Research grants and remission of duties
When applying for a research grant, you will be prompted to think about how much time you will need to spend working on the grant, which inevitably leads to discussions about how the Faculty can support you to enable that to happen. We appreciate that this will be different for everyone, so what follows are some notes and prompts to support the discussion that needs to take place while you work on your application.
You will have the initial discussion about this with whichever Research Facilitator is supporting your application. Then at an appropriate stage the proposed arrangements will be forwarded to the Associate Dean for Research and the Vice Dean for approval. Proposals for posts (i.e. Departmental Lecturerships) will also require the approval of the Planning and Resources Committee and Law Board, and the Social Sciences Division. Please also ensure that you keep your Teaching Group Convenor informed of your plans.
1.Fully-funded leave
100% research leave can affect your accrual of entitlement to sabbatical leave, but anything less than this normally does not. In any case, most people tend to continue with some teaching and/or supervision even while on research leave, but you will not be expected to continue with any administrative duties for the Faculty. Some funders require you to demonstrate that any teaching or supervision you continue to do is relevant to your research project.
Many funders will not fund college Stipendiary Lecturerships, only Departmental Lecturerships. For this reason, we can be flexible about how the stint of the Departmental Lecturer is met; i.e. this could be through college tutorial teaching, as well as Faculty teaching and PGT dissertation supervision. The Faculty will not pay for college teaching beyond this.
The stint of a replacement Departmental Lecturer is capped by the Faculty at 144 units per annum, so will never be sufficient to cover the whole of an Associate Professor's teaching. The Faculty expects the balance to be dealt with in other ways, for example, by ceasing to offer an option, or finding a colleague willing to cover the some of the teaching. It is possible to request Additional Teaching if necessary (in the usual gathered field round in Trinity Term); although the Faculty will not generally fund replacement teaching above the postholder's stint (i.e. not for over stint teaching).
2. Partial stint remission
Many grants include a line for the PI's salary costs, which constitutes part of the cost recovery for the Faculty (overheads are an important element of the Faculty's overall income). However, this income does enable us to support teaching remission or buyouts if that is what is necessary to enable the PI to undertake the funded research project. For someone with college teaching obligations, this might take the form of a college tutorial buyout, or a more formal Variation of Duties arrangement. To reduce Faculty teaching obligations, it is possible to request stint remission or replacement teaching (i.e. Additional Teaching, in the gathered field in Trinity Term). We do not have fixed rules about how much teaching can be bought out or replaced, not least because PI time is costed as a percentage of FTE, and we count teaching in stint points; and also because not everyone fulfils their stint primarily through teaching. Our general rule is that we will support all reasonable requests provided they are comfortably covered by the staff costs line in the grant. Should a PI wish to request any type of support other than teaching remission (e.g. administrative assistance) this would require a proposal to be made to the Planning and Resources Committee as this has different budgetary implications for the Faculty.
In many cases it can be difficult to get the timing of these discussions right. If done at too early a stage, it can seem like a waste of time, but if done too late, we find that the applicant's expectations can not be met, which causes disappointment. These notes are intended to avoid that happening.
In all cases, the leave/remission/buyout requires the approval of the Vice Dean and Associate Dean for Research, and any non-standard requests would require a case to be made to the Planning and Resources Committee.
CLV 10 August 2023