My university has begun charging an arbitrary "maintenance fee" as a percent of unrestricted research accounts (e.g. reverse interest).
Are you aware of any other university that does this?
If so - do you have any recommendations on how faculty can save enough unrestricted funds for a large purchase (e.g. a PhD student-year or research equipment) without having it potentially undercut by an arbitrary fee hike in the future?
Universities are under pressure to secure finance as such they really want to increase the maintenance fee or overhead cost. It seems that individual researchers have very limited say in this regard. I have experienced this problem, too. Many researchers are not aware of the high overhead cost until when they attempt to recruit PhD students and researchers. It is better to check with the administrative unit about various cost beforehand.
For any projects that we get fund from any agency we shall also get the overhead charges that we need to deposit on to the University acct, as far as I know that should be kept with the university side and they should own some interest and try to support the maintenance fee. Other than that a nominal charges are also collected for usage of equipment and that is also utilized for the maintenance. Other than that our university has a system of autonomy for each dept. and mostly the funds are handled by the individual project investigator and their head of the dept. The system is entirely different in our case.
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