BIOETHICS

The Bioethics Imperative XXVI
Faculty Effort Certifications in a Sea of Change: Unsettled Issues in Current Compliance Practices
(continued from the September/October 2006 issue of the ASPB News)

“Mokita”: The truth we all know and agree not to talk about. Papua New Guinea

At the core of compliance is each individual faculty member’s obligation. In this column I present the final five of my eight “Catch-22s” of Effort Certification (EC) compliance. (The first three were presented in the September/October 2006 column; ASPB News, vol. 33, no. 5, p. 38.) You’ll see that I paint scenarios that end in confusion and that I provide no answers, as there seem to be none at present. Unfortunately for us all, you may find additional Catch-22s of your own. I will close the next and last article of this series on Faculty Effort Certifications with the summary from the University of Washington FCR Report to the Faculty Senate regarding Faculty Effort Certification.

4. What is considered “in” and what is considered “out” of faculty effort? ECs must account for all university-related efforts “including sponsored research [your work that is funded off grants], administration, instruction, unsponsored scholarly activities [the stuff you do but are not paid for; see #3 in my previous column], clinical activity and other activities.” (1) Sponsored research is work that is funded off your current grants. Okay, I think I can put outreach into either instruction or sponsored research on my NSF grant. I have no patients (or was that patience?!), so I can ignore clinical activity. I (and others) get really hung up on unsponsored scholarly activities and other activities. UW’s President Emmert recently mused aloud something to the effect that “if a faculty member has a dream about his or her research, does that count as university time?” What about showers?! More seriously stated, the new focus on A-21 forces us to draw borders between creative endeavors and just plain living. Does the university own us outright as this increased enforcement of A-21 implies?

5. Volunteering, donating time, and unfunded mandates are out. The new stricter enforcement of A-21 makes it illegal for you to either volunteer or donate time to the institution because your institution is not paying you for this time. So you cannot “volunteer” part of your salary to pay a postdoctoral fellow; however, you can pay for all out-of-pocket expenses yourself because federal rules do not apply to how you spend your own money. Better not buy beers for the lab on Friday evening or bring a cake to lab meeting with federal funds, no, no, no! Also your department chair cannot impose on faculty any unfunded mandate (ask you to work for free) by being on a committee, teaching a course, or perhaps even giving a department seminar. You must be compensated for these activities because they cannot be volunteered.

6. Who pays for proposal preparation? Writing a grant can be an unsponsored scholarly activity. Regular ladder faculty or research faculty can pay themselves with federal dollars while writing a “noncompeting” grant (for grants that are paid out in yearly increments), but they cannot write a new or competing grant on their current funding because the new grant is not yet funded; it is unsponsored. Your chair or dean must pay you for hours devoted to writing a new grant (and which stone does that money come from?!). Perhaps the chair and dean do not have funds (because they just hired a new faculty member, built a building, did repairs, paid the electric bill, etc.). Do you not write the grant and so let your funding collapse or risk going to jail for an EC violation? Banish the day when you have a good idea for a new proposal!

7. Who pays for curriculum development? See #6.

8. What does one do with departmental faculty meetings, faculty elections, faculty governance, and service to any professional society (e.g., my writing this column, shhh!) or to the federal government (e.g., reviewing grants or being on a panel)? Must all service be squirreled away into some category or another, or be counted in aggregate as some percentage of your EC? Service is a valuable part of any promotion package, but now all these activities that serve to unite us, to elevate and drive our specialties, that we use to reach consensus in our institutions and professions are on the EC time clock. This poses particular problems for research faculty because there are fewer categories in which to squirrel away these activities, and if they have 100 percent salary funded from research grants, they cannot do any of these things without being in direct and clear violation of A-21 (i.e., >100% effort). Do you forgo all such activities and work in a vacuum? How will we set scholarly and professional standards if we cannot talk to each other? Again, best to check with your institution on this point and the level of activity that your Faculty Effort Certification should reflect.

Next time: Faculty Effort Certifications: Conclusions

Dina Mandoli
mandoli@u.washington.edu

I thank Brent Stewart (chair of the Faculty Council on Research, University of Washington) for permission to quote from the FCR report on FECs and two administrators at UW who provided detailed input and depth to the issues and who wish to remain anonymous.

Reference
1. University of Washington, FCR Report to the Faculty Senate regarding Faculty Effort Certification, January 19, 2006.