The Academic Senate's Council on Research (COR) sponsors a source of funding for any UCLA senate faculty member with an application and a bright idea.
Faculty can receive a grant of up to $10,000 for their research that is both academically meritorious and promising for the future solicitation of outside funds.
The Faculty Grants
Program (FGP) receives nearly 700 applications each year,
and awards grants to 75 percent of the applicants, based
on recommendations from a committee of peer reviewers.
COR chair Luisa Iruela-Arispe
urges faculty to view the grant not as a solitary means
of support, but as a seed fund that might help in the opening
of new doors.
“We have seen very
successful faculty members that are year after year recurrently
coming back to this source,” she said. “They have been extremely
productive at generating books and articles or sufficient
data for extramural funding.”
| COR's
Faculty Grants Program—viewed as a seed fund
to help bring in larger, external awards.
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The program therefore
not only encourages faculty research in the short term,
but often enables more money to be brought to the university
from outside sources.
Although the program
is campus wide and indiscriminate of discipline, faculty
in the UCLA humanities and social sciences departments have
come to rely on the program as a dependable source of funding
more heavily than those in the life or physical sciences.
“For the humanities,
this is really one of the key sources for funds for research.
The med school and life sciences have… multiple sources
of funding (such as the National Institutes of Health, the
National Science Foundation) that are not as open for the
humanities” Iruela-Arispe said. “These funds are essential
for maintaining the viability of research in those areas.”
The program is also
unilateral in terms of faculty experience—an assistant
history professor has as much chance of receiving funds
as a seasoned emeritus in the music department.
“It helps assistant
professors who are new here and need to get their foot in
the door, and it also helps emeriti who are not as active,”
said Kathy Speer, the Senate's principle policy analyst.
Grant recipients can
also use the funds towards hiring graduate students as research
assistants and contribute to the cost of graduate fee remissions.
In the past two years,
however, the funds for the program—which come from
the office of the Chancellor—have been cut approximately
20 percent.
The decrease in available
funds has affected the number of faculty the program is
able to support. A large percentage of the faculty who apply
are returnees to the process, and have depended upon the
fund annually.
“For the first time
last year many faculty that have been funded suddenly were
no longer funded,” Iruela-Arispe said. “It's important to
realize that the consequences of those cuts are not necessarily
tangible in a short time—we will most likely see this
in a long-term manner and it will be very difficult to repair
at that point in time.”
The program has served
as the lifeline for humanities research. But in light of
the budget cuts, faculty are encouraged to be more aggressive
in seeking outside funding in addition to the FGP funds
and expanding their research objectives.
“Some faculty
in humanities are very happy with just getting $3,000 a
year, but the research enterprise here is trying to build
projects—not just maintain a level of operating funds,
but to actually develop new research programs and support
graduate students,” said Elisabeth Johnson, co-director
of the Strategic Research Initiatives Group for North Campus.
“Faculty need
help in thinking about other types of funding,” she
added.
 
Editor's note: In our next issue, Part II explores
internal and external funding programs and how UCLA research
initiatives help facilitate collaborative interdisciplinary
projects.
Related Links
Faculty Grants Program www
Council on Research www
Academic Senate www
SRI - North Campus www
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