support may come from the office of the Dean of a College, the Vice-President for Research, or the Provost. Currently, there is no clear policy as to who a Center Director reports to at the University at Buffalo.

Proposal: Who a Center/Institute Director reports to should follow the money, i.e., whoever is funding the Center (Dean, VP for Research, Provost) is who a Center reports to. If no funding comes to the Center/Institute, then a Center or Institute should write an annual report and send it to one or more designated University official(s), such as the cognizant Dean, Vice-President for Research and/or the Provost.

 

Action Item 2: Allocation of Credit for Grants and Indirect Cost Recovery

Background: One measure of success of an academic department of Center/Institute for such purposes as national ranking or measures of productivity is the grant dollars brought in by a given Department or Center/Institute. Furthermore, allocation of such credit for signoff on the green sheets for submitted extramural grants must be allocated across departments and Centers/Institutes. If a grant is obtained by a Center or Institute, then the credit for this grant must be shared by several departments, as well as the
Center/Institute.

Rationale: In order to distribute credit for grants obtained through Centers/Institutes, one must:
(1) allocate credit across investigators, and then
(2) allocate credit between departments and the Center/Institute.

A suggested allocation for (1) and (2) are listed below:

Proposal 2.i: All investigators (Principal Investigator and Co-Investigators) on a grant should reach a consensus as to the allocation of credit, such as occurs on the routing sheet for grants. Two possible formulas were discussed. In the cases where workload and resources can clearly be allocated to each investigator (e.g., each investigator can clearly be identified with specific expenses on a grant), then the allocation across departments can be based on the proportion of grant costs to a given investigator, and their home department or departments. In cases where there is no clear separation of grant resources across investigators, then the allocation of credit to a department will be based on the percentage effort of each investigator on the project. If three investigators each put 20% time on a grant, each investigator’s home department is credited with 1/3 of the credit for the grant.

Proposal 2.ii: In all cases, some of the credit for extramural grants should be given to the Centers/Institute, and some of the credit should be given to each investigator’s home department or departments. Assuming that substantial resources are provided to the Center/Institute by a given investigator’s home department (e.g., faculty academic salary, secretarial or technical support, phone, mail, photocopy services), then it is appropriate that the Center/Institute and the department split credit for the grant. At one extreme, in the case where limited resources are provided by the home department to the Center/Institute, then less than half of the credit should go to the department, with the larger percentage to the Center/Institute. At the other extreme, where virtually all of the resources are provided by one or more departments, then most of the credit (and IDC recovery) should go to the department, while the smaller percentage should go to the Center or Institute.

Summary of Item 2: The allocation of credit/IDC recovery for a given department or Center/Institute represents the product of the credit allocated in proposal 2i and proposal 2ii. If 50% of a grant credit goes to the PI, and 50% of that credit goes to their home departments and 50% to the Center/Institute, then 25%of the credit or IDC recovery goes to the specified department, and 25% to the specified Center/Institute. It must be recognized that department chairs and center directors likely have different views of the relative contributions of a department to center activities, and that these issues need to be discussed and agreed upon prior to the signing off for a grant.