Falling Short

Salary compression and general issues of salary inequity are perennial issues in the departments with which I have been associated over the years. These are challenges for department chairs and other administrators who need to balance economic reality with fairness, all the while attempting to maintain a moderately high level of morale.

A common scenario that results in salary compression is when a new hire negotiates a high salary relative to peers or more junior colleagues in the same department.

You might think that such issues would become moot during an economic crisis. Many of us are fortunate to have secure jobs with decent salaries, however challenging it is to do our jobs with decreasing resources for teaching and research, and thoughts of alleviating salary compression must be set aside for now. For the most part, these issues are indeed temporarily on hold until we can be done with furloughs and pay cuts and unfilled positions and even terminations of positions. This was my impression, anyway.

But..

For some reason a certain administrator recently told me that, although I had had (in his opinion) "a spectacular year" in terms of publications, grants, students graduated, teaching, service, honors etc., he was going to allocate what few extra resources he had at his discretion to some of the assistant professors. He said his decision is not based on "merit" but on what he thinks is fair.

OK, that's fine.. sort of. I am not going to argue that I deserve more of these scarce resources than my hard-working junior colleagues, and my morale is not crushed by this turn of events. My so-called "spectacular" year was made possible in part by the fact that I am a mid-career professor with an established research group that is functioning well. My younger colleagues are still building their research programs, and the contents of their annual reports should therefore by viewed in this context, rather than by a strict comparison of numbers of publications or grants etc.

And yet, there is still a very large difference between my salary and that of a peer (male) colleague whose higher salary is not based on the fact that he is more productive than I am (because he is not). He was hired as a full professor and negotiated a higher salary than what his nearest peer colleague (that's me) was making. My initially low salary has of course increased over the years, but not at a rate that would put me at the same level as this colleague anytime soon, if ever.

I told the aforementioned administrator that I understood and even supported his plan to help some of the assistant professors, but I also said that I didn't want my situation to fall entirely off the radar screen in future years, as I saw it as an equity issue. One could argue that my colleague is paid "too much" and that my salary is more appropriate for my position and job, but that still leaves me as a good example of a woman paid ~85% of what a man makes for the same job.

The aforementioned administrator replied that I should have done a better job negotiating my salary when I was first hired.

Ah yes, maybe I should have. And maybe the assistant professors who need an economic boost to bring their salaries in line with other young colleagues should have done the same thing or else they also would not now be in such dire need of assistance.

But for some reason, my poor negotiating skills are relevant here, not theirs.

I was OK with the plan until the administrator made this gratuitous swipe at the circumstances of my hiring more than a dozen years ago with a different department chair and in a situation involving a 2-person hire.

Why did he think it was reasonable to criticize my negotiating skills and not those of my younger colleagues? (FYI, these younger colleagues are all men). He was telling me that I should just accept my salary situation relative to my peers but he's going to help these other colleagues who are experiencing salary compression for the exact same reason that I am??

Lucky for me, I am doing quite well despite my evident flaws as a salary negotiator lo these many years ago (although this will apparently haunt me, or at least my base salary, forever), and I feel fortunate to have a secure job. I do not begrudge my younger colleagues the fact that they have an administrator looking out for their best interests. These young men are fortunate in this, despite their lousy salary negotiating skills.

And yet, although I think I will not pursue the matter further this year, I am not inclined to remain quiet about it in perpetuity. I work hard, I believe I am an asset to my department, and I should be compensated fairly relative to my peers, just as my younger colleagues are.

Summer Time

It is with some reluctance that I am diving yet again into the fraught topic of

Professorial Use of Summer Time.

Yesterday's theme was money. Today's theme is students.

As part of my continuing effort to explain Academia from the point of view of a (mostly) well-meaning professor and adviser, let's consider the summer situation of a professor on a 9-month appointment at a research university.

Although I in no way condone the rude behavior of professors who apparently seem strangely pleased to inconvenience students who want to defend their thesis or take a preliminary exam in the summer (e.g., by refusing to participate in these events during the summer), I will throw out for discussion a few of the relevant issues from the professorial point of view.

At my institution and others like it, professors are not required to teach or do institutional service in the summer. That is the principle behind our being paid for 9 months of work rather than 12. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon for students and others to think it entirely reasonable that professors be available in the summer for committee meetings, exams, and so on.

Another frequent comment is that professors who make a decent 9-month salary should be happy with that. After all, we can have our 9-month salary paid out over 12 months, so it is just like being paid for 12 months. The reasoning seems to be that the actual amount of each pay check doesn't matter as long as you continue to get paychecks in the summer.

Is there another profession in which it is widely believed that those in that profession should work without pay for several months of the year just because they make a decent salary? Wouldn't it be a great way to keep health care costs down if medical professionals volunteered their services for 3 months of the year? Their salaries are high enough; why shouldn't they donate their time and expertise? And what about lawyers? Couldn't they work pro bono a few months of the year?

I am satisfied with my 9-month salary and pleased when I can get paid for at least some of my research time in the summer, but I disagree with those who think that we professors are greedy if we want to be paid for the work we do in the summer, that professors who work in the summer don't deserve to be paid in the summer, or that professors should automatically be available in the summer at the times that are most convenient for the students.

That last statement is obnoxious, but I mention it because, although the vast majority of graduate students are very hard-working, I have seen more than a few cases in which a student procrastinated throughout the academic year, spent a lot of time being involved in hobbies and social activities, and then needed to take an exam in the summer. That's the kind of thing that can rankle even moderately nice professors who are otherwise on board with working without pay in the summers and being available to help students.

In fact, most of my colleagues volunteer some or all of their time in the summer, and many of us are happy to do so. We don't stop being advisers just because it is summer. Most of us also know that it is in everyone's interest that students get the help they need, make progress in their research, and pass the various milestones (exams) in a timely way. Sometimes it just works out that summer is the best time for an exam or defense. And certainly if a student needs to defend in the summer in order to move into a particular job, the vast majority of professors I know would show up for a summer defense if at all possible.

Like most of my colleagues, I work in the summer and I enjoy it. Except when blogging, I don't obsess about my summer salary, or lack thereof, and I spend a lot of time with students of various sorts, whether or not I am paid to do so.

Even so, I do not want my summer time to be taken for granted or wasted. And I do not want my university to proscribe my research and advising activities in the summer (the topic of yesterday's post). Furthermore, if it's not asking too much, although I am of course enjoying the fabulous fun to be had in the waning phase of the academic year, I would like summer to come soon, please.

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.

Summer $

If you are a faculty member paid on a 9 month basis, how much summer salary do you typically get from grants? By "how much", I refer to time, not the actual amount of money.

The poll refers to a typical total amount of time for a summer, not an amount per grant.

This is a difficult question for me to answer because there is no typical amount. If you have the same situation, perhaps you could answer with the average amount in recent years. The answer should also be the amount of time for which you are paid a summer salary, not how much you budgeted, as the budgeted amount may be greater than the actual amount paid.

If your typical summer salary falls between two possible answers in the poll, pick the closest answer.

How much summer salary do you typically get from grants?
	none
	1-2 weeks
	1 month
	2 months
	3 months
pollcode.com free polls

You & $

It is clear from comments to this blog that, whenever the topic of faculty salary arises, there is a wide range of salaries represented by readers, even just among faculty readers.

There are of course authoritative compilations of average faculty salary by rank, discipline, university etc. (see The Chronicle of Higher Education or links in comments to yesterday's post), but what is the salary range of faculty who read FSP and who are willing to click on a button in a poll?

This poll does not account for science vs. humanities vs. social science, or life sciences vs. physical sciences, or any other subdivision that typically influences salary. Let's also ignore summer salary. Even when I put some summer salary in a budget, in many cases I end up spending it on something else anyway.

The requested data below refers to 9-month FACULTY salary, the typical salary base for a professor in the US. I know that professors in some other countries get paid for 12 (or even 13) months/year, so if you want to vote it would be best if you calculated your salary for only 9 of those months.

The results of this poll will not indicate anything representative about academic salaries in general, of course. From previous polls, it seems that the FSP readership consists largely of people younger than FSP -- does that mean the results will be on the low-ish side? Or will there be a fair number of high salaries owing to the presence of senior engineering faculty and football coaches? I have no idea what the results will be. Hence the poll:

What is your 9 month salary in US $?
	$30,000-39,999 (or less)
	$40,000-49,999
	$50,000-59,999
	$60,000-69,999
	$70,000-79,999
	$80,000-89,999
	$90,000-99,999
	$100,000-109,999
	$110,000-119,999
	$120,000-129,999
	130,000-139,999
	140,000-149,999
	$150,000 (or more)
pollcode.com free polls

Financially Secure Faculty

This post is inspired by a recent comment that referred to "financially secure faculty". The context was that graduate students (with their low salaries) are financially insecure but faculty (with their higher salaries) are financially secure.

Of course it's not that simple. Financial security does not correlate exactly with salary; i.e., you can not conclude that because faculty have higher salaries than graduate students, faculty are financially secure. Faculty may be more secure (in some ways) but that is not the same as being financially secure.

Tenured faculty have a certain type of job security because it takes an extreme event (criminal activity; an economic crisis) for a tenured professor to lose their job. Most of us with tenure are therefore in little danger of financial disaster owing to being unemployed.

Nevertheless, some faculty, and in particular early career faculty, struggle to cover the basic costs of living, in part because professors are typically paid for only 9 months of work by our universities. Consider in particular the financial situation of an early career professor with one or more children. Graduate students with families may be in a similar or more difficult situation, but some of my younger faculty colleagues are in financially precarious positions despite their higher salaries. There are many factors in the financial security of any family, including costs of daycare, mortgage, other loans and whether the family relies on one or two incomes (and what those incomes are).

Even mid-career and senior faculty may have serious financial challenges. Some of my colleagues have been dealing with personal financial crises related to the costs of caring for ailing parents and other relatives, college expenses for one or more offspring, the economic consequences of divorce, or the recent devastation of investment-based retirement accounts (the result of which is that some professors cannot afford to retire and continue to have adequate health insurance).

Certainly there are financially secure faculty, especially those who spent some time in administration and retained their higher salary once they returned to their regular faculty positions. And those of us in science or engineering fields tend to have higher salaries than our colleagues in the humanities, in addition to the greater possibility of summer salary from grants. I personally feel financially moderately secure in my two-professor family, although we are somewhat intimidated by the future costs of our daughter's college education and the slow rate at which we are accumulating retirement savings.

I feel fortunate in my job and even in my (9 month) salary. But: You can't generalize about the financial security of faculty just because our salaries are significantly higher than those of our graduate students.

Fulfilling Furloughs

If any of you academic readers have been furloughed, what did you do during your furlough time?

Were there certain prohibitions (e.g., you cannot go to your office, you cannot answer e-mail from students)? Did you follow the rules?

Did you work anyway or was there absolutely no way you were going to do anything work-related while not being paid?

If you had a choice, did you take furlough days when no one would notice or did you try to make your furlough times a bit more visible to the academic community? (even if you aren't allowed to cancel classes for a furlough day)

If you have students and/or a laboratory facility that can't manage without you, what did you do? Or are we all less essential than we think we are..?

As many of us explore the reality of being paid less to do our jobs, which in some ways are becoming more difficult to do, I was thinking of what I might (unilaterally) do to rebalance my time and effort. It makes no sense to decrease my research or teaching efforts, even if I wanted to, so the most obvious thing would be to quit some committees and spend less time doing service. I wouldn't quit all my committees or service activities -- some of these are a necessary part of my job -- but I do a lot of service and I could reduce this. Has anyone else done this or something else in direct response to changes in their salary/schedule?

Sticker Shock

Many grants come with 'indirect costs' (a.k.a. 'overhead') calculated into their budgets.

I understand why grants have indirect costs; i.e., the money that a university needs to help the grant-funded research to occur. IDC supposedly helps pay for the lights in our offices that are in buildings with climate control and support staff who help us do our research. IDC pays for the libraries that provide resources we need to do research. And so on. IDC pays for all those background costs (but not postage and maybe not photocopying, depending on which accountant is controlling access to the photocopier).

IDC rates at many universities are 50 ± 5%, but significantly higher rates are not unknown. It is not unusual for more than half of a grant to go to the university, not the researcher.

I sometimes wonder why NSF proposals don't report our direct costs as 'the' total on the cover page rather than having the total of direct + indirect costs being the most visible number on the proposal. Is not the total direct costs the relevant number for figuring out how much of the grant will be spent directly on research activities? The IDC rate, whether high or low, is something the university negotiates with the funding agency; the PI is responsible only for the coming up with a budget of direct costs (and some of those are mandated as well).

I wonder if sometimes reviewers balk at the high total of a grant proposal, despite knowing that they should divide the number on the cover page by 2 (or 3).

When writing collaborative proposals, my collaborators and I typically figure out whose university has the lowest IDC rate and then we shift more of the research expenses to that university, thus maximizing our collective grant resources.

Once a grant is funded, I am happy to report the total direct + indirect costs, as that number reflects what is being awarded to the university.

IDC as a concept is simple but in practice it is strange. Why does my university collect IDC on things like my travel to conferences or expenses related to scientific research done in/by another lab at another university? And then there is the IDC tax on fringe benefits, including for summer salary. Perhaps IDC calculations would start to get as complicated as figuring out income taxes, but I wish there were more IDC-free budget items.

All of this adds up to a lot of money. I know that universities need it and presumably are spending it well on essential things like light and heat and libraries, but as the cost of doing research goes up (e.g., travel, analytical costs, salaries of grad students and postdocs), it's hard not to look at the grant budget total and wish that more of that total was for direct research costs.

Worse and Worser

Mostly I have tried to be rather optimistic about the Economic Crisis, including in an earlier post in which I proposed that departments and other academic units may be more likely to try to hold on to tenure-track faculty at this time, as these positions might otherwise go away and not come back. Sometimes, however, data get in the way of a perfectly good hypothesis; e.g. see this post by PZ Myers about the elimination of an entire science department at the University of Florida.

Unless there is some obscure political issue involved, it is difficult to understand the reasoning for eliminating a geoscience department, particularly at a time when the physical sciences are so central to so many global (and local) issues involving the environment: e.g., climate, water, resources/energy.

I am not proposing that some liberal arts department be eliminated instead. The intellectual health of a university depends on the arts and sciences.

But eliminate a science department? Who will teach the youth of Florida about their environment? Who will teach them about water and climate and land and life and how they all interact? Who will teach them about volcano monitoring?

I am very sorry for the scientists and others losing their jobs in this department, and I'm sorry that there is a university that couldn't find a better way to deal with the economic crisis than get rid of a very relevant science department.

Compressed

It has been at least several days since I have talked about MONEY, even though my university has recently proposed some truly bizarre money-saving schemes that fall in the heading of 'let's look like we're doing something even though it won't save any money and will make it harder for faculty to do research'.

But let's ignore for the moment the issues of recessions and salary freezes and pay cuts, and consider the evolution of faculty salary over a typical career. In the course of a career at a single institution, most of us get a higher salary as time goes on, with a few moderate to large-ish jumps here and there after a promotion or as a result of retention negotiations.

There are only 2 promotion steps in an academic career (excluding moves to administrative positions), and at some institutions the 'promotion raise' is not impressive. That leaves retention packages as one of the primary ways to get a major increase in salary. In at least some cases (e.g. mine), the retention-related raise is not a way to augment an already high salary. It is a way to raise a salary to the level of one's peers.

So, in my career so far, I got one big raise a couple of years ago as a result of being recruited by another university, and I got another when a new department chair realized that my salary was surprisingly low given my research-teaching-service accomplishments, especially when compared to other faculty at a similar level of seniority.

That last statement leads to all sorts of complex considerations (and emotions): What is your salary relative to other faculty in the same department?

And not just faculty: Some grad students on fellowships make considerably more than grad students with teaching assistantships or even some research assistantships even though they are all doing similar work (and in fact, TAs may be working more).

Salary compression is a common phenomenon, not just in academia. A new employee is hired and negotiates a salary, and in some cases this salary may be similar to or higher than that of more senior employees. In academia, this causes disgruntlement in faculty who started at lower salaries, and who, in a typical system of small annual raises, may always be 'underpaid' relative to more recently hired faculty.

Universities typically do not have sufficient funds to uncompress (decompress?) salaries every time new hires are made. As a result, if you graph salary vs. seniority for faculty in some departments, you get a scatter-plot.

Example: Some of our newest faculty did very well in their negotiations with the chair/dean about salary, and have salaries that are equivalent to those of some associate professors (and even some less active full professors). Aside from the morale of lower paid faculty taking a hit, what are the implications of these (relatively) high salaries? Do they come with higher expectations for productivity?

In fact, a trend in some departments is to give assistant professors less teaching and less service than was the norm in days of yore (see yesterday's post). So now we have a situation in which 1st year assistant professors teaching 0-1.5 classes/year and just getting started with research have a higher salary than more senior faculty who teach a full course load, do lots of service, and maintain a reasonable research program.

My opinion regarding my well-paid younger colleagues: (1) Good for them for getting the salary they wanted, (2) Expectations for productivity of new faculty should be high but reasonable no matter what the starting salary, and (3) If that's the going rate for productive faculty, then the salary structure of the department will need some serious decompressing.

If I have to realign my own salary by getting another outside offer, so be it, but a better system would be one of proactive merit raises for productive faculty on a routine basis.

That requires $$, but once this recession is over, everyone has been bailed out, the crumbling infrastructure has been repaired, hiring freezes are defrosted, and universities have built awesome new student centers and sporting venues, I hope that there will be some money left to raise the salaries of hard-working faculty whose current salaries are mired in compression.

Dire Straits

In recent weeks a few of my colleagues and I have had the unpleasant task of trying to find ways to cut a department budget that is already very lean. Nevertheless, cut we must, and reduce the department budget to a level mandated by the powers that be. After two weeks of meetings and looking under every budget rock and cutting everything that could reasonably be cut, we are left with a situation in which we cannot cut anything else without harming the core functions of the department.

We could, however, reach our target cut if:

- We vote ourselves pay cuts, or

- One well paid senior faculty member retires.

But:

None of the senior faculty are willing to retire owing to the recent devastation of their retirement accounts.

And:

The topic of pay cuts was extremely upsetting to my fellow budget-cutting committee members. I didn't argue for a pay cut, but I was willing to discuss the possibility. I'd rather not have my pay cut, but I would be OK at a lower salary for a year or three if necessary. My husband and I both have good salaries, one child, and thrifty cats (when they aren't falling out of trees).

Some of my colleagues, however, have more precarious finances owing to being in a one-income couple, having > 1 offspring, and/or having other important expenses (mortgage, college) that would be endangered if they endured a pay cut.

So that leaves us where? I think that leaves us with begging the Dean for mercy and/or winning the lottery.

None of us would want to be in the position of having a vastly reduced retirement account just at the time when retirement would be a reasonable option owing to age and low(er) level of activity in the job. Even so, everyone in the department knows that the retirement of any one of a number of faculty of advanced age and salary would save the department. I would not want to be one of these faculty right now.

Whether these non-retiring faculty are viewed with sympathy or contempt is somewhat dependent on their level of activity, and perhaps also on the age of the person holding one of those opinions.

In a previous post I discussed whether tenure-track faculty were more or less vulnerable owing to the budget crisis, but inactive senior faculty who would most benefit the department by leaving now are also in an uncomfortable position, even if it is nearly impossible to make them leave.

Matchless

Some scientists need Science Stuff (equipment) in order to do their research and train their graduate students in the techniques they may need for their careers. Science Stuff can involve zippy new machines that do new things that couldn't be done before, zippy new machines that other people have but that we want to have as well, and zippy new machines that replace similar but old/malfunctioning equipment we already have. To get Science Stuff, we write equipment proposals to programs that fund big-ticket equipment items.

When writing a proposal to acquire research equipment, it is advisable to get matching funds from one's department and other academic units (i.e., a school or college within a university). I don't know about other funding agencies, but NSF does not require matching funds (cost sharing) for some equipment proposals, but good luck getting an equipment proposal funded without them.

Cost sharing is viewed by funding agencies as a sign of "institutional commitment", and typically involves actual $$, not just the commitment to provide space for the equipment, even renovated space. Many institutions have a standard formula for how cost sharing is shared among the various academic units; i.e., so much from the department, so much from the college/school etc.

Or, I should say, many institutions used to have a standard formula for calculating cost sharing. Now the formula would look something like

(department share of matching funds) * (Dean-level share of matching funds) * zero = zero.

Matching funds are hard to come by in these days of economic crisis. It appears that NSF will have funds available for equipment, thanks in part to the economic stimulus bill, but scientists at public universities may have a hard time getting matching funds because universities are in budget-cutting mode, not cost sharing mode.

If researchers at public universities can't get matching funds, perhaps only those at financially less desperate universities will be able to write successful equipment proposals. Perhaps my public university colleagues are being pessimistic and paranoid, but the lack of matching funds may well be a reasonable concern.

Will NSF continue to require-but-not-require matching funds, or will NSF take pity on matchless researchers?

My university has been severely limiting commitments for matching funds lately, and some administrators recently suggested that only those faculty who chip in some of their own (non-grant) funds will be eligible for consideration for matching funds.

This doesn't mean that we dip into our own bank accounts and sacrifice our kids' college education in order to get more scientific equipment, but there are only a limited number of ways that we can acquire non-grant funds. Examples include funds that are:

- associated with an endowed chair (either a lifetime endowed chair or a temporary (folding) chair;

- provided by a wealthy patron;

- added to a personal research fund as part of an award for outstanding research, teaching, or service, either as a one time infusion of funds or on a recurring basis;

- added to a personal research fund as part of additional administrative duties (such as being an academic advisor) that are time-consuming enough to involve additional compensation;

- part of the microscopic amount of indirect costs that, at some institutions, trickle back to the PI's department, where a small fraction of the small fraction is put in an account for the PI to use for research-related expenses that grants are not allowed to cover but that are essential for the research;

- remaining from a start-up package. Some of my colleagues try to make their start-up funds last for many many years because of the occasional need for such non-grant funds; and

- acquired through various legal/ethical but somewhat devious means; e.g., PI salary that can be put in a different accounting category and that by doing so is designated as non-grant funds and that, if the PI chooses not to use this money for salary, can be used for research-related expenses that aren't otherwise covered.

I am feeling fortunate to be in a secure job, and the world (and my research) will certainly survive if I can't acquire more scientific equipment for a while. This post is meant only partially as a complaint about the possibility of scientists at public universities being at a disadvantage relative to colleagues at other institutions.

Mostly it is a list of the ways that we can acquire and use research funds that are not tied to a particular project. These funds have always been important, and perhaps now are becoming essential to keeping individual research programs afloat.

Budget Axe

As the economic crisis drags on and worsens, I would like to discuss some more issues of how the poor economy affects Academe, in addition to the ones I listed in a previous post. Some topics this week:

1. Will tenure track faculty be denied tenure for budgetary reasons? and
2. How can researchers get equipment proposals funded if the proposals require matching funds and matching funds are scarce to non-existent?

Topic 1:

Some of my tenure track friends who were nervous about coming up for tenure in the next year or so were already nervous even before the economic crisis. The tenure process does seem to have that effect in general. Some of them are now even more nervous, convinced that their academic unit will try to save money by denying them tenure.

Let's assume that a certain assistant professor was likely to get tenure under ordinary circumstances. A department is very unlikely to vote against tenure for budgetary reasons because economic decisions of this sort are seldom made at the department level and therefore economic considerations aren't used in evaluations of tenure at the department level. It is not in a department's interest to solve a budget problem by losing a tenurable tenure-track faculty member and therefore possibly the faculty line altogether.

In fact, at least one of my tenure-track colleagues wonders whether the economic crisis makes it even more likely that she will get tenure in her department, owing to the department's wish to retain the faculty line (not to mention their acknowledgment that she is doing her job well).

At higher levels of administration, economic considerations may be more important, but even so, according to various university tenure codes that I found online and read recently, there are strict requirements about whether and how economic considerations can be used in personnel decisions involving tenure-track faculty. In fact, universities that are having a major fiscal emergency can also shed tenured faculty after following various procedures and trying other money-saving measures first.

Will universities deny tenure for economic reasons anyway but not admit to this being the reason? Maybe, though I am not quite so paranoid yet as to believe that. Most universities have pre-tenure evaluations for probationary faculty, and possibly also annual progress reports, and it would be unusual (and lawsuit fodder) if the pre-tenure indications were positive but the tenure decision was negative.

So far, my friends and relatives who have lost their jobs have been computer programmers and lawyers. Although universities in economic crisis can fire tenured faculty, those of us with tenure have a lot less to worry about than many of our friends and relatives with less secure jobs. Tenure-track faculty have the usual things to worry about, but I don't know yet of any budget axe tenure victims.

Perhaps the most precarious positions in academia right now are those of adjunct faculty, who have difficult and uncertain positions even in better economic times.

Bad Economics 101

There are some obvious ways in which the current World Economic Crisis is affecting Academia -- students unable to pay tuition, academic and staff positions going unfilled owing to hiring freezes, and building/renovation projects delayed are among the most prominent -- but what about other effects?

I wrote last year about how the lives of some of my graduate and undergraduate students have been disrupted by their having to move, with little notice, out of their apartments and find a new place to live, owing to the financial problems of their landlords. Since then, I've read that tenants in some places are being given more time to move out of foreclosed properties, as tenants are innocent victims in these situations.

The following are other examples of which I am aware, based on my own experience and discussions with colleagues at other US universities and colleges:

- Despite hiring freezes, some open faculty positions are being converted into non-tenure track, temporary appointments, and some are being left empty, resulting in canceled classes and/or higher teaching loads for other faculty, and uncertain employment options for those on the job market.

- Fewer funds are available for graduate teaching assistantships, even though undergraduate enrollments are not down, so there are the same number of labs to teach. I am not sure how this is going to work. Some of the slack can be taken up by eliminating coveted non-teaching TA positions (e.g., grader, AV/demo facilitator positions). Some departments hire undergrads as TAs because undergrads are cheaper than grad students (and, according to a colleague of mine who keeps track of these things, their teaching evaluations are as good as, or better, than those of the grad student TAs).

- Fewer/no funds available for teaching supplies. This happens from time to time anyway, even in non-crisis years, but is always unfortunate because there is always a significant amount of teaching-stuff carnage during a typical academic year and so there is almost always a dire need to replace the worn out, damaged, destroyed materials.

- Fewer/no funds for 'luxury' items such as speaker series; people to help with website construction and maintenance; social events; support for student travel to conferences; department newsletters..

- No raises this year or next.

- Don't even think about the possibility of getting a new building or renovated space.

- Adoption of bizarre and inefficient new accounting practices that don't seem to have any cost-saving benefits and that make everyone cranky but that perhaps have the effect of making it seem like Action Is Being Taken. Example: Some colleagues, owing to their university's new rules about hiring and justifying grant-related expenses, are unable to spend $ that is in existing grants. This grant money came from a funding agency and the expenses were justified in the original proposal. It is difficult to think of a (sane) reason why grant funds cannot be spent on the materials and activities for which they are intended.

Consider the following: More than a year ago, a colleague hired a postdoc. It was a 2-year position, but as is common practice at that university, the official offer was for the first year, with the second year contingent on adequate performance during the first year. The grant contains funds for two years: year one at Salary 1; year two at Salary 1 + raise. The postdoc did an outstanding job from the very beginning and was assured of the second year, but when it came time to start the second appointment year at a higher salary, the university said No to the promised raise.

The supervising faculty/PI argued with the accountants, argued with the Chair (who was sympathetic and tried to help), and argued with the Deans. The accountants and administrators were not convinced by the reasoning that the money for the raise was in the grant and the university was not saving any money by denying the postdoc the raise. The university people said that because the raise was not promised in the original offer letter, the raise could not be paid, in keeping with a hiring and salary freeze across the university.

Despite many many hours of ethics training on how to be responsible with grant funds, the PI came up with a creative solution to the no-raise problem, and this solution actually made the postdoc very happy. In the PI's opinion, not giving the postdoc a raise was more unethical than the creative solution.

This situation and others like it have generated much discussion among a group of my colleagues. Is it possible that university administrators, even at a big R1 university, do not know how grants work? Or is there something we faculty don't understand about spending grant funds on the items specified in the grant?

Maybe everyone is in Crisis Mode and not thinking clearly, and an efficient (and maybe even ethical) way forward will become apparent in the near future. I hope so, but at the moment it seems that the already difficult situation is in some cases being made even more difficult by strange and unhelpful policies that harm students, researchers, and faculty.

Minding the Extraordinary Gap

One of my uncles recently told me that one of his daughters had discovered that a newly-hired man at her workplace (a state institution) was being paid an "extraordinary" amount more than she or other women at the same level. My cousin initially assumed that this man must have some extra credentials or experience, but she did some quiet investigating and found that he did not.

My cousin talked to her boss to ask him why the new guy was being paid so much more than women who were his equals in experience and credentials. She assumed there was a good reason, but wanted to know what it was. It turned out there was no good reason, and my cousin and the other women were given "extraordinary" raises so that they were making the same (or more) than the new guy.

My uncle was shocked that his daughter had questioned her boss, but was impressed with her for getting such a big raise. He said to me "What I can't figure out is why she and the others got such a large raise when all she did was ask why this guy was being paid more." I told him that I thought my cousin and the other women could have sued and won, and that would have cost the state more and gotten the supervisors in trouble. In the end, the women probably would have gotten the big raises anyway. I said "You can't pay men more than women for no reason." Well, OK, you can, but I didn't feel like saying that.

This really surprised my uncle. He said he assumed that the salary you were paid was the salary you "deserved". I don't really know what he means by "deserved", and he couldn't explain it. He said it wouldn't have occurred to him to question why a man was being paid more than some women ("girls").

In many jobs, including some academic jobs, you get the salary that someone else thinks you deserve, and they may think someone else deserves more, but not for any particular reason that makes sense.

The mechanism for determining academic salaries varies widely from institution to institution. For state universities, the mechanism varies from state to state, and may also vary within a state if there is more than one university system. Even in systems that have salary ranges for specific ranks, there are ways that these ranges can be adjusted.

On two occasions I have acquired the salary data for faculty in my department. All of the highest paid faculty are men, but these are all men who have been or are administrators and/or are the department superstar. There is one outlier that makes my gnash my teeth when I think about it.

If you consider my individual salary compared to my department colleagues, there are some senior men who make less than I do (owing to their long-term lack of productivity), and there are coeval men who make more than I do (owing to nothing obvious). In the latter case, the difference is enough to make me annoyed and to point out the disparity to my department Chair, but not enough to make me call a lawyer.

In response to my query, the department Chair gave me a significant raise, in part from supplementary funds provided for this purpose from higher levels of university administration. This raise was nice but not enough to bring me to the same level (or even within spitting distance) as the more highly paid coeval men, but it did close the gap a bit. I think the Chair wants to lessen the chance that I will leave and/or be very unhappy about the inequality, but he isn't about to do anything too daring.

What impresses me about my cousin's case is that her boss brought her and the other women up to salary parity. I think a lot of people in the same situation would toss the women a bit of money to make them less likely to sue but not do anything too "extraordinary".

Summer Salary Season

When reviewing proposals, I don't spend much time looking at the budget unless there is some particular reason to do so, such as: comments on the budget are requested/encouraged because a proposal concerns equipment or some other large-ticket item; the proposal budget total is surprisingly high or low; and/or I am curious about some aspect of the budget, e.g. how funds for a particular aspect of the research are allocated or justified. The part I care about least is what people request for summer salary. I figure that that part is between the program director and the PI's to work out, and I don't really care whether someone requests 2 weeks or 4 weeks of summer salary.

The amount of summer salary I request typically has no relationship to the actual time I spend on the research -- I always spend much more time on the project than what I can reasonably budget in terms of salary. Similarly, the random (but low) number that my university assigns as my '% effort' on a project never has any relationship to my actual 'effort', which would be nearly impossible to calculate anyway.

When constructing proposal budgets, most of my colleagues and I try to pick a 'reasonable' number that is neither too high (causing sticker shock and making one seem greedy, even if it is theoretically reasonable to request funds to make up for at least part of the 3 summer months many professors are not paid by their university) nor too low (causing people to doubt the PI's commitment to the project).

If the overall budget starts to get out of control owing to the high cost of grad/postdoc salary, fringe benefits etc., my salary request is typically the first thing to go. And even if I do keep some amount in the budget for my summer salary, if the grant is awarded and funds get tight owing to unexpected costs -- e.g. when my department mandated a raise for grad students, including for RA salaries paid from existing grants that didn't budget for this because the raise was announced without warning -- my summer salary gets whittled away because it wouldn't make sense to take the money from the amount budgeted for the actual research. It is the same for many of my colleagues as well.

It's of course nice to get paid something in the summer. I work hard in the summer, and there are various expenses involving the offspring, house, car, travel that are easier to deal with if one is paid in the summer, if only for 1 month out of the three. Or three weeks. Or two.

One of my senior colleagues refuses to tie summer salary amount to base salary. He calculates summer salary as a fixed amount that is the same no matter what the base salary of the senior personnel. That is, if he writes a proposal with a junior colleague, they both get the same summer salary. His philosophy is that they both work as hard, so why should he get paid more, at least in terms of grant-generated funds? From what I've seen, this approach is rather rare, and most people prorate summer salary requests to their 9-month base salary.

As my salary has increased over the years, I find that I ask for less summer salary, mostly for the reasons mentioned above re. priorities in a limited budget and a wish to avoid budget sticker-shock. And some years, I don't request any summer salary, even though I don't do any less research. As long as the cost of everything keeps going up and funding agency budgets don't increase, summer salary erosion will likely continue, and some of us will be able to add "volunteer" to our list of titles.

Doesn't Compute

In the olden days, way back when not everyone had a laptop, many students used research group, department, or university computer facilities. I was always buying computers: I provided a few computers for general use by my group, I bought desktop computers for postdocs to have in their offices, and I purchased a laptop or two for use by students and postdocs working on particular projects.

All that was fine, but I also had to pay the university a fee every month for network connections in the offices of my students and postdocs and in my lab, and also for the ones in my office, other than one 'free' port that the university provided for each professor. Faculty were not allowed to use funds from federal granting agencies to pay these network fees, presumably because this kind of thing was supposed to be covered by indirect costs (overhead), so we were always trying to get additional funds from sources that didn't have rules against paying for internet connections.

In theory, we were not even allowed to use hubs to make more efficient use of our network connections (e.g., for connecting to a printer), and there were always vague rumors that there would be inspections for hubs and we would be forced to relinquish them. We lived in fear.

If one of my postdocs or students were assigned space in an office that did not have a network connection, I also had to pay for the additional cost of having the university telecom people thread cables through the walls. In the deepest darkest part of this era, I felt like the department's hostile zombie administrative assistant was moving my research group members around to different offices each year so that I could pay for the networking of the building. Paying for installation of a network connection in an office did not guarantee that one of my students or postdocs would be put in that office the next time the office became vacant.

The point of all this reminiscing about ancient computer and internet history is to note the contrast with the situation today. I still buy postdocs desktop computers if they so require, I still keep some computers around in a research space for general use, and once in a while I buy a laptop on a grant and give it to a student to use, but I spend a lot less than I used to on computer and internet related costs and fees. Now there is no monthly fee for network use, wired or wireless, and most students have their own computers.

I suppose I have become complacent about my reduced commitment to providing computers and computer-related things for my group because I was taken aback recently when a grad student asked me if I would pay for the cost of getting his personal laptop repaired. He uses his laptop for research related computing, in addition to recreational uses. It is going to cost nearly as much as the price of a new laptop to recover the files from his crashed hard drive, which was not sufficiently backed up.

I don't have a budget line for paying for the repair of a student's personal computer, and I am not sure how I would pay for it even if I thought it was an appropriate expense.

Is it an appropriate expense? He uses the computer for his research, though I have no idea what the ratio of research : recreational use is, though I hope it is high. His not having his research files backed up has caused a delay of at least two months in finishing a manuscript that should have been submitted long ago, and I am annoyed by that.

The advisor-angel sitting on one shoulder tells me that maybe I should share the expense (somehow) because it is in the best interests of the student and his research project to help him fix this problem quickly. I benefit from the fact that most students acquire their own laptops, so perhaps I should share in the perils? The advisor-devil sitting on the other shoulder tells me that if this student had been using one of the computers I had purchased for my group, of course I would pay for any repairs, but why should I pay just because he didn't back up the data on his personal laptop? His co-advisor and I paid for the data to be acquired, and he had a responsibility to keep the data and other important files safe, for his own sake as well as for that of the research project as a whole.

At the moment, the advisor-angel's voice is very soft and intermittent -- perhaps she has a weak signal or a bad connection? -- but the advisor-devil's voice is loud and clear and uploading advice directly into my head.

Students in (Mortgage) Crisis

My husband and I were very lucky that we bought our house years ago when housing prices were low and interest rates were reasonable, and we were able to get a nice house near campus. It helps me balance family and career to be able to get between home and work and my daughter's school quickly and easily, but if we were buying a house today, it is unlikely we could afford to own a house so close to campus.

Several of my graduate and undergraduate students have recently had their lives disrupted because their apartments were in houses or apartment buildings that went into foreclosure. Some have already had to find a new place and move, and some have to move within the next 1-2 months. When students move, it is typically in the summer, rather than during the academic year when they have very little time, so these unexpected moves have been extremely inconvenient for them.

Yet another student told me on Friday that he was going to have to move owing to his landlord's financial problems, and that as a result he might not be able to get as much work done as we had planned for April. This student is an undergraduate research assistant who is paid by the hour, so, unlike a graduate research assistant, if he doesn't work, he doesn't get paid. And if he can't work sufficient hours, I might have to hire someone else to make sure the most essential work gets done by a looming deadline that cares not for student housing woes, no matter how sympathetic I may be.

Even without the current mortgage crisis in the U.S., students are too often the victims of irresponsible or even unethical landlords, as I well know from my own experience with an avaricious, grasping, duplicitous, thieving scoundrel of a landlord when I was in graduate school. And now this. In addition to the problems that make the news, the mortgage crisis has generated a cascade of lost time and productivity that affects graduate and undergraduate students, and all those who work with them.

$ Matters

The typical procedure when invited to give a talk at another university is for the invitee to get the plane ticket and then get reimbursed after the travel is completed. Lodging, meals, and other transportation costs are taken care of directly by the host institution.

I was recently thinking about all the professional travel expenses my husband and I currently have that have not yet been reimbursed. Including past travel that has yet to be reimbursed and future travel that won't be reimbursed until various times over the next 5-6 months, the sum is quite large at the moment: in the range of $7000. It is so large in part because the system has broken down a bit in terms of timely reimbursements for past travel relative to payments for future travel. In addition, because my teaching schedule is lighter in the spring term than in the fall, I scheduled most of my invited talks for next term. I just got a flock of plane tickets and loaded up my credit card.

For one talk I gave months ago but for which I have yet to be reimbursed, my hosts have been very apologetic but say that their departmental accountant has been deliberately losing receipts and taking a long time with all reimbursements. I have sent my receipt and social security number to the accountant 3 times so far. Methinks my department isn't the only one with a hostile zombie staff member. My hosts say that I am welcome to call their accountant and yell and/or whine, but that option doesn't appeal to me very much (yet).

The delay is annoying but not a huge problem for me. It occurred to me, though, that hostile zombie accountants could cause major problems for financially vulnerable people, such as some candidates for faculty positions (e.g., recent/current Ph.D. students interviewing at several/many places).

As long as there is a constant stream of reimbursements to offset the constant acquisition of new plane tickets, the system works pretty well. For me right now, the system is out of whack, with a drought at one end and a flood at the other. If things got dire, I would ask a host department to get my plane ticket for me, avoiding the reimbursement issue entirely. In the meantime, I will just try to enjoy the glorious adventure that is air travel in the U.S. these days, and not worry so much about $ matters.

Academic Economic Unitness

Today in a conversation with a colleague, my husband was stunned when the colleague made a somewhat bitter remark about how much easier my husband’s life is than his because my husband has a professor-spouse and therefore two salaries. This and some comments that followed offended my husband because he felt that the colleague was saying that one of us should work for lower pay and not be such an economic burden on the department. Perhaps there would be more salary money for those in one-salary families if the two of us weren’t sucking up so much of the department’s cash to fund our lavish lifestyle? I am exaggerating -- this colleague would never state his opinion so crudely. Even so, what millennium is he living in that he thinks that my husband and/or I should make a lower salary because we both work?

And why stop with penalizing members of two-career couples? Why should single/childless faculty get paid more than a meager amount when they are just going to spend their money on themselves? Why don’t we scale faculty salary according to the number of children and dogs that each person has? Cats should count as well, but they don’t seem to be as expensive as dogs, so there would have to be a different coefficient for cats in the salary equation unless n(cats) > 12. I’m sorry if I’m offending anyone, but I would not include a salary adjustment for rodents or reptiles, and I am ambivalent about fish and birds. Should boy offspring count the same as girl offspring and/or should the offspring coefficient be adjusted for age and desire for high-end audio/video/computer equipment? [end of bizarre hyperbolic rant]

[start of serious blog-text] My husband’s negative reaction to this conversation was based in part on a long history of our both being underpaid relative to our colleagues in the department. The previous chair considered us an Economic Unit and saw no reason why either one of us should be paid according to our merits since together we made a decent salary.

The previous chair, as well as the person my husband was talking to today, are both in one-salary families, with wives who stay(ed) home with the kids. That’s their choice, of course, but it should be irrelevant to departmental decisions about faculty salary.

Perhaps it is harder for some of our colleagues to deal with our Economic Unitness because we are both Science Professors. If one of us were in a different career, would some of our colleagues still think the professor in the couple should be paid less, or would it be different because only one salary was coming from the department/university?

It struck me as kind of amusing that this colleague envies our situation. Salary considerations aside, I am sure he faces challenges in terms of balancing career and family, but I am fairly sure that he doesn’t have some of the difficulties that we do; for example, a sick kid or a no-school day doesn’t throw his work day into chaos. He probably also doesn’t realize that for years we spent half of our combined salary on day care. None of that should matter, however, to the simple fact that members of an academic couple should each be paid a fair salary, no matter how many spouses, offspring, or pets we have.