So, I've never written a grant proposal. I have however, written or participated in writing quite a few commercial equivalents, ie offers/quotes/proposals prepared in response for RFPs from potential clients, mostly working for small businesses providing services. The clients varied from a local brewery to government ministries, charities and national bureaus of supranational organizations under the UN umbrella.
Quite a few of those explicitly didn't allow for any kind of proportional overhead but required everything to be itemized even if in gross terms like project management or supervision or training or purchase of pencils and paper and I might be naive but is there a reason why this couldn't be dealt in the same way with grant applications
That’s a good question. I can say that in the grant proposals I write, the direct costs are all itemized and if you go over on a budget line, then you might run into issues. That’s the direct costs.
I think the response regarding indirects would be, per the comment about public goods, common goods, and so on, that it can be sort of hard to itemize these costs. Can you have a line item if your work increases the rate of depreciation on equipment? Will the work slightly increase liability and should there be a line for insurance (marginal) costs? How many more queries to a database will be made as a result of the work? How much more power will be used? How much time from the business office? What fraction of the cost of journal subscriptions should be covered?
I don’t know. This is now beyond my knowledge and expertise but I would venture that some items could be itemized but others would be tricky. Not to say impossible, but tricky. But it’s a really good point. In the for-profit world, the leash is tighter because the person on the other side of the offer/quote/proposal really does care about the value they are getting for the indirect costs being claimed, I would think.
I'm not sure this is entirely fair. You are right that overhead varies by discipline, but one thing I think you're overlooking are the *common* goods that indirects can contribute to. For example, if there are enough individual grants coming in, and thus enough indirect costs going to the university, that university can start offering services and resources to the researchers as a body that it previously could not afford, such as more research librarians, expensive data subscriptions, or grant support personnel (this doesn't beg the question: such personnel are justified by the *direct* costs they help researchers win that those researchers otherwise might not).
Your argument seems to have it that deans would be indifferent to *these* monies, since they don't do things like let them fly first class. But I think this also overlooks that many such administrators also like having larger teams and operating budgets because this is its own form of social cachet. Maybe that also makes them the bad guy, or it is just a case of aligned incentives.
I agree that a funded grant should be expected to pay for its share of the production of additional common goods (also common resources and club goods). I don’t disagree with that. (There is an issue with quanta, which is fair enough. You can’t put a new gas generator for the extra power in each grant.) So I would say that the issue for me is the question of the proper share of the cost of those goods the funded grant should cover. I might have added your examples because the (somewhat flip) example I used, pencils, is rivalrous. (The power for electricity is more like a club good, so partial credit.) So I agree there and I think it would be fine for institutions to consider common pool resources; I would just argue that the goal should be for the indirect costs to reflect the marginal production of such goods conditional on the proposal being funded, with the emphasis on the marginal and the caveat regarding quanta. In contrast, I agree that administrators like having teams because of the cachet, and that is one of the preferences which, yes, I see as a dead weight loss on the system, and I would oppose.
Well but with administrators my point was mainly that even if administrators like having more people on staff because it's a form of social cachet, this needn't be dead weight loss insofar as that staff really does add value -- e.g., they are research librarians or grants support personnel that free up a faculty member's time to do more (or else increase their productivity in) research, mentoring, teaching, where their time is best spent. It would be a case of aligned incentives.
More substantively, I think this vitiates your argument more than you may be allowing. You say "I would just argue that the goal should be for the indirect costs to reflect the marginal production of such goods conditional on the proposal being funded, with the emphasis on the marginal and the caveat regarding quanta". But if what you want were actually the case at a given university, it would not manifest itself as a dean's *indifference* to faculty getting grants unless that dean were indifferent to the production of common goods for the research/university community. So you couldn't just observe the dean's behavior, in the manner you polemically suggest in the original post, and straightforwardly infer how indirect costs are set up at your home institution. You'd have to actually get into the accounting weeds to ascertain whether or not your home institution's negotiated indirect cost rates are calibrated to reflect the marginal production of such goods conditional on the proposal being funded.
Thanks for the follow-up! I’m pleased to agree that the Dean’s behavior is not wholly diagnostic. As with so many issues, this one is complicated and, yes, one would have to get into the weeds to do it right. I would be very happy, to be sure, if institutions set as a goal discovering the *optimal* overhead from the sort of point of view you are endorsing—including productive staff, common goods, etc.—as opposed to *maximizing* overhead. I genuinely hope that conversation might take place. I would be interested in evidence that the institutions I’m referring to here have used that framing in their discussions regarding indirect costs. All I have is my very limited experience to draw from, but that has not what I encountered. (To your point about staff, my experience is that the value of staff is tremendously variable. At CalTech, I encountered staff who were worth their weight in gold. At Penn I encountered staff who, to be candid, detracted more than they added. UCLA, UCSB, Alaska Anchorage, and Arizona were in the middle. So, as always, it depends.)
"I wrote academic grants for many years, now write grants in the non-profit space"
English has been corrupted a lot lately. For example, discarding the perfectly good phrase " that raises the question" and by replacing it with "that begs the question," thus ruining an important and longstanding usage in informal logic and debate. "Begs the question" originally meant that a person is covertly assuming the conclusion in his chain of logic.
What you have written are "grant proposals," not grants. Grants are approved or not by the granting agencies. No one can write a grant. Granting agencies write "requests for proposals." Applicants write proposals.
The public has become suspicious of academia and of science for a number of valid reasons. The mistaken idea that an academic can write himself a grant would be a valid reason if it were true. It would be better not to add this bit of confusion to the public mind.
Thanks for the correction. I share your view about begging the question and am appalled at the loss. Hopefully and literally are similar casualties.
I also agree with you to a large extent here. In my area, psychology, people usually used the phrase, "to write a grant" to mean that they will write a grant proposal. In the context of most discussions, the meaning was clear. After all, no one in a psychology department was going to put out a request for proposals, so the meaning was clear in the context.
In the non-profit world, it's also a bit mixed. When I talk to my colleagues at the organization, I am careful to say that I am writing a proposal. When I talk to people in development, they typically expect me to use the phrase "writing a grant," knowing that I mean a proposal. But, yes, many people would agree with you in terms of the construction.
Good, but a small point of correction. You write: “I will gently remind the reader about the Program Officer. Consider how much she cares about the amount of other people’s money being poured into the Dean’s travel fund. (Hint: she literally could not care less.)”
Program officers at NSF ( I am married to one) do NOT like high indirect costs, as it cuts into how many grants they can fund. Program officers have no control over the amount of indirect costs charged.
That's a great and helpful correction. I will add a footnote in the text, directing the reader to your comment. I sacrificed accuracy for rhetorical weight, which was a mistake. I regret the error and appreciate the correction. Thanks Rosemary!
Yes I understand about the rhetorical issue. My program officer husband does not know (!) who sets NSF’s indirect costs, although he is sure all program officers prefer to fund more grants than pay indirect costs. NSF is very hierarchical as you can imagine.
So, I've never written a grant proposal. I have however, written or participated in writing quite a few commercial equivalents, ie offers/quotes/proposals prepared in response for RFPs from potential clients, mostly working for small businesses providing services. The clients varied from a local brewery to government ministries, charities and national bureaus of supranational organizations under the UN umbrella.
Quite a few of those explicitly didn't allow for any kind of proportional overhead but required everything to be itemized even if in gross terms like project management or supervision or training or purchase of pencils and paper and I might be naive but is there a reason why this couldn't be dealt in the same way with grant applications
That’s a good question. I can say that in the grant proposals I write, the direct costs are all itemized and if you go over on a budget line, then you might run into issues. That’s the direct costs.
I think the response regarding indirects would be, per the comment about public goods, common goods, and so on, that it can be sort of hard to itemize these costs. Can you have a line item if your work increases the rate of depreciation on equipment? Will the work slightly increase liability and should there be a line for insurance (marginal) costs? How many more queries to a database will be made as a result of the work? How much more power will be used? How much time from the business office? What fraction of the cost of journal subscriptions should be covered?
I don’t know. This is now beyond my knowledge and expertise but I would venture that some items could be itemized but others would be tricky. Not to say impossible, but tricky. But it’s a really good point. In the for-profit world, the leash is tighter because the person on the other side of the offer/quote/proposal really does care about the value they are getting for the indirect costs being claimed, I would think.
I'm not sure this is entirely fair. You are right that overhead varies by discipline, but one thing I think you're overlooking are the *common* goods that indirects can contribute to. For example, if there are enough individual grants coming in, and thus enough indirect costs going to the university, that university can start offering services and resources to the researchers as a body that it previously could not afford, such as more research librarians, expensive data subscriptions, or grant support personnel (this doesn't beg the question: such personnel are justified by the *direct* costs they help researchers win that those researchers otherwise might not).
Your argument seems to have it that deans would be indifferent to *these* monies, since they don't do things like let them fly first class. But I think this also overlooks that many such administrators also like having larger teams and operating budgets because this is its own form of social cachet. Maybe that also makes them the bad guy, or it is just a case of aligned incentives.
I agree that a funded grant should be expected to pay for its share of the production of additional common goods (also common resources and club goods). I don’t disagree with that. (There is an issue with quanta, which is fair enough. You can’t put a new gas generator for the extra power in each grant.) So I would say that the issue for me is the question of the proper share of the cost of those goods the funded grant should cover. I might have added your examples because the (somewhat flip) example I used, pencils, is rivalrous. (The power for electricity is more like a club good, so partial credit.) So I agree there and I think it would be fine for institutions to consider common pool resources; I would just argue that the goal should be for the indirect costs to reflect the marginal production of such goods conditional on the proposal being funded, with the emphasis on the marginal and the caveat regarding quanta. In contrast, I agree that administrators like having teams because of the cachet, and that is one of the preferences which, yes, I see as a dead weight loss on the system, and I would oppose.
Well but with administrators my point was mainly that even if administrators like having more people on staff because it's a form of social cachet, this needn't be dead weight loss insofar as that staff really does add value -- e.g., they are research librarians or grants support personnel that free up a faculty member's time to do more (or else increase their productivity in) research, mentoring, teaching, where their time is best spent. It would be a case of aligned incentives.
More substantively, I think this vitiates your argument more than you may be allowing. You say "I would just argue that the goal should be for the indirect costs to reflect the marginal production of such goods conditional on the proposal being funded, with the emphasis on the marginal and the caveat regarding quanta". But if what you want were actually the case at a given university, it would not manifest itself as a dean's *indifference* to faculty getting grants unless that dean were indifferent to the production of common goods for the research/university community. So you couldn't just observe the dean's behavior, in the manner you polemically suggest in the original post, and straightforwardly infer how indirect costs are set up at your home institution. You'd have to actually get into the accounting weeds to ascertain whether or not your home institution's negotiated indirect cost rates are calibrated to reflect the marginal production of such goods conditional on the proposal being funded.
Thanks for the follow-up! I’m pleased to agree that the Dean’s behavior is not wholly diagnostic. As with so many issues, this one is complicated and, yes, one would have to get into the weeds to do it right. I would be very happy, to be sure, if institutions set as a goal discovering the *optimal* overhead from the sort of point of view you are endorsing—including productive staff, common goods, etc.—as opposed to *maximizing* overhead. I genuinely hope that conversation might take place. I would be interested in evidence that the institutions I’m referring to here have used that framing in their discussions regarding indirect costs. All I have is my very limited experience to draw from, but that has not what I encountered. (To your point about staff, my experience is that the value of staff is tremendously variable. At CalTech, I encountered staff who were worth their weight in gold. At Penn I encountered staff who, to be candid, detracted more than they added. UCLA, UCSB, Alaska Anchorage, and Arizona were in the middle. So, as always, it depends.)
"I wrote academic grants for many years, now write grants in the non-profit space"
English has been corrupted a lot lately. For example, discarding the perfectly good phrase " that raises the question" and by replacing it with "that begs the question," thus ruining an important and longstanding usage in informal logic and debate. "Begs the question" originally meant that a person is covertly assuming the conclusion in his chain of logic.
What you have written are "grant proposals," not grants. Grants are approved or not by the granting agencies. No one can write a grant. Granting agencies write "requests for proposals." Applicants write proposals.
The public has become suspicious of academia and of science for a number of valid reasons. The mistaken idea that an academic can write himself a grant would be a valid reason if it were true. It would be better not to add this bit of confusion to the public mind.
Thanks for the correction. I share your view about begging the question and am appalled at the loss. Hopefully and literally are similar casualties.
I also agree with you to a large extent here. In my area, psychology, people usually used the phrase, "to write a grant" to mean that they will write a grant proposal. In the context of most discussions, the meaning was clear. After all, no one in a psychology department was going to put out a request for proposals, so the meaning was clear in the context.
In the non-profit world, it's also a bit mixed. When I talk to my colleagues at the organization, I am careful to say that I am writing a proposal. When I talk to people in development, they typically expect me to use the phrase "writing a grant," knowing that I mean a proposal. But, yes, many people would agree with you in terms of the construction.
Thanks for the response.
Good, but a small point of correction. You write: “I will gently remind the reader about the Program Officer. Consider how much she cares about the amount of other people’s money being poured into the Dean’s travel fund. (Hint: she literally could not care less.)”
Program officers at NSF ( I am married to one) do NOT like high indirect costs, as it cuts into how many grants they can fund. Program officers have no control over the amount of indirect costs charged.
That's a great and helpful correction. I will add a footnote in the text, directing the reader to your comment. I sacrificed accuracy for rhetorical weight, which was a mistake. I regret the error and appreciate the correction. Thanks Rosemary!
Yes I understand about the rhetorical issue. My program officer husband does not know (!) who sets NSF’s indirect costs, although he is sure all program officers prefer to fund more grants than pay indirect costs. NSF is very hierarchical as you can imagine.
Everyone seems to have an opinion about indirect costs.
This is an explanation from 10 years ago of what overhead covers at a research university and why it is what it is.
https://www.research.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/policies/others/introduction_to_indirect_costs.pdf