The Young Academy wants all scientists to have their own budget

This spring, the Labour Inspectorate will once again investigate workloads and social safety at universities. A spokesperson for the Labour Inspectorate confirmed this to the university magazine Delta, from TU Delft.

Five years ago, the inspectorate demanded universities address their employees' workloads, but a report published last year showed that this had not happened yet. This year, the inspectors will come to see if things have improved.

Budget cuts
One wonders what they will find because the cabinet has announced significant cuts to the higher education and science budget. When those cuts were announced, universities reacted almost immediately by saying there was a "huge risk" that workloads would increase even more. 

However, the Minister of Education, Eppo Bruins, is adamant, saying that budget cuts do not release universities from their duty of care for their staff. Administrators must now start putting their plans into action, he wrote to the House of Representatives last October.

Exploitation
The excessive amount of work is a real problem, says Eddie Brummelman, chair of The Young Academy, an association of relatively young scientists. Brummelman is also an Associate Professor of Pedagogy at the University of Amsterdam.

"Universities have been overexploited for decades," he says. "The Dutch education and research system is only this good because we are all working overtime, but we can't keep this up. Some people said the sector was structurally underfunded, which is why the previous cabinet added one billion euros to the budget."

Now that money is being taken away. The Young Academy is pleased that the minister is paying attention to the workload, says Brummelman. "But it is ironic, considering the austerity measures."

Young scientists
Young scientists tend to have particularly heavy workloads, according to Brummelman. The initial analyses of the "Academy Thermometer",  a survey launched by his organisation, point in this direction too. The results have not yet been published, but according to Brummelman, the pressure is highest for PhD candidates, postdocs and associate professors, probably due to their insecure position. "They have to dedicate more and more hours to teaching, while they are mainly judged on their research performance."

To have any chance of a career at the university, these young scientists all apply for grants from research financier NWO. Universities see these grants as a stamp of quality and they give scientists room to conduct research, but the competition is fierce: only thirteen or fourteen out of a hundred applicants are successful in each round.

To solve this problem, the previous cabinet came up with several ideas, including grants for young scientists: recently hired associate professors were given a research budget of their own, which made them less dependent on NWO. Incentive grants were also introduced for scientists at other stages of their careers. According to Brummelman, the system had teething problems: "Sometimes a faculty expects you to use that money to hire a PhD student, and then you discover you have even more work to do, as you now have to supervise that PhD candidate." He thought the idea was excellent, but now those grants have been scrapped. 

Preselection?
To curb the rush for grants (and increase the chance of success), universities had another plan: making their own pre-selection, so that researchers with no chance of success would not apply for the grant at all. Is that a solution?

No, says Brummelman, because one must also take social safety into account: "We will run all kinds of risks if universities start pre-selecting. NWO committees are independent and trained, and even they find it difficult to choose. Such a pre-selection process – and the dependence that comes with it – is dangerous. You often need the grant to make a career. The grants are now linked to personnel policy."

A foothold
As far as he is concerned, there is only one solution: a "fixed base" for researchers, or in other words, a basic amount that every teacher and scientist could spend on research as they saw fit. This would make them more independent.

In the battle against work pressure and social unsafety, he believes we need a change of this kind to the system. After all, if we put more money into the same system, we get more of the same.

Smarter
Such a change – if it ever happens – could take years. But Brummelman thinks we could make progress with small changes. For example, The Young Academy is campaigning for a "smarter academic year" with fewer teaching weeks. "Dutch universities teach about two months longer than equally good universities in other European countries," explains Brummelman. Some universities are running pilots with an adjusted schedule. Erasmus University, in Rotterdam, will be the first to implement it.

In addition, The Young Academy is denouncing the hierarchy at universities under the motto "everyone is a professor". The plea is to give associate professors and assistant professors the right to award doctoral degrees to PhD candidates. They would be no longer dependent on a professor for this. "Research shows that a lack of social safety often stems from scarce resources and power imbalances. So we need to do as much as we can about that."

Whose fault is it?
Is the heavy workload the fault of the cabinet for not allocating enough money to universities or of university administrators for not having their organisations in order? Both, says Brummelman. "The budget cuts have had a disastrous effect on workloads, but at the same time, it is a good thing that the Labour Inspectorate is looking into universities as organisations and their duty of care. We must come up with something to reduce the competition between universities for students and research funding."