The Wethington Award

1/19/2016

Once again, for those new to this blog site, at present there are 9 posts on the blog and each has its own set of comments. To read the comments you have to hit the word "Comments" at the beginning or end of the post. Somewhat confusing is that when you bring up the comments for a specific post it eliminates the other posts from the screen. To bring the other posts back up simply go back to the top of the page and click on Blog. Finally, to understand the development of the blog it is best to read it from the bottom post (Dr. Paul Kearney Case) up.

Let me preface this post with the statement that I really struggled with the decision to put this topic on the blog site. I feared (and I am sure one of our commenters hopes) that, due to the pervasiveness of this Wethington Award and its impact on the income of many honest hard working academic researchers, discussing it might reduce support for the cause of this blog site rather than enhance it. To begin with, my intent is not to be judgmental but rather to provide a historical perspective of the mindset and attitudes of some past and present hospital, college and even university administrators toward the use of federally funded grant dollars. Furthermore, to some these discussions may have relevance to the concerns of money management issues driving the actions taken against Dr. Paul Kearney. Because the Wethington Award has been sanctioned by the legal department at the university I will not attempt to address any concerns in this area, but rather I would wish to focus on ethical concerns I, and hopefully others, might have with it. I believe that these relate directly back to the hospital/College money management concerns in that this award mechanism was defined and/or sanctioned by the administration of the College of Medicine and hospital. The bottom line being, one would hope that administrators at an institution of higher education like the University of Kentucky would value ethics, and not view them as some impediment to progress and wealth.

The simplest way for me to proceed on this Wethington Award blog post is to paste in an email I wrote President Capilouto back in 2012 shortly after he became the 12th president of our university. It is definitely a very protracted email and I am sure in some areas to some readers may also even appear a bit self-righteous. I apologize for that, but keep in mind it was written about 4 years ago in one final attempt to present these concerns to a new University President that I hoped might ask the questions, “Is there a compromise in ethics in this award and is this something that an academic institution like the University of Kentucky should be doing?” I primarily include this email because this award has been ongoing for close to 15 years and this email provides a historical synopsis (at least from my perspective as a tenured professor in the Department of Biochemistry) of how the award came about. I know that prior to my retirement the award was expanded to encompass the entire university and the mechanics of the award were changed somewhat. At least for the 2014-15 years the new award process looked like this: https://research.ca.uky.edu/sites/research.ca.uky.edu/files/app_2014-15_0.pdf. Personally, although I feel certain the university legal beagles have okayed all of this from a legal perspective, I still question the ethics. My concern is reflected in the document’s statement below entitled the “Level of the Award”:

Eligible faculty members can receive up to 50% of their salary savings, not to exceed $30,000 (without fringes), upon mutual agreement with the chair. Awards will be funded by departmental salary savings generated from grants. Awards will be disbursed once per year on June 30.

So what are my ethical concerns? To begin with, what appears counterintuitive in this statement is that there really is no departmental “salary savings” (most often grant direct cost salary reimbursement dollars) if the money does not come back as a salary savings but rather as a salary bonus/award to the investigator. Furthermore, shouldn’t this salary savings go back to the true originators of the salary and not the individual? Therefore, it looks to me like what is being done here is that grant direct cost salary reimbursement dollars (which in most cases are federal taxpayer dollars) are being laundered through university, college or department discretionary funds to provide bonuses/awards. Some reading this blog feel the state does not contribute to the salaries of the faculty of this university, but rather that these are all paid through either tuition revenue, or KMSF. Even if that be the case: a) what are the 280 million state taxpayer dollars being used for, b) is there not an ethical concern about asking for federal taxpayer supported salary reimbursement dollars for the express purpose of obtaining a bonus/award, and c) do you not think this award incentivizes an abuse of salary reimbursement requests and that these millions of dollars drained from the coffers of the NIH/NSF budget each year affect the number of grants these agencies are able to fund or renew? So yes I can clearly see where this “award” can be made legally sound, but the bigger question to me is, is it ethically sound? Or as Potter Stewart put it, “ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do”.

Finally, the irony in all of this is in the reply to my email from Dr. Capilouto’s office that I include at the bottom of this post. As you will see, he (or whomever wrote the reply for him) states he has asked for “a thorough and thoughtful review of the Wethington Awards program at the University of Kentucky”. These reviewers (presumably his legal office) I guess ultimately decided the best way to legitimize it was to expand the practice university wide.

My email to President Capilouto

From: Noonan, Daniel J
Sent: Saturday, March 03, 2012 11:28 AM
To: President, University of Kentucky
Subject: Concerns

Dear Dr. Capilouto:

Academic teaching and research are two of the most rewarding endeavors I have encountered in my 64 years of existence on this earth. Unfortunately, they, like all too many good things in life, encounter challenges to their purist good that somehow need to be either endured or challenged, lest they erode the goodness from the core of the endeavor. Over the past 11 years I have taken a quasi-pacifist’s role in regard to an instituted practice here at the University of Kentucky Medical Center that I feel directly challenges the integrity of academic scientific research. I have regularly aired my concern about this problem to those around me (including our previous University Presidents), but have never aired these concerns to agencies that might directly impact them. There are several explainable reasons for this complacency, although I can’t say they are fully justified in my conscience. Perhaps the major reason is the fact that the practice is so pervasive and involves so many people I call colleagues and friends, that it is not in my nature to hurt or disrupt the lives of folks that are genuinely good people. Furthermore, it is in my estimation that the majority of these people are simply victims of manipulation with a carrot that is too large and tasty to refuse. That carrot is of course money, and therefore it is perhaps the carrot that we should focus on when looking for a target of action with regard to rectifying this challenge to academic and scientific integrity. Being a new President to this University, I hope you will indulge me and let me digress a bit so as to develop this story as it was developed within my small world as a professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry at the University of Kentucky.

The hubbub about striving to become a top 20-research university is really nothing new. In my 19 years here at the University of Kentucky we have continuously strived to upgrade the research component of our department through judicious hiring and incentive programs. Being limited to state budgetary constraints we have been primarily restricted to identifying young postdoctoral fellows who look to have a strong potential for success, and then nurturing these young Assistant Professor investigators through their formative years of balancing their independent research program with their newly acquired teaching and administrative responsibilities. The rewards at the end of this 6-year probationary program are promotion to Associate Professor and tenure. Here is where a state university like the University of Kentucky often encounters a specific competitive challenge. Highly talented tenured Associate Professors in the prime of their research career often are presented with options to practice elsewhere, and generally these options include incentives in salary and benefits that can’t or won’t be matched by the University of Kentucky. It can be very frustrating to see young faculty members in whom we have invested much time and resources to develop their research program to national prominence, simply pack up and leave. The bottom line is, faculty retention has been, and will continue to be, a major struggle for state universities like Kentucky.

About 10-11 years ago several of the Chairs in the basic sciences departments at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine discussed proposals for presumably developing incentives that might aid in addressing the faculty retention issues. I wish to state here that the adverb presumably in the previous sentence is wishful thinking on my part, for I was not at these meetings and as will become evident, the people who would most benefit from the ultimate incentive programs were the high salaried Chairs themselves. Several proposals were developed, and these proposals were subsequently introduced to the faculty by individual Chairs at their monthly departmental faculty meetings. Originally, if memory serves me correctly, 2 major proposals were under consideration. Both proposals were, at least in part, predicated upon the amount of research grant funding being brought into the Medical Center by the investigator. To fully understand these proposals it may (or hopefully may not) be necessary to define 3 key elements in grant funding and grant budgets. These are direct costs, indirect costs and salary reimbursement. Direct costs are those costs that are necessary for directly implementing the research studies proposed in a grant (materials and labor costs). Indirect costs are expenses peripherally associated with implementing the research proposed in a grant (administrative costs, space, utilities etc.). Many granting agencies (especially all of the federal granting agencies like NIH and NSF) allow the investigator to incorporate into their grant budget “direct costs”, an expense item that would be used to pay the % of their salary directed towards the time period devoted by the investigator to do the research proposed in the grant. This is termed “salary reimbursement” and is generally a simple percent of the individual’s salary. For soft money institutions or departments, (those that generally do not have outside salary funding resources) these monies are used to directly pay the individual’s salary. For universities with state supported salaries like Kentucky, these monies are presumably used to reimburse the state for the state-funded salary time spent by the individual in performing their research. As you probably well know, the “direct cost” salary reimbursement dollars generated by grants here at the University of Kentucky do not go back to the state treasury, but rather back to the College in which the faculty are employed. The College has a great deal of flexibility in how they can use these funds and in the past the College of Medicine, for which I am a member, has opted to give a majority of these salary reimbursement dollars back to the department from which they originate. Furthermore, in the past the department Chairs have had discretionary use of these funds, and, at least in some departments, they have been used for such critical items as paying graduate student stipends, paying office staff salaries, buying and repairing commonly used equipment and bridge funding for supporting investigators who fall upon hard times with respect to their research support. Any remaining monies were funneled back into the research programs from which they were generated and could be used by the investigators to more efficiently advance their proposed research (e.g. buy equipment, supplies and technologies not anticipated or budgeted for in the original proposal).

Well back to the problem at hand; faculty retention, incentive programs and our 2 original proposals. The first proposal presented (at least by my Chairman in our faculty meeting) was one in which faculty members would be given an annual salary “bonus” check based upon the amount of salary reimbursement dollars they generated for the department. When it was explained that the money funding this proposal would be derived from the College of Medicine’s available discretionary funds, but were totally contingent upon the salary reimbursement dollars brought into the College of Medicine (which is in part the source of these discretionary funds), some of us brought up the perceivable legal and ethical issues associated with such a system. It would appear that what was being proposed was that monies requested by individual investigators for the express purpose of doing research (direct costs in a grant proposal) would be laundered through the College of Medicine for the express purpose of fattening the personal wallets of the investigator. The fact being that salaries, and most often direct costs, are derived from tax revenues, some of us interpreted this as a misuse of state and federal funds. Finally, others recognized that there was an obvious skewing of the amount of such bonuses simply by the fact that those with larger base salaries would most likely benefit more from the system.

The second proposal was that of converting our current 12-month salaries into 9-month salaries. College of Medicine faculty are generally involved in teaching only through the 9 months spanning the Fall and Spring semesters. The proposal was to maintain the same composite salary for faculty but pay it over 9 months, and allow the faculty to use grant funding to pay for their salary during the summer months. This proposal in essence would have provided all faculty with an instant raise in salary (whatever three months of salary constituted at the time of implementation of the proposal), but would be a one time event and appeared to contain possible contentious university issues.

After gauging the cumulative faculty responses and further investigations into the legalities of the 2 proposals, the Chairs and other administrators of the College met and came up with a third plan. This plan was in essence the same as the original “bonus” plan, but in an effort to overcome some potential legal issues as well as make it sound more legitimate and ethical, it was designated as a “Wethington Award” rather than a salary bonus. This proposal was put before the department faculty at our monthly meeting and our interest in participating in such a program was established through a vote of faculty. Although a couple of us were adamant about not participating in the program, and at least one of us refused to accept an award predicated upon grant direct cost values and what was viewed as College of Medicine laundered grant funds, the vast majority of faculty were in favor of participation. To perhaps get a better feel for why we were in such a minority, I think it is useful to present the popular reasoning behind voting for participation in this award. To begin with the faculty were assured by our Chairman that this proposal was reviewed by University legal council and declared to be a legal proposal. Furthermore, the Chairman suggested (without examples) that this practice or something similar was being used at other academic institutions. Finally, there is that carrot, the money. The way the award would be (and currently is) implemented in my department was that the first 30% of salary reimbursement dollars generated by a faculty member through his/her grant funding would be used by the department to fund the many departmental needs and legitimate items mentioned above. Any salary reimbursement dollars in excess of this 30% could either be used in an individual’s research program or be funneled (laundered) into a “Wethington Award”. Therefore, if an Assistant Professor was receiving an annual salary of $60,000 and had managed to obtain funding support with salary reimbursement totaling 70% of their salary ($42,000), the first 30% ($18,000) would go back to the Department general fund and the remainder ($24,000) could be used as a “Wethington Award” (personal income). In the first few years of the award a cap of $25,000 dollars was placed on the award, but as avarice and top-heavy salaries might have it, this cap has since been raised to $50,000. Although I have not participated in this system and have been an active lobbyer against it, I can’t judge my colleagues who participate in it. Many of our faculty members are middle-aged and with children. The University salaries are at the low end of our “bench-mark” institutions and raises are practically non-existent. Let’s face it, an extra $10,000-$50,000 a year is a large sum of personal income to reject on a principle of ethics alone. I have had faculty colleagues state that they recognize that this “in principle” is wrong, but they have kids to put through school, its legal and it is a practice at other institutions. One conversation that did bother me was one in which the faculty member went to the Chairman of our department and stated he no longer wanted the award, but rather wanted the money put back into his research program. According to this faculty member his request was refused and he was told he has to take the award.

I am also able to see the potential frustration of Department Chairs who wish to reward those faculty who are able to attract research funding and national prominence. These are obviously the faculty most susceptible to disenchantment with the system and outside recruiting forces. Unfortunately, in my personal estimation this reward system is the wrong way to go about it. Beyond the expressed issue of ethics and misuse of taxpayer dollars, the program is also counter-productive in the long run. This program encourages the abuse of salary reimbursement requests and artificial inflation of grant budgets. Now, rather than budgeting for legitimate concerns faculty are budgeting for the award. The department chairs and administrators like to suggest that this system is also a motivational tool for applying for grant support, but those of us who struggle continuously for grant support know better. We are already doing everything we can to submit fundable grants, and motivation has never been an issue. Those not motivated to submit grants are probably no longer competitive in this funding jungle, and therefore no incentive program will help them. Finally, money has always been a strong temptation or driving force of illegitimacy, and I fear that for a few this tasty carrot might tempt normally conscientious and honest investigators to become overly creative with their submitted grants in an effort to strengthen their prospects of funding.

For us investigators that continuously struggle in obtaining and renewing grants, this reward system is also a type of cancer. These salary reimbursement awards inevitably eat away funds that could be legitimately used to fund or renew other grants. Without knowing the exact number, I would estimate that the College of Medicine may issue 1-2 million dollars in Wethington Awards annually. This recurring drain on funds could by itself fund the first year of anywhere from 5-10 new or renewed grants. In these times of substantially reduced NIH funding this is a significant figure. I have had grants that scored near the funding line only to lose out due to lack of funds, so I come away with the feeling that these awards are personally impacting my ability to get grants funded, and I believe these awards will also eventually come back to haunt the fundability of these individuals receiving the awards.

So we are back at the same contentious issue of how do we go about increasing the attractiveness of the University of Kentucky to our present and rising stars. They are a valuable resource to the University in both money and national credibility. Obviously salary adjustments would be one approach, but this seems to not have much support in our state’s legislative bodies. Perhaps something more enduring might be worth considering (or revisiting as the case might be). I have previously submitted proposals to past University Presidents for full subsidization of the higher education of faculty dependents. This is a benefit offered by a variety of our benchmark institutions and its implementation would probably have minimal cost and impact on our existing financial and teaching burdens. Furthermore, it can be anticipated that this program would bring in some very talented undergraduates that might alternatively opt to take their talents elsewhere. Finally, it has legitimacy. A second benefit that might be implemented is in the area of subsidized medical and insurance benefits for the families of faculty members. Being a university that has its own Medical Center as well as its own HMO program, I would think that the costs of this type of venture might likewise be manageable.

I choose to write this letter now for 3 reasons. The first is that I am unimpressed with the new Dean of our College with respect to these issues and some of the directions he is taking the College. The second is that, although I am nearing retirement, I have invested 19 years into our College and University and hate to see that investment be destroyed rather than developed. Finally, you are a new President of this University and at least from the little I have seen of you at University Senate and public presentations, you appear to be a good listener, a good thinker and a decisive person, traits I feel are critical to this University in the coming years.

Good luck in your work and thanks for reading this protracted letter.

Best Regards,

Dan Noonan

Daniel J. Noonan
Professor
Department of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry
University of Kentucky College of Medicine
BBSRB, B151
741 South Limestone
Lexington, KY 40536-0509

President Capilouto’s email Reply

From: "President, University of Kentucky" <pres@uky.edu>
Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2012 09:20:52 -0400
To: "Noonan, Daniel J" <dnoonan@email.uky.edu>
Subject: RE: Concerns

Professor Noonan,

I again thank you for your correspondence below and alerting me to your concerns.

In particular, following your communication I asked for a thorough and thoughtful review of the Wethington Awards program at the University of Kentucky. That effort is ongoing.

I assure you that I continue to take your concerns seriously and I will take the results of the review seriously.

Eli Capilouto

30 Comments

Mrs LT

1/21/2016 03:42:12 am

This is such a mess I don’t know where to start.
My distillation of these rambling arguments is that Noonan thinks that it’s bad or not fair or somehow unethical for the university to incentivize faculty productivity by aligning compensation with sponsored research activity. This is as usual presented as a concern about misuse of “taxpayer dollars” provided by the state of KY or, in an expansion of his taxpayer watchdog role, the federal government.
A counterpoint to these “taxpayer” arguments would of course be that KY gets more than $2 for every $1 that it contributes to the federal government and that the citizens of KY get a $3Billion university in return for their $280M investment (which as I explained before would not cover the faculty salaries and benefits).
The “ethics” arguments are more nebulous, particularly since (also as usual) Noonan doesn’t present a plan that would be acceptable to him. Presumably this might be a situation where everyone gets paid the same and the true academicians like Noonan are valued (literally) the same as someone who recovers all of their salary from sponsored research. But why stop there, what about people who generate income from clinical services? We all know that Kearney is still getting paid $350,000 which I bet is about 3.5 times what Noonan was earning before he “retired”. The answer is of course that Kearney was paid what he was worth. The situation with researchers is no different. However they choose to do it, the University has to pay people what they are worth or they will leave (which of course is probably what Noonan would like so the place can revert back to the collegial community college he so enjoyed working at). But, if researchers leave then there will be less jobs for people to work in our labs and less opportunities for students and fellows to train with us. So perhaps the motivation for having a faculty compensation plan that rewards research productivity is to do something that’s for the common good of the university? Perhaps that’s the ethical thing to do?
Finally, every other successful biomedical research university I am aware of has a faculty compensation plan that includes a variable component that’s based on some metric of productivity. Even public universities. I expect that’s what most taxpayers would want.

Bill

1/21/2016 09:03:32 am

Wow, once again Mrs LT has provided a totally nonsensical response to Dr. Noonan’s post that completely avoids the central concern of ethical integrity by simply saying, “we deserve more money than you because we are more important to the university”. Therefore, we should be allowed to benefit from our research grant by telling the granting agency that we deserve a salary bonus for being such brilliant individuals. I wonder what NIH thinks of this policy. Well maybe someone should contact them and see if it meets with their approval.

The problem Mrs LT is that you spend way too much energy attempting to insult Dr. Noonan in your posts and not enough energy in submitting a reasonable response to what appears to be a very logical concern aired here. The concept that our rising stars are valuable assets in the university is a reasonable one, and Dr. Noonan clearly acknowledges this in his letter to President Capilouto. The problem he has with this is the mechanism for retaining these individuals. Like I inferred above, I would venture to say that if you told the taxpayers (in the form of the granting agency officials) that you have included salary reimbursement in your grant budget for the express purpose of obtaining a personal salary bonus from the university, I suspect they would not only deny the request but might even cancel your grant. In essence, by making both the award and the amount of the award contingent upon the amount of salary reimbursement from grants, the university is doing exactly that in the Wethington Award. Furthermore, from a university perspective, what this award is saying is that a funded researcher is much more valuable to our university than any academician. Extending this logic, there are an increasing number of faculty, in at least the College of Medicine, that do little to no teaching but have grant support, and they therefore are much more valuable to this university than those that do teach. I think Dr. Noonan might direct you back to the comment on one of the previous posts in which he provided a sound argument for the relative income versus outlay for teaching versus research in his former College. In essence, there is zero profit from budgeted grants while there is considerable profit from teaching. I fully agree that grants provide employee salaries and facilitate postgraduate education, but I have trouble seeing where that places these people on some sort of pedestal. If there is a group of faculty that stands out in this crowd I believe it is those that both teach and maintain research funding. Come to think of it, Dr. Noonan did this for much of his career at the university.

Finally, beyond the standard promotions and pay raises, I think I like some of the alternative faculty compensations Dr. Noonan suggested in his letter to President Capilouto. They would appear to impact faculty retention issues, are equitable to both teachers and researchers and they are legitimate. Faculty retention will always be an issue, but I tend to agree with Dr. Noonan here, I see no value in compromising the integrity of the university to solve this issue.

Dan Noonan

1/21/2016 11:52:59 am

Thank you Mrs LT for once again contributing to the blog. Mrs LT, I think Bill is pretty accurate with his point that you seem to have totally disregarded the central concern in this blog post and that is the issues of ethics in this award. They may mean little to you but in many respects they are an essential component of a university. We even require our graduate students to take a course on the subject. The fact that the award itself and the amount of the award are both totally contingent upon the amount of direct cost salary reimbursement dollars a grant recipient is asking from his or her granting agency begs the question, “am I asking for this money to justify the time I am spending on this research or am I asking for it to get the maximum award and salary bonus?” Furthermore, like I pointed out in the blog post, what advantage is this “salary savings” and how can you even call it a “salary savings” if it goes back to the individual as a bonus to their salary?

Secondly, your parameters for “worth” and “productivity” are completely subjective and to a certain extent do not even fit into the award. For example, a faculty member that receives a 5 million dollar grant from a source (e.g. industry or private funding agency) that does not permit salary reimbursement would by the university award and your calculations be a less “worthy” and “productive” faculty member than one that that receives a 0.5 million dollar grant from a place like NIH or NSF. On the other hand, by your calculations a person who does not teach but has a funded grant that pays salary reimbursement is a far more “worthy” and “productive” individual at this university than someone who merely teaches, or better yet, someone who teaches and has a grant that does not allow salary reimbursement. Sorry, I am not buying into those definitions of “worth” and “productivity”.

Finally, I have to believe there are better and more equitable ways for dealing with faculty retention issues and rewarding “worth” and “productivity”. In the original discussions on the development of this award, as well as here in your comments, justification for this award has been linked to ‘this award being a reflection of what other universities are doing’. I sure wish someone would be a little more specific and give a few examples of documented cases of where this type of award system is being used, or simply how much and what type of compensation packages other state universities are using to promote faculty retention and reward “worth” and “productivity”. Please leave out private universities and research institutes, because as I noted before, if you simply want an avenue for rewarding research, create a research institute wherein salary reimbursement dollars are used to pay salaries. In that scenario bonuses would not be required because you could define salaries at whatever you wish.

1/21/2016 12:33:04 pm

Thanks once again Bill for adding to the blog and for your support. As I mentioned in my response to Mrs LT, I agree with your observation that Mrs LT, rather than provide a response to the central issue of the blog post, decided to ramble on about worth and productivity. Unfortunately I can't buy into Mrs LT's unidimensional view that research funding is the most important parameter of defining worth and productivity in a faculty member at the University of Kentucky. Beyond the issues of ethics, I begin to worry that in feeding this fixation on being a top 20 research university we may simply forget that we are also an academic institution. Some believe that teaching is something that anyone can do. Having served as a course director for 20 years at the university I can definitely state that this is not necessarily true. I think it is acceptable to at least ask the question, are we being fair to the students who pay all of that money for an education if we deemphasize teaching skills in our faculty recruitment and retention parameters, for the explicit purpose of maximizing our research funding at the university? Well it is at least something to think about. Thanks again for your support of the blog

1/21/2016 01:07:39 pm

Surely the central issue of the blog post is is it "ethical" or beneficial to the university to align faculty compensation with participation in sponsored research. I provided some reasons why I think it is. You clearly don't agree. You can find plenty of basic sciences faculty compensation plans for public universities online. This is pretty typical:

http://www.medfaculty.pitt.edu/directory/compensation-and-incentives/

Let me know what you think.

1/21/2016 01:20:31 pm

“am I asking for this money to justify the time I am spending on this research or am I asking for it to get the maximum award and salary bonus?”

As I explained this all has to be justified and documented by law. And honestly do you really think there are faculty who are only doing federally funded research to get a bit more salary? That's just as insulting to me as your suggestions that people who don't teach a lot are not real "academicians" like you are.

"In that scenario bonuses would not be required because you could define salaries at whatever you wish."

No, the NIH has a salary cap for reimbursement from grants to the ability to generate salary from grants is limited currently to about $185,000.

1/21/2016 03:37:01 pm

University of California system medical schools

http://www.ucop.edu/academic-personnel-programs/_files/apm/apm-667.pdf

UNC medical school basic sciences compensation plan

http://academicpersonnel.unc.edu/files/2013/02/ccm3_032042.pdf

Obviously places like UCLA, UCSF, UC San Diego, UNC are not top teaching institutions like UK but they seem to be doing OK despite having these unethical compensation plans.

NYT

1/21/2016 04:42:35 pm

Dr. Noonan, just ran across your blog. Interesting stuff. How can I get in touch?

1/22/2016 02:44:05 am

How are you getting in with these public university medical school non clinical faculty compensation plans? Here is another one.

http://www.regents.iowa.gov/Meetings/DocketMemos/15Memos/March2015/0315_ITEM02f.pdf

One of your misconceptions seems to be that NIH/Grant funds are used for this variable salary component. This is clearly not the case (although perhaps that’s something else you’d like to have audited?).
One more thing. You’ve deliberately confounded my use of the term “worth” as referring to individual’s intrinsic “value” so that you can get outraged about being devalued as academics. By worth I mean what someone could be paid if they worked at another institution. Believe it or not, some faculty (especially our rising stars) have kids, wives who don’t work, mortgages and so on so this actually matters to them.

1/22/2016 06:20:50 am

Please let me take this one Dr. Noonan. Interesting stuff Mrs. LT. I have looked over all of the compensation packages you reference here and none look anything like the “bonus” package we call the Wethington Award. Although the ones you provide here offer administrative supplements to salary, none state that the supplement and the amount of that supplement is totally predicated upon the amount of salary reimbursement dollars someone brings in on their grants. In fact, most are considerate of both teaching and research accomplishments in that raises, promotions and salary supplements are predicated upon performance evaluations. Well surprise, surprise, you mean other institutions actually value the component of teaching?? Well knock me over with a feather.

You almost had me in tears with that somewhat incomprehensible statement concerning the NIH salary cap at $185,000. How do we survive and how do I raise a family on so little? Oh, I know, become an administrator with something like Associate Dean of Research in your title and then we can tap into the grant indirect costs for our $350,000 salary. Or perhaps like Dr. Kearney, save a wealthy person’s life and get an endowment in your name. Interestingly, the difference between these 2 enhanced salaries is that the first is not based on that highly valued parameter of performance while the later is.

Well Mrs. LT, it looks like you will never see the potential ethical concerns with this Wethington Award system. I only hope that you are not lecturing in the ethics course that the graduate students are required to take. From the sounds of your low opinion of the value of academics and those that teach them I suspect you do little to no teaching. Take it from a person who knows, money isn’t everything in life.

1/22/2016 06:37:23 am

Bill- now I really wonder who you are?

What is incomprehensible about the NIH salary cap? You can't recover more than $185,000 from grants.

Look at this from the UNC plan:

One component of eligibility for a variable component based on excellence in
research is that faculty would be expected to exceed the target for percent of salary earned from
external sources, set by their department for their rank. The target level for participation is
expected to increase with faculty rank. For faculty whose salary is above the NIH cap, the target
salary percentage will be calculated against total salary from all sources.

How is that any different from the Wethington Award?

Rosie

2/1/2016 07:58:58 am

Just perusing this blog and noticed this person cites UNC as a model for ethical behavior. What a crock, isn't this the school that sanctioned the fictitious courses for their student athletes to take? I am certain we could set the bar a little higher than that. What about establishing our own bar? Oops, I think that is exactly what we are doing with this Wethington Award. Unfortunately, like this person, I do not see it to be much better than UNCs.

1/22/2016 06:42:13 am

Also, I do teach and I do have an extensive record of teaching that includes awards for teaching at institutions with dare I say it higher standards than UK.

And, although my lab is mostly run by professional staff it has been an effective training place for graduate students, MD/PhD students, professional students and post docs at UK. Many of these received fellowships and grants and have moved onto success at the next stage of their careers.

I am also very involved in mentoring early career investigators, particularly underrepresented minorities.

I have a pretty good idea about what Noonan did but lets see what you do Bill? I bet you run a graduate course for 3-4 students that nobody wants to take but at least its something to put on your DOE.

1/22/2016 07:49:38 am

And why do you think success as a trauma surgeon is "performance based" but success in research isn't? I know a lot of physician scientists and I think most of them would agree that making important contributions in research is more difficult than being competent clinicians (not that clinical service isn't an important and worthy activity which I feel compelled to add to fend off your obvious response).

And clearly whatever Kearney did isn't essential for the functioning of the hospital and the trauma surgery program because this has carried on without him, presumably because Andrew Bernard can do everything that Kearney could do.

1/22/2016 09:18:26 am

I guess we just have to take your word on this outstanding teaching/mentoring career. Congratulations. Myself, I teach in multiple courses, one with a class size over 100. In addition, I have never been without grant funding.

If your primary justification for the Wethington Award is that other universities do something like this, than I am certain you will never fathom any of my ethical concerns with the Wethington Award. It is what it is. Again, I hope they do not assign you to teach in the ethics course.

Finally, there you go again Mrs LT, trying to twist statements made to fit some slight you wish to make. No one here said success in research isn’t performance based. Furthermore, no one said the trauma surgery program at the hospital would not survive without Dr. Kearney, and yes the program is in good hands with Dr. Bernard whom Dr. Kearney trained. Finally, no one said the salary cap is incomprehensible, but rather the sentence it is used in just might be. The point being, your arguments always fall short because you just can’t keep your personal feelings of contempt out of your responses towards anyone presenting an opposing opinion to yours.

1/22/2016 09:54:30 am

Excellent. So if you have all of this grant funding presumably you have also been receiving a Wethington Award every year. Or did you take the opportunity to demonstrate your superior ethics by turning it down? Can't wait to hear your response.

1/22/2016 10:11:26 am

What is this ethics course you keep referring to? I am a PI/Co-PI of NIH training grants that require instruction in responsible conduct of research for trainees. I am the chair of an NIH study section that reviews F and K series grants that again require this as a reviewed component. Why on earth do you think I'm unethical?

I'm happy to send you my CV so you can verify all of this. Just let me know where to send it. I will be very interested to see yours in return.

1/22/2016 12:32:47 pm

Mrs LT, do I sound that naïve. We have seen what this hospital administration does to anyone that challenges their approach to governance or attempts to investigate their abuse of authority. They monitor emails and devise avenues for either driving out or administering out anyone they view as a threat to their fiefdom. Do you think I am stupid enough to give you information that would aid in my identification? If that happened I would not be surprised to find the locks on my office door changed and my office computer confiscated. That is in part what this blog site is all about, the abuse of power that has the majority of faculty and staff wondering who is next. I am certain you have no worries in that area, so feel free to identify yourself anytime. We are all looking forward to it.

1/22/2016 01:01:53 pm

Sorry for asking. I obviously don't fully appreciate the level of paranoia around here. I'm just curious because you all seem to speak with so much certainty and authority that it makes me wonder what your credentials are (aside from presumably having worked at UK for 20+ years and participated in all of the high quality educational programs on offer in the College of Medicine...sorry there I go again). Anyway, although we don't agree on anything I am truly sorry that you clearly care a lot about UK and feel as though the institution is being harmed by the hospital.

1/23/2016 03:53:20 am

Well Hallelujah, Internet at last. That’s the good and bad of retiring and moving out into the boonies, you are away from it all and you are away from it all. Thanks for keeping the blog lively Mrs LT and Bill. Sorry I have not been able to participate in this apparent love fest. Unfortunately I must continue my absence because now that the snow has stopped I have horses to feed and about 100 yards of driveway with 15 inches of snow on it that I have to shovel. If you don’t hear from me in the future simply check the obituaries. I know that would make some who read this blog extremely happy but hopefully others might miss the entertainment. So while I am gone you children try to play nice. Ta Ta.

1/25/2016 01:04:58 pm

Well I am finally back. In looking over the conversations between Mrs LT and Bill, I believe most of the pros and cons of the Wethington Award have been covered. I think it is clear why I had my reservations about including it on this blog. I had a relatively small but adequately funded research program for almost all of my years at UK, and therefore I fully recognize the importance of research at the university and the importance of rewarding highly productive faculty in both research and teaching. My hope is that it could be accomplished in a more uniform and ethical manner. Beyond the avenues available to college administrators to offer raises and promotions, colleges have discretionary funds that might be used to facilitate this. They could be used to reward both productive researchers and outstanding teachers, as is seen in some of the examples Mrs LT provided for other universities. Furthermore, one would hope that it would not be based solely upon the amount of salary reimbursement from grants, but rather a combination of lets say outstanding research accomplishments (grant income, publication record, research awards, meetings attended, editorial boards, etc.) and/or their outstanding teaching accomplishments (teaching income, lecture hours, teaching evaluations, teaching awards, etc.), or whatever other uniform criteria one may come up with. It basically would say that the university recognizes your exceptional accomplishments throughout the year in question and value you as a faculty member. It is the combination of these things that make a university work. Outstanding researchers often do less teaching and those struggling with research (due to age, area of expertise or whatever) often pick up this void left by the outstanding researchers. In closing, I might also like to point out that I feel the university has a similar obligation to contribute to these efforts to strengthen faculty recruitment and retention. Increasing university endowments, subsidizing the university education of faculty dependents or further subsidizing faculty health care or insurance premiums are simply 3 reasonable possibilities that I can think of. The bottom line being, I am not against rewarding faculty for meritorious service, I simply think that it should apply to all aspects of faculty service to the university.

1/25/2016 04:24:03 pm

Congrats. You’ve managed an entire post without accusing anyone of being unethical or engaging in criminal misuse of tax payer/grant funds!

Yes, it would be great if everybody got paid the same, all contributions to the academic mission of the university were valued equally and nobody could request any salary from grants so there was more money to go around for research. We could also introduce some sort of a salary cap for universities to even up the playing field so some places don’t monopolize all of the grant money. Unfortunately people are greedy and competitive so none of this will happen.

The real outrage about salaries in basic sciences at UK is that some people earn so much.

Check this out. These are both professors in basic sciences departments at public research universities. One of them shared the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (and I know is also a stellar teacher). One didn’t. Neither have significant administrative roles. This is public information that can be accessed at the links below.

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/databases/public-salaries/

SANCAR, AZIZ UNC-CH Distinguished Professor Biochemistry and Biophysics $177,111

http://www.kentucky.com/news/databases/article44603448.html

ST CLAIR DARET Dept of Toxicology and Cancer Biology Professor $279,110.04

There are a dozen or so of these mindbogglingly overpaid non clinicians at UK even if you ignore people who are paid extra for “administrative” roles.

If anyone from the administration reads this blog, this something you should be outraged about.

1/25/2016 05:37:41 pm

Mrs LT thanks again for your blog post. I am totally aware of some of the disparities in salaries in the college and the hospital. People in the blog have previously pointed out some of these for the College of Medicine and the hospital. Now you point some out for the Basic Sciences department. There are things in this world that I cannot do anything about and I consider this to be one of those. I personally consider this as minutia with regards to the bigger picture of the potential mismanagement of finances by the administration of the hospital. The blog emphasis is on the specific targeting of Dr. Paul Kearney for his challenging the mismanagement of hospital finances, and the abuse of power used to try to silence this challenge. Perhaps in some future blog by hopefully somebody else we can discuss in a civil manner these disparities in salaries for the various individuals and how this might be either rationalized or remedied

1/26/2016 03:34:13 pm

I think treating some people exceptionally well is just as bad as treating other people exceptionally poorly. And frankly if you want to stir up a lot of faculty unrest this sort of thing is more likely to do it than trying to keep the never ending Kearney saga going.

1/27/2016 09:17:41 am

The "taxpayer dollar" support to UK is going down and down...pretty soon you will have to start asking where the $168 million is going.

Here is a summary:

Second, in the first year of the new two-year budget cycle starting July 1, the Governor's budget proposes a cut of $25.2 million to our state appropriation. To put into context, this year we were scheduled to receive an appropriation from the state of $279.6 million. The budget, if enacted for next year, proposes lowering that appropriation to about $254.4 million - a 9 percent reduction. The following year, 2017-2018, our base will be reduced to $169.7 million and the remaining one-third ($84 million of the $254 million) would be placed in a pool of dollars that would be allocated across universities based on performance. As details of the method of allocation become clearer, we will keep you informed.

1/27/2016 01:37:55 pm

Thanks for the update Mrs LT. This appears to be speculation at this point so I think I will wait and see. If it does come to this, my sympathies are with the parents and students who will no doubt have to pick up the slack through tuition and housing increases. Perhaps, rather than paying bonuses from salary savings or grant salary reimbursements, they might put this money back into the pot to offset the these losses in state revenue. What do you think of that idea?

1/27/2016 02:36:59 pm

I expect the University will just use this as an excuse to operate with even more financial autonomy from the state (<5% public funding does not warrant 100% public oversight).
Your idea of a freeze on these "bonuses" is commendable but a non-starter in the greedy world of UK Healthcare. I'm afraid you and your friends here with your enthusiasm for altruism and public service.

1/27/2016 06:16:22 pm

Oh I really like that idea Mrs LT. Maybe we can totally divest ourselves from the state and become an elitist private institution. That way we could raise tuition and fees to the point where we wouldn’t have to deal with trying to educate those unworthy poor hicks. I suspect this budget would not be anywhere near the <5% if we were not trying to build so many new buildings with money we do not have. Thanks again for adding to the blog.

1/28/2016 11:59:15 am

We are told that the new residence buildings are privately funded. The science building is actually needed (and apparently funded in part by the Athletic Program) but the new research building is not (in my opinions). Are you suggesting that these already stretched beyond breaking point "taxpayer funds" are being used for some of these buildings (presumably this would be whats left over after paying for the fully funded faculty salary lines)

In order for UK to become "elitist" and attract high paying students it would have to be able to compete with other "elite" institutions. I don't see that happening.

2/1/2016 08:08:08 am

Continuing with my perusal. I think someone left out the costly new hospital facilities that are either programmed for construction or under construction. Aren't these and their financing a part of the hospital finance mismanagement concerns that appears to be central to the ongoing Kearney vendetta?

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The Wethington Award

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