Recipients, Funding Structure, and Administration of Fellowships and Grants
1. Recipients
Fellowships are awards applied for, won by, and made to, individual scholars. They are paid to those individual scholars, either directly or through the scholar’s institution (in accordance with the preferences of the awardee and his or her institution, and as arranged with the ACLS Office of Fellowships).
Research grants, by contrast, are most commonly awarded to institutions—typically, the colleges or universities employing the individual scholars. In some cases, though, grants are awarded to individuals. (There are some ACLS awards that fall under this category.)
2. Funding Structure
Funds that accompany ACLS fellowships—unlike institutional grants—generally take the form of salary replacement at the postdoctoral level and support stipends at the doctoral level. Unlike institutional grants, there are no budgets per se for any research costs, except in some few ACLS fellowship programs (such as the Digital Innovation Fellowship Program) that provide for supplementary expenses assigned directly to the individual Fellows.
There is no “Principal Investigator” (PI) for a fellowship, as there is with an institutional grant. The awardee for an ACLS fellowship is an ACLS Fellow.
There is no institutional responsibility regarding a Fellow’s stipend funds except where the Fellow has designated his or her university to be the vehicle or agent for payment of said funds and the university agrees. This is typically done to facilitate payment of supplementary funds needed to bring the award’s stipend up to the scholar’s regular salary, and to ensure continuous provision of benefits at the Fellow’s home institution.
Since fellowship support takes the form of salary replacement or support stipend, responsibilities for any applicable taxes on the award rest with the individual Fellows.
3. Administration
Unlike institutional grants, ACLS fellowships are not (and cannot be construed as) awards paid to the university per se. The ACLS fellowship represents an award to an individual scholar in the form of a salary replacement or support stipend.
The amount and timing of the salary replacement is worked out in advance of the Fellowship period with individual Fellows.
ACLS makes its awards on the condition that Fellows will devote full-time to the projects they propose. This does not assume sabbatical pay or leave, thought those are often the conditions under which the awards are taken up.
In many cases, the fellowship stipend does not equal the Fellow’s normal salary. The expectation of the ACLS, in calculating the shape, scope, size, and number of its awards, is that Fellows’ institutions will “top up” ACLS awards to meet the salary and benefits, as may be needed for faculty members (and therefore, their institutions) to take advantage of the award and the honor it represents.
ACLS fellowships do not provide benefits. The expectation is that the Fellows’ institutions will continue to provide the Fellows with benefits during the fellowship period.
In contrast with institutional grants, institutions may not “charge” to ACLS fellowships costs of any kind, such as benefits, indirect costs, or overhead. This rule obtains even in cases where the Fellowship stipend is routed through the institution.
Typically, ACLS fellowships will not have “unspent” or “excess” funds. An ACLS Fellow is entitled to the entire amount of his or her award as initially designated in accordance with their salary replacement need (unless he or she violates the terms of the Fellowship). Since ACLS fellowships are made to individual scholars rather than to their institutions, ACLS cannot ask for monies back from the institution. The standard scenario is that funds are “fully expended”—paid out per regular salary payments—by completion of the Fellowship period.
Unlike institutional grants, ACLS fellowships have no requirements for financial or expenditure reports from the accounting office or Office of Sponsored Research (OSR) at Fellows’ institutions. ACLS Fellows may be asked to account for funds expended under any special budgets for research costs attached to their stipends.
Unlike institutional grants, ACLS fellowships have no requirements for narrative reports from the accounting or OSR offices at Fellows’ institutions. ACLS Fellows are asked for final reports on their research or writing during the Fellowship year.
It is not possible to transfer a fellowship from one institution to another, given that is an award to an individual. If an ACLS Fellow changes institutions before or during the tenure of the award, we may route the fellowship stipend through the new institution—but no transfer of funds need take place between the Fellow’s old and new institutions.
It is not possible to take funds from an ACLS fellowship salary stipend and re-grant them to any other individual or institution. There are provisions for scholars to spend supplementary funds in small budgets attached to Fellows’ awards in some ACLS programs; those budgets are designed at the discretion of the Fellows and as approved by ACLS.
Note on Research Budgets attached to ACLS Fellowships
Some ACLS fellowship programs provide for small research budgets attached to the Fellowship. There is no exhaustive list of what line items are allowable in such research budgets: equipment, personnel, and services costs are all acceptable.
It is not possible to cover administrative overhead or Fellows’ salary or benefits as costs under such research budgets.