Campus Offers Pilot Program for Faculty Salary Exchange

The campus has announced a pilot program that will allow faculty who charge part of their academic year salary to extramural funds to bank salary savings generated from their position as discretionary funds. The Faculty Salary Exchange Program (FSEP) provides schools and colleges the option to implement a program that allows investigators to direct charge up to 30 percent of their academic year research effort to appropriate contracts and grants and use the salary savings generated from their faculty position to create a research fund. Funds released by participation in this program are intended to be used in support of temporary commitments. Any salary charged to individual grants must be allowable under sponsor guidelines and fall within the total percentage of the investigator's effort on the project.

Deans are delegated the decision whether to make the FSEP program available to faculty in their school or college. Deans are also responsible for determining specific program and process guidelines, including whether any portion of the salary release should be retained by the college or department. In those colleges that opt to make the program available, a further decision to participate should be made on a department-by-department basis by each chair. Faculty wishing to participate must obtain approval from both the department chair and dean and are responsible for initiating and renewing FSEP requests.

The campus memo from Jan de Vries, Vice Provost - Academic Affairs and Faculty Welfare, is available at https://mossberg.berkeley.edu/CALmessages/display_message.asp?d=2/23/2007&s=105. Additional tools and administrative details to assist in planning implementation of the pilot are available at the Academic Personnel Office web site: http://apo.chance.berkeley.edu/FSEPguidelines.html.