‘It Felt Like a Betrayal’: Researchers Won a $2-Million Prize. The University Wants to Take It.

Courtesy of John Shea, of the U. of Florida

October 24 should have been a great day for John M. Shea and Tan F. Wong, professors of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Florida.

The day before, after three years, their team — which includes three Ph.D. students and an undergraduate — won the $2-million grand prize in an artificial-intelligence competition, beating out more than 100 teams from around the world.

The message that day from the administration, however, was far from congratulatory.

“Please understand that if Shea and Wong convert university funds to personal funds,” stated the email from a university lawyer to a lawyer representing the university’s faculty union, “they will be subject to personnel action and possibly other more serious consequences.”

The battle for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contest was over. But the team had another fight, this one with its own university. Who gets to keep the prize money?

“We put our blood and sweat into this — working 14- or 16-hour days sometimes,” says David Greene, a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering who works on artificial intelligence and communications for radio designs and is a member of the research team, GatorWings. “The university is basically setting a precedent that any cash prizes in any competition, whether they’re to students or faculty, will be owned by the university.”

The union representing the university’s faculty has filed two unfair-labor-practice complaints with the state’s Public Employees Relations Commission, asserting that the university violated state law when setting its policy on prizes without bargaining over a matter that changed union members’ terms and conditions of employment.

The union wants the college to stop enforcing its policy, make the two professors on the team “whole … with compound interest,” and pay the union “reasonable attorney’s fees and costs.”

A New Policy After a Big Win

The policy was created, professors on the team say, after GatorWings scored a big-dollar win two years ago, in an earlier round of the competition, called the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge. The contest aims to spur research into the application of artificial intelligence to the radio-frequency spectrum.

GatorWings won $750,000 in that round, in December 2017. The team and the university clashed over who owned that money.

“For as long as anybody knows at the University of Florida,” says Eric Lindstrom, a lawyer for the United Faculty of Florida, a union that represents faculty members and graduate assistants on the campus, “faculty have always been allowed to keep money that is awarded to them through their scholarly work.”

At the time, Shea’s team of researchers decided not to fight the university. “Basically,” he said, “the university agreed to take very minimal overhead off of that money and give the majority of the money in a very flexible spending account that we could use to fund our ongoing work on the project.”

In 2018, without consulting with the union, the university instituted the policy change, Shea says.

A university representative declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

The policy states that prizes belong to the university if faculty members or their team use university time or resources to win them. It also tries to explain the distinction between grants and prizes like the Darpa winnings, stating that the latter “are designed to reward R&D efforts that are not directly tied to future performance of work but rather for some achievement or accomplishment already achieved.”

“However,” the policy continues, “they are not personal ‘prizes’ such as the Pulitzer or Nobel in that they are designed to reward accomplishments or incentivize development of a product rather than recognize individual scholarly stature.”

In December 2018, after the policy change, GatorWings won another $750,000 from Darpa as the team advanced in the contest. The money was given to the team, but the professors say they had to relinquish it to the university. “They told us bad things would happen if we didn’t follow their directions,” Shea says. He assumed firing, arrest, or other discipline.

The union filed its first unfair-labor-practice charge in June 2019. After GatorWings won the $2-million grand prize last month, the union filed its second grievance.

The university’s policy, Shea says, is a violation of shared governance. “They didn’t ask any of us who have a stake in this what sort of policy there should be,” he says. He added that he and Wong, the leader of GatorWings, drafted and sent a policy to the administration “that would have basically given the university and inventors equal shares. There’s already a similar policy for intellectual property, so we just modified that so it would be fair.”

The university, he says, didn’t respond. “Instead,” he says, “they just sent us the policy they created.”

Compensating Graduate Students

The professors say there’s more at stake than shared governance and prize money for themselves. They also want to compensate their student team members for their yearslong hard work.

“If we bring in $3.5 million,” Shea says, adding up all the team’s Darpa winnings, “it looks good for us. It may help us move to some higher-ranked university and get a higher salary. But we can’t take care of the graduate students. One of our graduate students is even out in industry already, so we can’t increase his pay. There’s nothing we can do according to the university. The university’s policy even says they don’t have to return any of the money to even our lab. They can just take it all and use it to mow the grass.”

Many of the research universities contacted by The Chronicle stated that they don’t have a policy specifically governing external prize money for scholarly work. The University of Iowa, for example, said it would review a competition’s terms to see what university policies might apply.

None of the universities told The Chronicle that it would require scholars to turn over prize money. “Absent any unique circumstances,” wrote Dan Gilchrist, a spokesman for the University of Minnesota, the institution “would not claim monetary awards associated with a prize in recognition of faculty or other employee or student achievement.”

Milan Mrksich, interim vice president for research at Northwestern University, said his institution’s policy defaults to the rules of the award sponsor. “If there was not clear language that this would be an institutional award,” he says, “I think we would be flexible and defer to the investigators.”

That university time or resources were involved would not be a consideration, he says. “All faculty awards for scholarship flow from use of university resources,” Mrksich says. “There are faculty members who are focused on winning a Nobel Prize. The route to doing that depends heavily on the research that they supervise in their university lab.”

‘It Felt Like a Betrayal’

The Darpa rules don’t require that the money go to the institution. They state that the money will be paid to the bank account specified by the leader of the winning team. If there’s more than one person on the team, it’s the responsibility of the team leader to determine the division of the prize money. There are no directives about how the money is to be used.

The agency’s intent with its awards is twofold: “1) As both incentive and reward to the winners for the hard work and long hours it takes to successfully compete in a Darpa prize competition,” wrote Jared B. Adams, an agency spokesman, in an email, “and 2) to provide a source of funding for maturation and future research to take place beyond the conclusion of the competition with the hope of accelerating the adoption of the technologies created.”

For some team members, a cut of the winnings could be life-changing. Greene, the Ph.D. student, struggles to finance his education. The married father of two has debt “comparable to what a medical doctor would leave school with” — the product of two bachelor’s degrees, a master’s, and his doctoral education. “I’m actually at that point,” Greene says about his Ph.D. program, “where I don’t think I’ll be able to continue without picking up another side job or something like that.”

Shea says he hasn’t spent too much time thinking about how the money would be divided among the team members, if they ultimately get access to it.

“We’ve discussed with the team that we’re trying to make sure everybody’s contribution gets fairly represented,” he says. “Some of our Ph.D. students have made very, very essential parts of our radio — our radio would not work without the work they’ve done. Some of our students have developed very important tools that allow us to look at the data, and we wouldn’t be successful without these tools.”

Regardless of the outcome, the dispute created a rift that goes beyond prize winnings.

“The money is one thing — it’s just a fight between lawyers and the interpretation of words, like what does ‘prize’ mean,” Shea says, thinking back to the day after the win in October. “But nobody from upper administration texted me, emailed me, or called me. That’s the one thing that hurt. We won the Super Bowl of engineering, and not the dean or the president of our own university could say ‘congratulations’ to us. It felt like a betrayal.”

Vimal Patel covers student life, social mobility and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.