Giving Less Than 100%

Here is how I think the summer salary (from grants) thing should work:

If I can get some summer salary from a grant, that's great. If I can't or if I need to spend my summer salary on another grant-related research activity, that's fine. No matter what my summer salary situation is during the 3 months when the university does not pay my salary, I advise my graduate students, I advise my undergrad researchers, I write new grant proposals, I go to conferences, I read, I think, I write papers, I discuss Science with various colleagues, and I even occasionally think about what I will teach in the fall. I basically do whatever I think is best for my researchers and our research program and my overall job as a professor. I adore having this flexibility. For me, one of the excellent things about being a professor is that there is an extended interlude in the year when I have a lot of freedom to set my own schedule and priorities.

Here is how my university thinks the summer salary (from grants) thing should work:

If faculty get summer salary from a grant and are paid at their usual salary rate for a specified time period, they can do nothing other than activities related to that grant: no writing of papers unrelated to that grant, no research activities unrelated to that grant, no travel to conferences unrelated to that grant, and certainly not any writing of proposals for a new grant.

During that time, we aren't even supposed to spend significant time with graduate students who are not supported on the same grant that pays our summer salary for that time block. We are supposed to say "Xavier, I'm sorry, but I can't help you with that until next month when I am no longer being paid summer salary" or "Benita, we should discuss that before July 7 because after that I can't talk to you about your research until August 12", but "Omar, yes of course we can meet this afternoon. You and I are being paid on the same grant right now."

And what about graduate students who want to defend their thesis in the summer? They'd better find out the summer funding situations of all their committee members or they are out of luck entirely. It would be better to have a committee comprised entirely of faculty with no summer salary from sponsored grants because these faculty can do whatever they want.

Although one might think it is in the best interests of the university that faculty write grant proposals and give papers at conferences, woe betide faculty with proposal deadlines or conference abstract deadlines in the summer.

And what are we supposed to do about reviewing or editing manuscripts and proposals during this time?

I can see the reasoning behind not paying someone from a particular grant while they are working on another project. I don't like it if the policy is going to be interpreted so strictly as to prohibit legitimate professional activities, but I can understand the principle. What really bothers me, however, is when the definition of the working day is not confined to standard hours and faculty are not even supposed to do other work, including write proposals, in their free time -- nights and weekends, for example. Apparently whatever time we work, whether it is 40 hours or 168 hours a week, that time belongs to the grant that is paying us, and we can work on no other projects, not even in the wee hours of the morning while sitting on the porch with a laptop and some friendly cats. The grant owns all our working time, however much that is.

And in fact, if we are working, we should be working in an "approved site", which does not include homes, cafes, or the various nooks we find to work while our offspring are engaged in enriching structured activities (sports, music etc.).

I don't get that either. Is the assumption that if we are not sitting at our desks, we are likely to be lying on a beach somewhere? If we were allowed to work at home, do the ethicsmeisters fear that faculty would interpret this as permission to do "research" in posh night clubs and resorts (and charge the expenses to our grants)?

A widely held view among physical scientists is that our biomed colleagues would do just that, and, in fact, that without these strict policies, they would all be paying themselves double so that they could support their cocaine habits, even though they force their grad students and underpaid postdocs to manufacture most of their own personal drug supplies in their research labs. {<-- attempt at joke}.

The good news is that we are allowed to attend a conference in the summer if the theme of the conference is related to the grant that is paying our salary at that time. I am confused about this, though. If we attend a conference to present a paper on the topic of the grant that is paying our salary, are we allowed to attend other talks, even if they are off-topic? Can we chat with colleagues about other research? Will we be banned from the poster sessions because they are rife with unethical possibilities for viewing graphic depictions of unrelated research?

The people who tally effort have run amok.

The solution, of course, is to claim effort at <100% during any time period that requires working on multiple projects, advising various students, writing new proposals, or attending a conference.

That's doable. Instead of being paid x weeks of summer salary at 100% effort on a grant, I can be paid at a lower % effort for longer. And then I can have the kind of summer that I want to have, and everyone benefits: my research group, my university, my cats, and me.

Problem solved? Maybe in practice, but the policy that necessitates these accounting games makes me want to gnash my ears.

Please Share Your Worst Accounting Nightmares

It would really cheer me up a lot if some of you would share stories of your worst accounting woes, especially if some of your experiences are worse than those currently afflicting my departmental colleagues and me.

Get competitive. Send in your worst accounting nightmare story. It doesn't even have to be true, though I suspect there is no need for fiction.

Here are 2 contributions to a group-accounting-woe-wallow:

1. A colleague of mine submitted a large number of receipts for several professional trips. All the expenses were on his personal credit card(s) and added up to quite a lot (thousands) because he had also paid upfront for the travel of his graduate students and a postdoc. The reimbursement was delayed and delayed and delayed for months.

Finally he found out why: He had not indicated how many people were in each hotel room. This is not part of the instructions. This is not a line on the forms. This is not something that ever had to be listed before. This is one of those Mystery Traps that accountants set for the unwary. In this case, the travel was within the US, where it doesn't matter if there are 1, 2, or 4 people in a hotel room; the price is the same: SO WHY DO THE ACCOUNTANTS CARE? And if they do care, why not just ask for the information that is holding up the reimbursement?

2. I recently had to approve a form that lists the people who are receiving salary from a certain grant. In fact, in the time frame indicated on the form, I paid the salaries of one graduate student, one undergraduate, and one postdoc from this grant. The form, however, which contains an automatically generated list of people paid, using information in the university's personnel database, indicated that I had hired no one and was paying no one. I asked the accountants about this. Even though all of these people have been paid in the time frame of the form I had to approve, because the effort reporting time frame of the university does not match the reporting time frame of the form, the people whose salaries are being paid by the grant don't show up on the form that is supposed to report how many people received salary from the grant. Apparently this problem can't be fixed and I have to approve a form that is in error. If I don't approve the form so that it can go on its merry way up the approval chain, the consequences for me and my research group are not good. If I refuse to sign the form because it has incorrect information on it, the consequences for me and my research group are not good.

Hence my plea for Your Accounting Nightmares.

*** NOTE: Owing to unexpected circumstances, I will have limited internet access for a few days and will probably only moderate comments once/day. There might also be an interruption in posts until regular internet access resumes. ***

Don't Make Me Be Unethical

Universities and funding agencies have good reasons for developing detailed systems of accountability for how grants are spent and how grant funded researchers spend their grant funded time, not to mention effort. Among physical scientists, it is common to blame the bio scientists for the never-ending ethics training and insane paperwork. (I'll just put that out there, and then drop it.)

As regular FSP readers surely know by now, some of these rules and regulations make me crazy.

Example: I found myself promising recently that I would never ever ever use a software site license that I purchased with one grant for any activity not related to that specific grant.

I suppose that in some ways that makes sense, but it would make more sense if what I had purchased was something that could potentially have non-research related uses: a car (in which I might drive my cats to the beach for ice cream cones), a yacht (in which I might have wild parties, when I wasn't being seasick), even a computer (on which I might blog and upload cat wrestling videos to YouTube).

But consider that this software, which has one and only one highly specialized purpose and which cannot be used for anything unrelated to that one highly specialized purpose, can and will only be used in the pursuit of Scientific Knowledge.

Would it really be unethical if I used my grant-purchased site license for a different project? According to the rules and regulations, it would be unethical to do so, but it would be stupid not to. Furthermore, it would be a waste of money to purchase an expensive site license for every single project that could use that software.

The rules should be rewritten to say that purchases such as this one can only be used in the pursuit of Scientific Knowledge. That way, everyone wins. My research group gets to do lots of interesting science things without losing sleep over the ethics, the funding agency facilitates the interesting science through their generous support and sensible policies, we proclaim our results to the world and thank the funding agency in our papers, and everyone is happy.

Effort Time?

Some people tend to end statements with an upward, question mark type of inflection. There has been much study and discussion about the reasons and consequences of the question mark inflection, particularly for women. I don't tend to speak this way, but recently I did, to my peril.

One day not so long ago I was working on Project 1 when a student working on Project 2 needed some help, so I helped him for a while, and then, after I briefly went back to Project 1, another student came by who had questions about Project 3, so I helped him, and then I got email from a co-author with the reviews of a manuscript related to Project 4 and we discussed the reviews and then I dove briefly back into that manuscript and thought about some things we might change and that reminded me that I need to deal with reviews for Project 5, so I worked on that for a while, and then I got an alert by email about a journal and so I did some journal-grazing and read-skimmed some papers relevant to Project 6 and then I went back to Project 1 for a while before being interrupted again.. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. And then, that same afternoon, I had to talk to the accountant about effort reporting for Project 1 and she asked "What % of your effort -- not time -- will you spend exclusively on this project during the effort reporting period?"

I thought back on my day, which was fairly typical for the summer, randomly guessed a number between 1 and 100, and spoke it as a question: 15?

She said: That's a lot. Are you sure?

I said: 2? 7?

She asked: Which of those is correct?

I said: Neither. The correct answer is "I don't know."

She said: We need to use the correct number. OK, how much time will you spend on this project?

I asked: In hours?

She said: No, in % of your total time of 40 hours.

I said: But what if my total time is more than 40 hours? Can I just give you a % of whatever time I work? How about 4? 12?

And so on. We did not reach a number. I pleaded with her to tell me what number would seem like a good number and she refused because we might be audited and it would be bad if I worked more than what was listed and it would be bad if I worked less than what was listed. Every time I suggested a number, she rejected it because it was either somehow not an acceptable number (too low, too high) for mysterious accounting reasons or she wasn't convinced it was accurate. I said that if she told me a good number, I would promise to work that amount, although I was of course lying because I'm going to work whatever amount is best for the project in the time I have available, and also I still don't get the concept of time and effort being different but the same. She refused.

If I were an accountant, I would hate me.

My fatal error, however, was putting a little question mark inflection at the end of the first number I stated in my conversation with the accountant. My husband says he just gives the accountants a number -- any number, he has no idea what the numbers mean either -- and they never question him. They just accept that number as correct.

Now I will send the accountant a number by email, a medium in which I control the punctuation, and try to recover from my inflection error.

Proposed Ethical Lapse

These difficult economic times have resulted in many necessary cost-saving measures and cuts. These difficult economic times have also resulted in some unnecessary measures and cuts that do not save anyone any money. Examples of each:

• Freezing faculty salaries (and hiring) saves a university money.

• Freezing postdoctoral salaries (and hiring) does not save the university money if the postdocs are entirely paid from external sources of funding.

In fact, universities benefit financially from postdoctoral scholars because postdoctoral salaries may be part of the indirect cost calculation of a grant. Postdocs in the sciences bring money to a university. Freezing salaries of postdocs or other soft-money researchers is a money losing policy.

Perhaps administrators aren't aware of this? Perhaps they are aware but it's too difficult to make different policies for different job categories? Perhaps they are concerned about fairness? That is, why should one group of employees get a raise when others are experiencing salary freezes or cuts?

I know that faculty at various institutions have written letters to the powers-that-be about restrictive postdoctoral hiring/salary policies, with only limited success at overturning the policy or being granted exemptions.

I can't think of a good reason why grant-funded salaries can't be paid as budgeted in the grants. If the money exists in a grant for the specific purpose of paying a researcher, the researcher should get the budgeted money no matter what the university policy is regarding hiring/pay for faculty or staff.

Some of my colleagues have been trying to find ways to get around the salary freeze so they can pay their postdocs (or themselves) the amounts budgeted in grants. Here are some of the possibilities that I have heard discussed:

1. Writing and back-dating a letter promising a specific raise in an official letter to a postdoc. Although the salary for the first year is always mentioned in an offer letter/hiring contract, in some cases the salary for subsequent years is not. The proposed back-dated letter is an attempt to get around the lack of a specific letter for the second or subsequent years. If a pre-economic-crisis letter exists and spells out the salary/raise for subsequent years, the university has to honor this.

2. Finding a way to get the raise money to its intended recipient in a non-salary kind of way, e.g. buying an awesome personal computer of equivalent cost as the unpayable raise. Computer purchases can easily be justified on most grants. This isn't as good as a real raise, but it's better than nothing.

Back-dating a letter clearly isn't ethical, and I suppose spending grant money on something that wasn't originally budgeted and that might not directly impact the research isn't ethical either, but can these ethical lapses be forgiven because they are done for a good cause? Are the lapses justifiable because they are done to counteract a misguided policy, or should we follow the rules, however stupid they are?

If we can't spend the budgeted money on salary, we either have to spend the money on something else (something we are told at ethics training workshops is not allowed) or we have to give the money back to the funding agency at the expiration of the grant. Perhaps we can prolong our grants with no-cost extensions until the no-raise policy is lifted and eventually give our postdocs the budgeted raise, assuming the postdocs haven't moved on to another job.

I have recently considered another not-so-ethical route to take so that I can give a raise to a postdoc. The raise is in the grant budget, was justified in the grant proposal, and the postdoc deserves the raise. I made a request to the Dean that I be allowed to give the postdoc the budgeted raise, and my request was denied. So I started thinking of ways I could somehow get the raise to the postdoc anyway.

I could perhaps be talked out of my unethical idea by persuasive comments to this post, but at the moment this idea seems kind of appealing to me. Consider:

One of the only ways to be granted an official exemption to the no-raise policy is if the person in question has another job offer. The job offer doesn't have to be carved in stone -- it can just be an email from someone at another institution expressing an intention to offer a position. I don't want my postdoc to go out and get a real job offer (and he has said he wants to stay on here as a postdoc for another year or two), but I am pretty sure that I could get a colleague at another institution to send my postdoc an email expressing an interest in hiring him away from my institution (but without any real intention of doing so). With such a letter in hand, there's a good chance I could get the raise approved.

Ethical? No.. Should I do it anyway? Is there another, better way?

AA: Alcohol & Accountants

My obsession with insane accounting procedures and regulations is continuing unabated. I admit that I have not sought professional help for it, and writing about this problem in my blog has not helped much either because it has made me realize that other people have these same problems, and that is more scary than comforting.

It is tempting to write about the fact that at the moment I am totally unable to figure out, owing to accounting glitches, how much money I have in my grants or the fact that the online effort certification system seems to have gone berserk, but instead I think I will rant about another accounting issue that makes me want to gnaw off my eyebrows: getting reimbursed for a professional dining experience that involved no consumption of alcohol.

I could just as easily write about an annoying accounting issue regarding being reimbursed for a professional dining experience that involved consumption of alcohol, but I will leave that for another time.

Today I certified for the THIRD TIME that a meal, in which I took a visiting department seminar speaker to a small local restaurant for a casual dinner with one of my graduate students, involved no consumption of alcohol.

I don't really care that much about getting reimbursed for this small sum, but it is customary for faculty who volunteer to take department visitors to dinner to be reimbursed up to a certain reasonable amount. If alcohol is consumed, the faculty host must pay for the alcohol and must provide a separate itemized receipt.

It would have been totally fine with me if the visitor had wanted a beer or glass of wine or even a bottle of wine or 7 martinis.. whatever.. But the visitor did not want such things. The small local restaurant did not provide an itemized receipt, and I did not request one. I think it is quite obvious from the low amount of the bill for the meal that the only way we could have purchased alcohol with the meal is if we each only had a small bowl of iceberg lettuce for dinner.

The accountant refused my reimbursement request because I did not provide an itemized receipt, but said that if I wrote in an email message that I certified that no alcohol was consumed, I could be reimbursed. I wrote back and said "No alcohol was consumed."

A week later another accountant called me and said that I had to certify again more specifically that no alcohol was consumed as part of this meal and that I did not have an itemized receipt because I neglected to ask for one. I wrote in an email "No alcohol was consumed as part of this meal. I neglected to ask for an itemized receipt."

Today an accountant stopped me in the office and made me write on a piece of paper "During the dinner on DATE with VISITOR X, no alcohol was purchased as part of the meal. The receipt provided does not include any payment for alcoholic beverages. I neglected to ask for an itemized receipt." SIGNED FSP (in my best, most legible handwriting).

I asked if I should also write that I am very very sorry, that I admit that I showed a shocking level of negligence in failing to obtain the correct type of receipt, that I will try hard to get an itemized receipt next time whether or not alcohol is consumed, and that I will be willing to swear on a stack of accounting bibles that I did not purchase alcohol as part of the meal in question. The accountant thought about this for a moment and then said that it probably wasn't necessary to do those things yet and he would first try getting my signed letter past the next level of accountants.

That's nice, but aside from wondering whether academic accounting attracts insane people or makes them insane, what is it with this obsession with alcohol?

I can maybe see why the department might not want to pay for an alcohol-soaked dinner extravaganza involving consumption of many bottles of expensive wine and whiskey or whatever, but seriously.. Why are US universities so neurotic about paying for a visiting professor to have a glass of wine at dinner? I think it is bizarre, but it is by no means the most bizarre aspect of academic life.

Out of Pocket

On Monday, I discussed the difficulty of paying for certain research activities from grants. In some cases (e.g. postage) the easiest solution is to pay from personal funds. If I save a lot of time by paying myself, it's worth it to me to pay cash or use my own credit card.

Every April when I prepare my tax returns, I am aware that my non-reimbursed professional expenses add up to thousands of dollars each year. My husband typically has a similar amount. What are we spending all this money on? Stamps?

Professional expenses that I pay for myself (not from grants) include:

- Postage, photocopies, office supplies, computer supplies, peripherals, ink cartridges, printer drums, software etc. We used to be able to set up an account at a campus bookstore and purchase some of these things, but alas, those days are gone. I am not very good at keeping track of all these expenses, but I can figure some of it out from credit card receipts.

- Research expenses after a grant has expired; e.g. conference travel to present results of the research, or page charges/color printing fees for an article published after a grant has expired. In some cases I can deal with post-grant conference travel by also presenting results from research related to an active grant, or I can put the page charges on a related grant (or use the mysterious IDC funds that are allocated to faculty at random intervals). In some cases I just pay for it on a credit card and don't get reimbursed.

- Travel expenses not anticipated or not possible to budget in a grant. If I made a realistic budget that included travel to 1-3 national and international meetings and workshops for me, most or all of my graduates students, a postdoc, and some undergraduate research assistants, the travel budget would be insanely large. Therefore, for some trips I pay my own way. I can use frequent flyer miles for some travel (though this is becoming more difficult and expensive), and I can use ff miles to send some members of my research group to conference sites. Frequent flyer miles help, but using them comes with fees, especially if the ticket is for someone else. And then there is the cost of the conference registration (expensive), lodging (expensive), and per diem (food) for my research group. I don't tend to reimburse myself for per diem expenses, mostly to save grant money.

- Teaching materials. The supplies budget for teaching materials in my department ranges from sufficient to zero. When it is zero, my choices are to teach with incomplete and scruffy materials, or to purchase items myself. The amount of breakage and loss and general damage is rather impressive in some of the lab classes, so there is a constant need to replace some of the teaching supplies. If these are not replaced, the students are cranky, the TA's may be cranky, and my ability to teach well is compromised (as are my teaching evaluations). It is worth it to me to buy some items myself if that is my only choice.

- Professional society memberships, journal subscriptions, books.

- Costs associated with entertaining visiting colleagues, prospective students etc. (although these expenses are in a different category for tax purposes).

There are also some pseudo-professional expenses that I don't typically count for tax purposes but that are related to my professional activities:

- Expenses related to taking language classes. I have been taking these classes specifically because learning this language will help with some long-term research projects and international collaborations, but I don't have to take these classes in the same way that I have to do other research activities. As a faculty member and non-degree seeking 'student', I don't have to pay tuition (just a nominal fee), but I do of course have to buy textbooks, CDs, and other materials related to the language course.

- Expenses related to bringing my daughter to conferences. If my husband and I attend the same conference, our daughter comes with us. We pay her airfare, of course, and when she was younger, we paid for on-site child-care (if offered) for at least part of the time.

It all adds up somehow to thousands of dollars for each of us. With the exception of the teaching materials, some of the rest is quite reasonable to expect us to pay ourselves, though I do wish it were easier to pay for research-related travel. With the huge airfare increases this year, my travel budgets for existing grants are taking a big hit.

Making an Effort

Astute commenters on yesterday's post noted that effort reporting at universities is another bizarre aspect of grants management. This is so true. I alluded to this in a previous post on summer salary, but perhaps the topic of effort deserves its own discussion.

Back in the day of effort statements that were printed on paper and that required faculty to sign them so that the forms could be returned to some office where they were no doubt lovingly filed and stored in a special room in the financial nerve center of the university, one of my colleagues used to sign his statements as "Mickey Mouse", just to see if anyone noticed. No one ever did, or at least no one ever mentioned it. As an Assistant Professor, I dutifully signed mine with my real name in my best handwriting, certifying that I had done my professor activities in the proportions stated, even if I hadn't.

In my more recent experience, there are two particularly absurd aspects of this kind of 'effort':

- The % effort assigned to each of my job activities has changed somewhat dramatically with time, but continues to bear no relation to my actual effort. As far as I can tell, these numbers were selected by a random number generator in an accountant's computer. The annoying thing about this is that the university accountants insist that I use their numbers in my current-and-pending support forms for grant proposals, even though these numbers are misleading and typically make it appear that I have more summer salary than I do, making it more difficult for me to request what meager summer salary I hope to eke out of my grants.

- Now that effort reporting is web-based, I am asked to certify the effort of my students, including undergrads who do part-time work for me. Because each person gets one effort statement, I am asked to certify all of their effort, even if they also work part time in the dining hall or a parking garage. Then I am asked to check a box saying that I know for a fact that this person did all the work that the statement says they did. I have absolutely no idea if my undergrad research assistants even show up to work in the dining hall or parking garage or wherever.

I therefore refuse to sign off on the effort statement of someone for whom I have only partial information as to their effort. A possible explanation for why the accountants are reluctant to give me accurate information about my grants and budgets is that they are getting revenge for how difficult I am when it comes to effort statements (and a few other things).

Also, once you have been a co-PI with a colleague at the same university and once you have paid a student (grad or undergrad) from a grant, they are never removed from your effort list even once the grant/work is done. If I one day felt overwhelmed by an urge to sign effort statements, I could sign the statements for the department Chair, a number of other colleagues, students who are now in other departments, and all sorts of random people. I have not yet been visited by such an urge, but it could happen (but no one would even care).

The accountants have stopped pestering me to sign the effort statements of people other than my own and that of grad students and postdocs who are funded entirely on my grants, but I did lose the battle to have my NSF budget forms match my actual effort instead of the bizarre university numbers. The university will not even submit my proposals if I don't use their stupid numbers, and I decided it wasn't worth the effort to fight the accountants on that one.

No Man's Land

Despite the presence of the word 'Man' in the title, this is not actually one of those Gender Lens-y FemaleScienceProfessor posts. It is about research grants and what we can and cannot use them for, and in particular the phenomenon of having a legitimate research activity that falls between the cracks of funding agency restrictions and university restrictions. The subtitle of this post could be: The Accounting Gods Must Be Crazy

Grants obtained from federal agencies and other sources place restrictions on the types of things for which the grant can be used. This makes sense. If there weren’t these restrictions, professors might spend grant money on crystal vases for their yachts instead of on research. OK, so maybe I wouldn’t be too tempted to do that, but I might get jeweled collars for my cats.

The annoying – and at times surreal – part of grant restrictions is when a certain type of material or an activity is caught in the no-man's-land between funding agency and university restrictions. Examples:

Postage/Mail: As part of my research activities, I need to mail research-related items. I don't just mean that I need a few stamps now and then and am too cheap to buy them myself. The amount I spend on research-related postage is on the order of few hundred dollars per year for items that can be sent by regular (non-courier) mail. I think that NSF thinks that the university should provide postage from the indirect costs (IDC) that universities receive from every grant. The university, however, does not think it should pay for postage. I can see why funding agencies and universities don't want to pay this; the total sum for all investigators would be large.

In any case, my options for mailing are:

- Pay the postage myself if I want to use regular USPS mail;

- Use a grant and send the items by courier, even though this is more expensive and speed may not be necessary.

- Attempt a complicated (but ethical) third way that involves the small % of IDC that the university transfers to the department, which then transfers a minute fraction of this fraction to individual investigators and puts this money in an account that, with effort, I can learn exists. The funds are not transferred at any predictable time during the life of a grant, and we are never notified when a transfer occurs. In some cases, no IDC transfers are made within an entire year. If I ask nicely, the accountants might tell me whether I have such funds, and even how much I have in an account, and, if I am lucky and the accounting gods are happy, maybe I can even use the funds for mailing a package.

Photocopies: For one of my grants, I knew that I would need to photocopy some documents and images in a particular size and resolution that would require a specialized copy facility, so I budgeted for this in the proposal. A couple of months ago when it was time to make the copies, I found that I couldn’t. A university accountant had deleted that item from my budget and had transferred the funds I’d requested to another budget line. I didn’t notice it because my total budget didn’t change, and I didn’t get a line-by-line breakdown of the revised budget. [note: the budget we submit to NSF and the budget that the university goes by can be slightly different in terms of budget lines; this adds to the fun of proposal writing and grant management].

I discussed this with the accountant and explained, as I had also done in my budget justification submitted as part of the proposal, why I needed photocopies. He said “Oh, OK, that’s definitely allowable. I thought you just wanted to make regular photocopies.” Well, I do sometimes want to make regular photocopies, but I know better than to attempt to request funds for that. He sighed and said that he could, with effort, create a new budget line that would allow me to make the photocopies and charge the expense to the grant. And in fact he did so at my request and the problem was eventually solved.

More difficult and serious than mail and photocopies is the purchase of some necessary but prohibited items for labs. For example, a colleague of mine is writing an equipment grant. He has identified lab space, he has the necessary promise of matching funds from the college and department, and he has quotes for the analytical equipment, but he is not allowed to request funds for a table on which to put the equipment. He can’t just haunt garage sales or order a table from Ikea – he needs a sturdy, stable lab table of particular dimensions and materials. Tables, however, are considered 'office furniture'. What if he used the funds to buy a mahogany credenza for his office? He tried calling it 'lab supplies', but this type of grant proposal also prohibits that type of budget item. And he can forget trying to get funds to buy a chair for the lab. I said “You won’t need a chair because you’re going to have to put the machines on the floor”.

I have complained before about the many hours of useless ethics training faculty must endure, even if I support the general concept of ethics training. I have complained about how we are told that we cannot use a printer to print a document for a project that is not related to the grant that purchased the printer, so if we have several grants we should buy several printers, or, one ethics instructor once admitted under torture, we could probably get away with one printer if we keep separate ink cartridges and printer drums (for laser printers) for each project.

I am not going to say that faculty are forced into unethical behavior by absurd rules that leave a no-man's-land in which we can’t acquire or use grant funds for items we legitimately need for our research, but I will say that we have to go through bizarre financial contortions just to get some really basic things done.