The University of Florida has agreed to allow a pair of electrical- and computer-engineering professors whose research team had won a $2-million prize to keep the money and distribute it as they wish.
In 2018 the university created a policy declaring that prizes won by faculty members belong to the university if those researchers or their teams use university time or resources to win them. Now the university says it will no longer enforce the policy, in a shift it announced on Wednesday.
We're sorry. Something went wrong.
We are unable to fully display the content of this page.
The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network.
Please allow access to our site, and then refresh this page.
You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one,
or subscribe.
If you continue to experience issues, please contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com
The University of Florida has agreed to allow a pair of electrical- and computer-engineering professors whose research team had won a $2-million prize to keep the money and distribute it as they wish.
In 2018 the university created a policy declaring that prizes won by faculty members belong to the university if those researchers or their teams use university time or resources to win them. Now the university says it will no longer enforce the policy, in a shift it announced on Wednesday.
We’re very happy to be done with it, and very happy we’ll be able to share this prize with our team.
“We’re very happy to be done with it, and very happy we’ll be able to share this prize with our team,” said John M. Shea, one of the professors on the research team, GatorWings. “Universities can’t go wrong allowing teams to benefit from their participation in these huge competitions that take so much time and effort.”
The United Faculty of Florida, a union of public-university faculty members and graduate students, had filed a pair of unfair-labor-practice charges with the state’s Public Employees Relations Commission, asserting that the university had violated state law when setting its policy on prizes without bargaining over a matter that changed union members’ terms and conditions of employment. The professors — Shea and Tan F. Wong — also said the policy violated standards of shared governance.
ADVERTISEMENT
The settlement ends the litigation. In addition to agreeing to not enforce the prize policy, the university’s administration said future decisions about enacting such a policy would be determined through collective bargaining, according to a statement by the union.
Before the team won the $2-million grand prize of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency competition, in October, it won money in earlier rounds of the three-year contest. The agreement also states that a previous $750,000 prize will remain with the university but will be applied to research conducted by Shea and Wong on behalf of the university. Shea called the settlement fair.
Now the professors face another challenge: how to divide the winnings among themselves and their small team of students. “Our goal is to reward the people whose hard work and ideas enabled us to be successful in the competition,” Shea said. “So it’s not necessarily divided up on time worked but based on the actual technical achievements that allowed us to win the competition.”
With his cut, Shea said, he plans to take his family on a nice vacation. “They didn’t get to see much of me, at times, for three years,” he said.
Vimal Patel, a reporter at The New York Times, previously covered student life, social mobility, and other topics for The Chronicle of Higher Education.