How painful should it be to run your grant?

Some places are good, some places are horrible. What is the pattern?

Running a grant should not involve bureaucracy so impenetrable that you’re driven to tears. But sometimes that happens.

Picture this: you have a grant and you can run it seamlessly. You can hire students, purchase supplies and equipment, schedule travel, and conduct a search with reasonable amount of paperwork, without having to chase down non-responsive offices. Imagine there are people who do this work who want to facilitate your project and support you in making sure that you’re following rules and policies. Imagine that when you get a grant, you’re more excited for the project than fearful of the bureaucracy.

Some places actually work like that. It can feel like all our fellow academics are suffering under extraordinary administrative burdens to run their funded projects, but there is solace and maybe even some hope, because some of our colleagues actually have it pretty good.

I know, right?

I’m in a rather unique position because I am simultaneously experiencing both sides. While I’m professor in the biology department at one university, at this moment I am directing a consortium that operates through a different university. Which means that for more than a year, I’ve been the PI of projects based out of two different institutions. For each of these projects, I’ve been hiring people, doing travel, purchasing supplies, and such. What I’ve noticed is that one campus is far more effective than the other. The HR process in one place is straightforward, and the HR process in the other one is not too far from Kafkaesque. It is, as they say, like night and day. One of these roles provides me with more direct administrative support, but I’ve been involved enough in these processes that I can tell that one office works so, so much better than the other.

Simply knowing that impossible bureaucracy doesn’t have to exist makes it all the more frustrating. I’ve long wondered why some places are so horrible at providing support for running awards, and why some places do it pretty well.

I haven’t come up with any insights. Some folks manage to get their travel paperwork through in a flash, while some of us need to submit this paperwork far in advance and still need to hope that it might make it through on time. Some of us are able to compensate speakers for travel and with an honorarium as a simple matter of course. Others need to gird themselves for combat just to do exactly the same thing. I won’t bore you with stories, like hosting a speaker from a 1-hour zoom seminar and having our post-award office asking them to fill out 50 pages of HR paperwork just to receive a small stipend. Oh, look, I get I will bore you with that story. Whoops. You get the idea.

I have absolutely no data to share, nor institutions or people I wish to throw under a bus, but I’ve been watching this for a long while now. I’ve noticed when universities do post-award well, and there’s a bunch of places. Now, the faculty at those campuses with good post-award will complain, because, well, everybody complains. But when they tell me their woes, I can just laugh, and then cry, because they just don’t seem to appreciate how bad it really gets. I’ve been working in a place that has driven me to some combination of tears and rage on several occasions, and now I get to run a grant in a way that somehow seems to magically function okay? Wow, it’s a world of difference. It really changes the quality of your job quite substantially, and it definitely affects your disposition towards all of the work on the pre-award side.

Why torture yourself writing a grant when getting notice of award is also torture, amirite?

I’ve wondered why some places are better than others. I can’t discern a pattern. You might think that extremely high-endowment private universities might somehow have the funds to hire enough people to make this stuff work well. And they do, but that’s no guarantee they will work well. In converse, you might think that underfunded regional public universities would be universally bad at post-award but I know of a few that are really not that bad at all. For every other class of institution — SLACs, R2s, state flagships, you name it — there is a lot of heterogeneity. I don’t think it’s a rural vs. urban thing, or a small or big campus thing, or anything associated with the amount of research activity. At least, not that I’ve noticed. There is just the occasional place that does this well. It’s not research institutes vs. universities, either, I don’t think. It’s not a privates vs publics (which run awards through separate research corporations, foundations, etc.) thing as far as I can tell.

While the incidence of quality post-award management seems to be distributed idiosyncratically, this is nonetheless consequential for the people involved. I imagine this all comes down to the quality of leadership and the consistency of that leadership. It presumably has something to do with institutional culture of responsibility and accountability. Whether or not the staff are more concerned about being blamed for mistakes or for not being a responsive member of a team. If a post-award office is broken, it can be really hard to fix. I know this because I’ve been watching talented and earnest administrators putting huge amount of effort and concern into attempts to fix broken post-award offices.

How would you rate your post-award situation? What are your biggest problems, and what do you think ultimately might explain why some places have are nicer for running grants than others? Have you picked up on patterns that I haven’t?