maintenance budgets, was Re: Universities

[dabell58@earthlink.net]

Original Message:
-----------------
From:  Wimblees@aol.com
Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 16:03:55 EST
To: caut@ptg.org
Subject: maintenance budgets, was Re: Universities

But this issue of equipment maintenance brings up an other question. Does
any 
one have knowledge of, or experience with, how other departments get money 
for the upkeep of their multi million dollar equipment. I'm sure the
biology, or 
physics, or business schools, have equipment that needs constant attention. 
Do these departments have trouble getting and keeping repair people, and
the 
money for parts, to take care of this equipment? 

Wim 

Hello, all --
One of my former jobs was Department Administrator in a chemistry
department in a research university. Our departmental equipment maintenance
budget came largely from what are called "overhead monies" from research
grants given by government agencies and private foundations; professors
applying for grant money were required by the university to include a
10-15% line (10-15% of the research money requested) which went directly to
the university to support general university activities. These activities
included not only departmentally-owned instruments (as opposed to
research-grant-owned instruments) but other impoverished departments such
as English, modern languages, music --

It was (and I expect still is) a fairly complicated system with lots of
opportunities for departments to feel ill-used, and the best the university
could do was to make sure everyone was ill-used equally--

A parallel, I suppose, would be for all concerts to be supported by paid
ticketing with a surcharge for general instrument maintenance, any extra
money to be used for general university expenses such as English, modern
languages, biology -- a system somewhat antithetical to the educational
mission of a university --

My two cents --

Best wishes,
Dorrie Bell
Boston, MA




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