CUNY Review of Large Multi-campus Proposals

Internal Procedure for Large Multi-campus Collaborative Funding Proposals

Scenario:

• At issue are subsets of funding opportunities where it may be required or desirable to limit the number of submissions from the CUNY system
• In general, CUNY colleges follow their own internal review and approval procedures when the number of intended submissions exceeds the total number of allowed or desirable proposals for a given institution.
• However, no equivalent internal review procedure exists in those special cases where the funding proposals involve collaborations between multiple CUNY colleges or between CUNY colleges and institutions outside the CUNY system.
• In many of these cases, the University Dean for Research (Dean) is requested to provide financial or other forms of support for the proposal.

Issues:

• In situations where there has been more than one such multi-campus collaborative proposal for a specific funding opportunity, often, the Dean has been requested to assure the same type and level of unqualified support for proposals that were essentially competing against each other.
• It is generally recognized that in some of these situations, the chances for success are higher if one CUNY-wide application is submitted to serve most if not all of CUNY campuses.
• Since these requests for support often came just prior to the deadline, the Dean did not have sufficient time to evaluate and offer support to the strongest of all submitted proposals.
• Furthermore, because of the pressure of the deadline, at the time when support was requested, there was little opportunity for the Dean to recommend any programmatic change or consolidation.

Policy:

• As a way of addressing the abovementioned scenario and issues of concern, we would like to propose that a CUNY system wide internal faculty review process be introduced for these special cases of collaborative research proposals.
• The proposals that will be subjected to this internal faculty review will be identified based on meeting ANY of the following criteria:

1.      The call for proposal limits the number of submission from an eligible institution and CUNY is considered as a single institution;

2.      The proposal includes a multi-campus collaboration and the amount of funding requested is $500,000 or larger;

3.      The intended submission will request some form of support from the central office (such as matching funds).

• CUNY faculty interested in responding to collaborative proposals that meet the above criteria will be required to submit a preliminary proposal at the campus grants office of the lead institution, at least six weeks prior to the filing deadline that includes the following:

1.      Project description of up to 5 pages;

2.      Preliminary budget and budget justification;

3.      Bio-sketches of up to 2 pages for each participating faculty.

• Upon receiving the preliminary proposal, the campus grants office of the lead institution will forward the proposal to the Dean for review.  The Dean, in turn, will notify and send copies to each of the grants offices of the institutions involved in the collaboration.
• In cases where the Dean receives only one collaborative proposal for a specific funding program, the PI and the campus grants office of the lead institution will be notified immediately and given the go ahead to proceed with the preparation of the full proposal.
• In cases where the Dean receives more than one collaborative proposal for a specific funding program, an internal faculty review committee will be convened and asked to evaluate all of the submissions based on a set of criteria established by the Dean.  It is expected that the review will be completed within one week.
• After the conclusion of the internal faculty review, the Dean will notify, at least four weeks prior to the deadline for final submission, the PIs and the campus grants offices of the lead and participating institutions, about the final outcome of the review process.