Space Allocation Guidelines
Office and research space within the Department of Psychology is shared by the department as a whole. No office or research space is assigned on a permanent basis to any faculty member. Office and research space is allocated by the department chair following consultation with the faculty who would be affected. When appropriate, the chair consults with the department's Policy and Planning Committee. With respect to space for behavioral neuroscience research with animals, the chair consults with the head of the department's behavioral neuroscience area and with research-active faculty in this area. Occasionally, the chair appoints a space committee to advise on specific issues.
Requests by faculty for research space are made to the department chair. Faculty who anticipate requiring additional research space in the event of funding of external research proposals are expected to discuss this with the chair in advance of submitting the proposal. Consideration of whether research space is being fully and effectively utilized is an ongoing process. Reallocation of research space from less research-active to more research-active faculty can occur at any time. Reallocation of research space typically occurs on the occasion of departures or hiring of psychology faculty.
Psychology faculty are allocated an office of approximately 105 to 115 square feet. As compensation for the small size of faculty offices, the architect for Park Hall provided seven rooms close to faculty offices to be readily available for meetings with undergraduate and graduate students, for graduate seminar meetings, and for student and faculty committee meetings. These rooms are also used for short-term projects (e.g., analysis of data) that require more space than is available in faculty and staff offices. These rooms are also used for testing of participants in psychological research.
Whether psychology faculty are active in research cannot be determined by the application of a simplistic rule such as counting publications or grant submissions. Faculty research and scholarly activity in terms of articles, book chapters, and books is difficult to assess. Research in psychology does not proceed at a steady pace and so faculty productivity can be variable over several years. Publications can represent a great range of effort--a single article can be a report of a series of empirical students extending over several years or a brief book review or commentary. Publications can be single-authored or co-authored and it can be difficult to assess whose contribution is primary. In addition, the quality of the research that is reported and of the ideas that are advanced is certainly more significant than the raw number of publications. Furthermore, faculty research and scholarly activity must be considered in the context of other faculty commitments, for example, preparing grant proposals, administering research grants, seeking grant renewals, training of undergraduate and graduate students in research techniques, and supervising undergraduate and graduate student research. With these cautionary statements in mind, a rough guide is that over a three-year period psychology faculty publish four to eight articles, chapters, and/or books. The determination of whether a particular faculty member is research active is best left to the department chair, who can consider recent research and scholarly publications, recent and prospective proposals for external research funding, the extent to which the faculty member is supervising undergraduate and graduate students in research, and the likely trajectory of the faculty member's research and scholarly activity and productivity over the next few years.
Faculty in the Department of Psychology engaged in clinical, cognitive, developmental, personality, and social research and who are research active are generally allocated three to six research rooms, amounting to a total of approximately 500 to 900 square feet of research space. Faculty in these research areas are expected to make credible efforts to obtain external research funding. However, the continued allocation of research space is not contingent upon obtaining or maintaining external research funding. The amount of space allocated to a faculty member can vary as a function of many factors, including the nature of the research, the extent of research activity, the number of undergraduate and graduate students supervised, and whether work space for graduate assistants is provided within the faculty member's research space or in nearby department offices. The type of research space and its location can depend on whether the faculty research program requires sound conditioning, a waiting room for parents with young children, or other special needs.
Faculty who are engaged in behavioral neuroscience research with animals have specific needs for housing and caring for animals and specific technical requirements for research space (e.g., security, a separate ventilation system, fume hoods for venting gases, secure facilities for controlled substances, radioactive materials) that must be taken into consideration on a case-by-case basis. Faculty engaged in behavioral neuroscience research are expected to obtain external research funding. The continued allocation of research space is contingent upon obtaining and maintaining funding. A grace period of 12 to 18 months while external research proposals are pending is typically permitted before the department chair considers reallocation of animal research space.
February 14, 2002