Effort Reports

A Harvard professor can no longer accept a Federal grant for a research project unless he promises to tell every month how much of his effort within the University is going into that particular project. He puts the figure (a percentage) on an "effort report." His report is then filed with his department, and may be reviewed by the government.

How does he arrive at the figure? If he did it honestly, he would have to estimate not only the effort he expends on research, but also the precise degree to which his teaching, reading, and talking with students and colleagues contribute to his project. This, of course, assumes that he can figure out what "effort" means. Does it imply something different than "time spent"?

But no one at Harvard pretends that the forms are to be filled out honestly. Each reporting form sent out by the Comptroller's Office lists, under a column headed "committed effort," the percentage of the researcher's salary that the Government pays or that Harvard uses to meet its cost sharing requirements. In the next column, headed "actual effort," the researcher is more or less invited to put down the same figure. He knows, for example, that if he comes up with a smaller percentage, the University could be required, after some future audit, to pay back part of the grant.

Unfortunately, Harvard and other universities did less than they might have to keep this meaningless requirement from being foisted on them. They first accepted effort reporting in 1963, when the National Institutes of Health adopted it as a requirement. The universities themselves offered it as a compromise in 1964, when they feared that the Bureau of the Budget was going to recommend, in effect, that professors fill out time cards. And they stood by in 1965 while a provision that would inevitably force more effort reporting was tacked onto educational appropriations in Congress. As a result, by last spring, all researchers benefitting from a Federal grant found themselves subject to the requirement.

Perhaps the most disturbing implication of the government's growing insistence on effort reporting is the possibility that it may some day adopt a meaningful method -- as opposed to the present procedure -- of making Faculty members account to the Federal bureaucracy for their time. The assumption that government control of its research funds extends to the working habits of researchers is dangerous and open-ended.

The Federal agencies are facing some real problems as the amount of money flowing from them to the universities grows and grows. How are overall research priorities to be set? How can the worth of individual researchers and their projects best be judged? Yet the agencies have chosen to emphasize this vain and misguided attempt to judge researchers' output by the amount of "effort" they put into it.

Only Harvard and other universities, acting together, can apply the pressure on the agencies and in Congress that will get effort reporting rolled back. They are, from all indications, about to try. If they fail this time, or accept another weak compromise, effort reporting is probably here to stay.