University Faculty Senate, 342nd Plenary Session, March 3,
2009
IV. C. Discussion of the PSC-CUNY
Research Award Program
Panel members:
Kathryn Richardson, Chair, UFS Research Committee, UFS-designated member of the Task Force,
Chair of Nursing at NYC College of Technology
Thomas Bird, member, UFS Research Committee, UFS-designated member of the Task Force
Professor of Language & Literature at Queens College
Cheryl Bluestone, Vice Chair of the UCRA , Professor of Pyschology at Queensborough Community College
James Gordon, member, UCRA Executive Committee, Professor of Psychology at Hunter College
William Divale, Chair
of the 2005 UCRA Task Force, Professor of Social Sciences at York College
Contents of Background materials attached:
1. UCRA Expenditures, Cycles 35-39.
2. UCRA Statistics: Cycles 36-39, by College and by Division & Panel
3. PSC-CUNY Contract Article 25.
4. Report of the UCRA Task Force, 2005.
Overview:
The PSC-CUNY Research Award Program is a peer-reviewed faculty grant program. The University Committee on Research Awards (UCRA) is responsible for operating the peer-review part of the program. Members of the UCRA are screened and recommended to the Chancellor by the University Faculty Senate's Research Committee. The UFS Research Committee has been in continuous service to CUNY since 1970 initiating the FRAP (Faculty Research Award Program) that later became the PSC-CUNY Award. The UFS Research Committee and the UCRA continue to collaborate and support needs of faculty at CUNY to conduct peer-reviewed research.
The Vice Chancellor for Research, Gillian Small, chairs
a Task Force on the Restructuring of the PSC-CUNY Research Award
Program. The goal of the Task Force is to make recommendations regarding a more
efficient mechanism by which to distribute the funds. The Vice Chancellor has written that “it has become clear that the current structure for granting
awards is inefficient and unsustainable.”
The Task Force began meeting in late November. The membership of the Task Force is given at the end of this web page The Task Force has no representative from the UCRA, the body that administers the PSC-CUNY Awards. The UCRA had formally requested membership on the Task Force and has objected to the Award program being described as “unsustainable.”
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Panel Discussion of the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program:
(An excerpt from the Reports & Deliberations of the 342nd Plenary Session of the UFS, March 3, 2009.)
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Chair Philipp—The next item [on the agenda] is a discussion of the PSC-CUNY awards program. We have a number of really distinguished discussants. The first is Kathryn Richardson, who is the chair of the nursing department at New York City College of Technology, and the chair of our Research Committee for many years. She is one of two UFS representatives on the Task Force on the Restructuring of the PSC-CUNY Award Program. Our other representative is Professor Tom Bird, professor of European language and literature at Queens College, a member of the UFS Research Committee, and has served on the UFS Executive Committee. The next member of our panel is Bill DiVale, who used to be a member of the UFS. He is professor of anthropology at York College, and was a senator from 2005-2008 and served several terms as the UCRA liaison in Anthropology, and was chair of the UCRA task force in 2005. Bill’s recent research has been funded by the NIH about $5 million in the past 10 years. Cheryl Bluestone is a professor of psychology in the department of social sciences at Queensborough Community College. Her recent research is funded by the National Science Foundation and published by the National Social Science Association. She is vice chair of UCRA and is the liaison in interdisciplinary studies. Jim Gordon is professor of psychology and director of the Visual Psycho-physiology Laboratory at Hunter College. He is an elected member of the UCRA executive committee, and he has served as a liaison for several terms. Jim’s research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health for a total of 30 years; that’s a really impressive accomplishment. Welcome to everyone. We have important issues to discuss about the PSC-CUNY research award program.
Professor Richardson—We are all going to present for a bit about the Research Committee itself, the structure of the UCRA, costs, and two task forces – the one now and another in 2005 that Bill Divale chaired. Professor Bird will talk about the current task force in a moment. I’m going to start with a little history of the Research Committee. You all got these handouts in the back, and there is an overview of the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program. We are mainly here tonight because this is a faculty peer-reviewed grant program. The University Committee on Research Awards, the UCRA, is responsible for the program. Members are screened and recommended to the Chancellor by the University Faculty Senate Research Committee, which I chair. It has been in continuous service to CUNY since 1970, initiating the Faculty Research Award Program (FRAP) that later became the PSC-CUNY awards. The UFS Research Committee and the UCRA continue to collaborate and support needs of faculty at CUNY to conduct peer-reviewed research. You know that we have call letters that Stasia does such a nice job on every year, which look like this. We distribute them every year at the meetings. They are published in the UFS Digest, and Stasia does contact the individual schools, both the provosts and the grants departments, and we try to get people at all of the different colleges to volunteer to be liaisons, who are part of the UCRA. This yellow slip here each year tells the areas we are looking for liaisons in, and also the criteria for selection. We collect the curriculum vitae of the faculty and usually meet in May or June and go through all of the vitae that are submitted and decide as a group whether the people who submitted their CV’s are highly recommend, just recommended, or not recommended. The highly recommended and the recommended people’s names go to the Chancellor, and the Chancellor looks at our recommendations and from our recommendations appoints the liaisons. Now Professor Bluestone will tell us all about the UCRA structure.
Professor Bluestone—I suspect many of you have been involved in the PSC-CUNY awards and are vaguely familiar with the process, but I’ve been asked to speak about this because there is a crisis that has occurred that we’re going to talk about in more depth. So I want to make sure that everybody understands the current process that exists. As Kathryn mentioned, we have 31 panel liaisons. They are primarily discipline based, so there’s an Anthropology Panel, and a Psychology Panel, and there are also a couple of cross-disciplinary panels. They are quite successful in generating inter-campus collaboration. Many faculty from many campuses participate in the panels. The liaison recruits a certain number of people to take part in this process. We receive about 1,200 applications a year, and the job of the liaisons and panel members is to obtain peer reviews on each of the proposals to determine whether they meet the quality standards for fundability. Once these reviews are received, it is the job of the panel to meet in a collaborative process to decide which proposals should be funded, giving some preference to proposals that are scored more highly to junior faculty and other assorted reasons. That’s the general background, but we should move on now to the heart of the issue. Professor Richardson—Next is Professor Gordon to talk about the costs.
Professor Gordon—You all now that we have program, and there are about 1,200 applications from the faculty. The program is funded in our contract. It is $3.6 million now. I’ll say something about the level of funding in just a minute, but I want to talk a little bit about how the money gets spent. It’s our money. The Research Foundation is paid an administrative fee of 10%. There are three full-time people running it, and almost 1,000 funded grants, so it’s not an insane number but it is a big number. The liaisons each get $2,000, an in-service award. They can’t apply for these grants, so it compensates them to a certain extent. That is $62,000. Then there are the costs of running the program. The biggest single cost is that we spend about $70,000 paying for outside reviews. Each outside reviewer gets $50. Then, there are liaison expenses, so the total is about $160,000 that we spend to run the program, and then $360,000 for the Research Foundation. We spend about 4.6% of the budget. That number has gone up slightly from 3.6% over the past five years, which is not a surprising change, considering that we increased the number of grants by 22% over the same time period. The rest of the money, about $3 million, gets divided up among the approximately 1,000 grants, about $3,000 per grant. The panels can decide how to divvy up the money. They get a certain amount, based primarily on the number of applications that they get. Then they can say that they are going to set a criterion based on the reviews with different cut-off values, and we can fund the proposals more or less well. The maximum amount for funding is $6,000. It used to be $10,000 but we never gave even close to that, so we thought it was silly to leave that number where it was. The bulk of the money comes right to the faculty so they can do their research. I should say that the proportion of grants funded is pretty high, about 80%. There could be debate about what proportion you want to fund and things like that, but that’s how the money is spent for this program. I would just say something about the level of funding: in 1970, when I started here, I got a PSC-CUNY grant. It was for $6,000. The maximum grant now is $4,000 or maybe $5,000. I think the value of the dollar has changed slightly in the last almost 40 years.
Professor Richardson—Professor Divale is going to tell us about the 2005 Task Force.
Professor Divale—I was a liaison, in Anthropology, for about 9 years. I was on the UCRA for three or four years, as well. I think this is one of the best-run programs in CUNY. I’ll speak on that later. In 2005, Dean Small wanted to have a task force, and she met with the whole UCRA, and at one point asked me if I would chair the task force. Her complaint at that time was that too many proposals were getting funded, and so the amount of the proposals was down to about $2,900 on average. Also, we were funding about 90% or 92% of the proposals. It wasn’t competitive. We asked for volunteers for the task force. We asked for representation from the Union, but the Union did not want to take part. We had several members of the UCRA, in fact Jim was one of them, and we worked hard for over a year. We met regularly and came up with a report which you have copied here. At that time, Dean Small didn’t seem to have much of a complaint with our report. One of the things we changed is that in the old days, the scoring went from 1 to 5, the lower number being the more fundable. You had to get a 2 or below to be funded. That range made it very hard to discriminate between grants, especially when people knew you had to give it a low score or it wouldn’t be funded. Well, we increased the scoring range from 1 to 10, and the result of that over a couple of years has been that the spread of scores increased, and panels could now decide themselves what would be the cut-off point. The average funding rate is now in the high 70’s. In some disciplines, it’s even lower. It’s getting more competitive. One of the things I’d like to refer to here is that one of the most important things we did with the report was conducting a survey of the faculty. We asked the Chancellor to include a blurb in his email that goes out about the faculty survey. Also, all the UCRA members went to their campus Listservs and posted the URL. We had around 550 respondents. 78% of them had at one time applied for a PSC-CUNY grant. This was not a random sample, and it was a sample mostly of faculty who were interested in the program. But there’s no reason to think it was unrepresentative. If you can look at the handout, you have the task force report, and on page 9 there is one table which shows results to the question “Last year 90% of the applications were funded which meant average dollar awards were less. What percentage of proposals do you think should be funded in your disciplinary, on average?” You can see from the bar chart that it’s towards the higher percentage where most of the responders were. In fact, 55% of the respondents felt that between 70% and 90% of the applications should be funded. And 84% of all respondents felt that between 50% and 90% should be funded. So it’s clear that the faculty would like many awards to be given out, even if it’s a lesser dollar amount. One of the reasons for this is that in the humanities this is almost the only source of funding, and in the social and behavioral sciences you can do a study with $3,000 or $4,000. You can get pilot studies done to get more money from larger agencies. Dean Small’s argument was that the sciences needed bigger grants, more money. So that’s why we had to make the program more competitive, so the natural sciences could get bigger awards so that they could get results from which they could then get large grants from NSF and NIH. But in terms of the survey, regardless of the discipline of the faculty member, the sciences as well as the social sciences and humanities, most faculty preferred more awards at a lesser amount. They saw this as a way for people to do research, and it was an opportunity. The real problem with this issue is the amount of money that is available. Jim mentioned when he first applied in 1970 that his award was $6,000. On page 6 is a table where we tried to find out what money was available over the years, and Stasia was very good in trying to dig up the data, but it was not kept. You can see the initial funding in 1970 was $1.5 million. In 2005, it was $3.3 million. So it really just doubled in that 35 year period, and yet in 1975 242 awards were made, and in 2005 there were 1,000 awards made, and now there are 1,200 awards made. So the number of awards made, and applied for, has gone up 5 times while the amount of money has only doubled. In fact, in 2005 we projected that the total dollars in terms of 1970 dollars corrected for inflation meant the UCRA should have been funded for $6 million. Then it was $3.3 million. The problem is not that we are not competitive enough, but the faculty has gotten bigger, we have encouraged research and more people are applying, and yet the money is not increasing. That is really the issue. This is the faculty’s money. It’s part of what is negotiated in the contract. It’s clear the faculty want this money to be distributed as widely as possible. I agree that if it got down to $2,000 it would be hard to do research; but it’s not. If anything, the awards are creeping closer to $4,000. Most people I know in the humanities and social sciences can do their research for that. I want to close by saying that I was a member of the UFS for a few years, and I finally didn’t want to renew my membership because I felt this was a very negative body. In other words, whatever the chancellery came up with, you guys were opposed to it. I remember the online BA program, which I was for and I think it’s one of the best things CUNY has done. This program is even better. If you read this report, you’ll see something like 60% of the awards resulted in publications – this is self-reported so I don’t know how true it is. And 47% resulted in funding. It’s impossible to get anything more successful than this. If there’s anything that we should make a stand on, and fight about, and this organization is great at being refuseniks, it is this thing. I think Dean Small is dead wrong. The University basically wants to take this award, and fund fewer proposals hopefully at bigger dollars, thinking it’s going to result in bigger federal grants with the high indirect cost. That will kill the social, behavioral, and the humanities. I think we should fight this thing tooth and nail, and normally I support the administration, but not on this.
Professor Bird—The PSC-CUNY award program is negotiated by the Union with the University and built into our contract. As Bill and Jim have said, the awards are our money. For 35 years, the program has provided seed money to faculty. The program was designed initially with the goal of advantaging new faculty to launch their research careers, and also for current (middle and senior) faculty to do work preceding their acquiring external funding. Speaking for and from the faculty, the PSC-CUNY award program has been extremely successful. To address the present situation, a task force has been appointed and a draft has emerged, the fruit of the task force. Late last fall, Vice Chancellor Gillian Small confected a task force. It consists of three vice chancellors, one senior vice chancellor, three provosts, the president of the Research Foundation, and five faculty members. A familiar approach at 80th Street – democracy under proper supervision – but a curious group to be restructuring a faculty-owned program. The assumptions that the task force was given: one, change is needed. The faculty response was No, the present situation is fundamentally sound, and time and again when faculty have been consulted University-wide the faculty had been very positive about the program. Item 2: local campus decisions are desirable. What in the name of the Merciful could be wrong with local campus decisions. Well, there is a footnote: the local campus decisions would be shepherded by the provosts. Ah, yes. Three: peer review is much too expensive. I think you have heard the evidence that the fees are modest, and let me add that peer review is a valuable component. The critique that comes out of the peer review is valuable. It is especially useful for younger faculty. Next item: too many grants are being given. Well, the new draft would take care of that. The money would follow the number of applicants and according to the new draft that would mean a significant, long-term reduction of award funds, especially to the community colleges but to the smaller senior colleges, as well. Finally, there is a lack of accountability. We discussed that at length and decided that was a straw man. Friends, there is an undesirable lack of engagement with the UFS, with us, by the two principals, our esteemed Chancellor, long may he reign over us, and by Vice Chancellor Small, who suggests when the issue is raised is that there really isn’t a draft – it’s only a draft, so there really isn’t anything to discuss yet. But, there is a concern among some of us that, absent the concerted action that Bill has asked for, if fate moves through the City University once again as it has in the past, we will soon be informed that “after extensive faculty consultation and lengthy debate by the University trustees, a new policy has been adopted to take effect on September 1.” Friends, I suggest to you that we must not let that happen. Thank you.
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Discussion:
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Professor Crain—It sounds like the administration does not have the authority. Professor Richardson—They don’t really have the authority, but the contract is rather vague in how it’s structured. It does say that it’s a faculty-run program, but really doesn’t give any guidelines as to how the program is to be run. So over the years, and we’re not really sure where it started, there are bylaws of the UCRA. Professor Bluestone—I just want to make the point that there are three legal staff on this task force, and they were extensively advising. We’re basing this on a draft, so we’re not 100% sure, but it looks as though what they’re going to try to do is to evade what regulations there are. In other words, the draft has provosts administering the funds and then it comes back to us for a stamp of approval so there’s a pseudo-committee that really doesn’t have any function but we lose faculty control. The money would be controlled by the provost in “directed research efforts.” That would be another potential problem that may leave out certain departments and disciplines and so on. Professor Divale—In your handout, you have Article 25 of the contract, which explains the PSC-CUNY program. Professor Bluestone—The Union has taken the position that this is a negotiated benefit, but what we don’t want it to come to is a grievance. We’d hate to see the program be destroyed, and then have to try to grieve it. Professor Richardson—We’d like to hear the opinion of the body, before we sit down and do any work on a resolution or anything. Chair Philipp—The UFS Research Committee is tasked to generate a possible resolution for this body. Professor Barnhart—I was looking at the contract language, and it looks pretty clear here in 25.2, subsection (c) in the sixth page of your packet, which says “The Committee shall be responsible for establishing guidelines for the application and approval of research awards and shall communicate these procedures to all members of the instructional staff.” It sound as though the UCRA has jurisdiction over this. It doesn’t really matter what recommendations this Task Force comes out with because contractually it is the UCRA that sets the rules, according to the contract. They can propose, but it doesn’t sound like they can dispose. Professor Gordon—It does say, I believe, that the Chancellor appoints the UCRA, so the Chancellor could pick a set of faculty, at will. As it works now, the UFS makes recommendations as to who they should be, but there’s no language about that here. Professor Bluestone—I think they’ve been very careful to go through those regulations to see if they can possibly evade or circumvent them. Whether they can or not, I don’t know, but that’s what our concern is. Professor Pimental—I have received PSC-CUNY grants that helped me get tenure at the University. I am also concerned that CUNY is less and less committed to the humanities and social sciences. For instance, you see the Collaborative Grants and 90% of those have been given to the hard sciences. Then what are we going to do if the PSC-CUNY awards are closed to us? Professor Nolan—I served on the UCRA Committee and was also a liaison. There are two changes here that I think are important. One is that the campus-based initiatives won’t be University-wide within the discipline so all of the chemists in the City University work together to see who gets these grants. Professor Gordon—Absolutely. I want to point out that having these panels, which can then recruit reviewers from the entire CUNY faculty and outside of CUNY, means that we get really excellent reviews and feedback about our grants. That won’t happen with an in-house committee. Even if I were to write a grant at Hunter College in my discipline, who at Hunter College could actually review it and say whether this is a good grant or not? Only by going outside to a much larger arena of reviewers can you get this kind of appropriate review. Professor Nolan—Actually the way the program is run now, people cannot review grants from their own departments. You have to go outside your department to get a review. The other thing I found valuable when I was working on this was that the outside peer reviews were of good value. Professor Gordon—And some of my faculty want the reviews in advance, and they are less concerned about whether they got funded than what the reviewers said because they want to know what they should modify as they submit their grants to NIH or some other place. Professor Dalglish—I fully support all of your reasons for opposing this change. Looking at Article 25, this is a legal document? And what they are proposing to do is to breach this contract. Isn’t that so? How can they do that? Do we need legal counsel to stop them? Chair Philipp—That’s a matter for the Union, not the UFS. It’s a contract with the PSC. Professor Bluestone—Steve London made a couple of posts about this, and they view it in the same way. We’re glad to have their support. Our concern is that it appears, but we’re not certain, that this task force is prepared to try to implement this, and then we would be in a position to grieve it or do something about – again, I’m guessing, but that’s our concern. Chair Philipp—This body has a right to express its opinion about what should happen. We have had a long-standing role. I sit on the Board of Trustees, and the UFS appoints members to the Board committees with a vote on these issues. And our Research Committee is responsible for appointing all of the members of the UCRA, subject to the Chancellor’s choice of our nominations. Professor Woytowich—Would it be appropriate to read one sentence from the working draft that was given out at FGL [The Council of Faculty Governance Leaders meeting on February 27]? This wasn’t given out to everybody, was it? “Each campus will establish a campus committee to make recommendations for funding to the provost.” This to me is the heart of the problem. All of the other proposals we may or may not object to, but I think that one really does it. My concern would be that whatever the Union does, or we do, has to have some teeth if it means going to court, or calling on faculty to take some sort of action like refusing to participate. That’s the heart of it. Chair Philipp—Just to repeat, the UFS Research Committee has been tasked to suggest a response to the Executive Committee, and we will take the most rigorous possible response to this. Count on it. By the way, I’ve been asked to remind you that Kathryn and Tom are members of this Task Force, and at the present time Vice Chancellor Small is Chair of the UCRA. Professor Gordon—She is chair of the UCRA, but I should point out that basically after the last task force report was made she stopped attending the meetings. Chair Philipp—That is something that I will be discussing with the Chancellor. Professor August—I’ve gotten two PSC-CUNY awards, and been rejected by one, and the reviews are so important! Also, in the humanities it is almost impossible to get a larger grant. When I have applied, I’ve noticed that other people who’ve applied have five or six graduate students writing their applications, 40 or 50 pages. It’s almost impossible to compete out there. So for research at the community colleges, these grants are essential. The last time I applied, and this is the part about on-campus overseeing, I was told that I could apply for whatever I wanted but my college would not allow released time for one of these grants. Particularly in my situation the most valuable thing that could be given to me would be released time because I don’t think research can be done under a 25 hour per year teaching obligation. I would appreciate somebody checking that piece out. Professor Divale—As it works now for the released time part, you still need approval of your chair. Professor August—The chair would do it, but the college was saying no. Professor Divale—If you look at page 5 of the handout, this shows the breakdown of awards by discipline and panels for the past three years. If you look at the social sciences, about 70% were funded, and if you look at the physical sciences, which is the thing behind Provost Small, they funded 940 and did not fund 93, which means the physical sciences are funding 90% of their proposals. It’s clear down the line that what the faculty want is to spread this out, and I really think if there is one thing to go to the Board for, it’s this. This is a program that works, and whatever we have to do, we should. And I’m not depending on the Union, because they should have been here way before. And it’s a lot easier to stop this thing now than it will be later. Either a petition drive, or the UCRA will come up with an alternate proposal that will look pretty much like what we have now, so the Chancellor will know to leave this thing alone. Professor Friedman—It’s a little difficult to hear from the panel a comment about the PSC, what it should and shouldn’t have done because some of us can respond to that and I don’t want to get into that because there’s a history, and I don’t even know it all, but I feel frustrated because I want to make a motion, and I’m trying to think what the most pointed position would be, and I don’t have all of the Whereases or know whether anyone came prepared with a motion, but I would say at a minimum “Be It Resolved, that the UFS plenary…..” Chair Philipp—I’m not entertaining a motion right now. We have tasked the Research Committee to come up with an appropriate resolution for the next meeting. Professor Friedman—OK. I misunderstood. Professor Baumrin—The panel was terrific. Bill, you blew me away. Professor Baumrin—I wanted to expand on a remark of Professor Gordon. When he says this is our money what he was really referring to is that the money is taken out of the lump sums that were made available when we were under the City of New York and then when we went under State funding, and if this money doesn’t go to this program it goes back into salary enhancements. It’s our money. I was there at the inception of this program when the money was taken away from the deans, primarily Hunter, Queens, Brooklyn, and City Colleges, and placed in this program under faculty supervision, the main point of which was the neutrality of the selection process. In other words, a peer-reviewed selection process. This is the most important research program in this University. Chair Philipp—I’d like to thank all the panelists for an outstanding presentation.
All members other than UFS and PSC members were named by the university administration.
| Name | Title |
| Gillian Small | Chair of the Task Force, CUNY Vice Chancellor for Research |
| UFS-Nominated Members | |
| Kathryn Richardson | Professor, Nursing, NYC College of Technology Chair, UFS Research Committee |
| Thomas Bird | Professor, European Language & Literature, Queens College member, UFS Research Committee |
| PSC-Nominated Member | |
| Deborah Bell | Executive Director, PSC |
| Other Members | |
| Fred Moshary | Professor of Engineering, City College |
| Thomas Kessner | Distinguished Professor of History, Graduate School |
| Margaret Bull Kovera | Professor, Psychology, John Jay College |
| Mary Papazian | Provost, Lehman College |
| Peter Katopes | Provost, LaGuardia Community College |
| Evangelos Gizis | Provost, Queens College |
| Richard Rothbard | President, Research Foundation |
| Frederick Schaffer | CUNY Senior Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs |
| Pamela Silverblatt | CUNY Vice Chancellor for Labor Relations |
| Ginger Waters | CUNY Vice Chancellor for HR Management |