The proverbial ‘stick to beat’ is to use – mainly by people higher up in management – an unjust argument to cause or prohibit an action. Often such arguments are used to cover up own mismanagement, to please higher management, or to disguise underlying reasons.
Recently I have been involved in putting together a research proposal with local SMEs for a provincial subsidy called EFRO. To my surprise, we had to request about 535 k€ to obtain enough money to hire a postdoctoral researcher for two years. The net costs for the postdoc (be assured that none of my postdocs is driving a Tesla or Porsche) – for salary and consumables to perform the actual research – are approximately 200 k€, so we’re looking at a ‘surplus’ of more than 150 percent. Since this scheme provides only 50 percent subsidy, 400 k€ of total costs would make sense. But, according to the financial department, I had to ‘earn in’ an additional 20 percent on the net budget to make the project ‘profitable’, by writing up extra hours spent by me and a technician.
Earning capacity (‘inverdiencapaciteit’ in Dutch) is a financial term that, in this context, indicates the ability to earn additional money on a project to cover costs that cannot be booked on the project directly. Obviously, research groups have many costs, like housing, infrastructure and personnel. Moreover, the organization in the university as a whole, all have their own staff and facilities. On the other hand, various funders of research allow a variety of costs to be put in project proposals. It is in particular the extent of hours that supervisors and other permanent staff can write on these projects that defines the earning capacity. But the question is whether earning capacity is the right way to ‘earn money’ for a university as a structural way to support the organization.
So, what is now really the problem with this earning capacity, you may ask? There are, at least, two that I can think of. The first is the magnitude of it. In the past, some earning capacity was desired on projects that allowed it, but writing up additional staff costs was not obliged. With the current financial situation, however, the earning capacity was increased and it is maintained strictly. Therefore, financial officers make now the decision for us, scientists, whether we can or cannot apply for a particular subsidy. For example, regular NWO projects on which no additional staff can be written, are ‘strongly discouraged’ and EU training network programs are even completely banned unless you have another way to compensate for the lack of earnings.
The second problem I see is plain honesty. The number of hours that I and my technician need to write on the above mentioned EFRO project is 20 percent (!) of our time. As a PI, I am supposed to spend about 40 percent of my time on research (and the rest on education and management), so would this mean that I can handle only two of such postdocs and then my time is up?! In practice, I currently supervise well over ten PhD students and postdocs directly, and a few more as second supervisor. Therefore, I write already way more hours than I am supposed to spend on research, but that does not mean my other tasks are suddenly gone. Neither I nor my technician – whose job is already more than full without this project – will actually put in the hours that we will book on it. So, us promising to spend this amount of time on the EFRO project may be financially sound, but it is not ethically sound!
So what is then the real problem? The real problem, in my opinion, is not the earning capacity – this is just the proverbial stick to beat with – but it is our overhead. We scientists, who take care of all the primary processes – education and research – should not have to ‘earn money’ but just get projects in to be able to do our research. And that without being hindered in the choice of projects and without requiring us to write more hours than we can sensibly and realistically spend on these projects.
Of course, we (including me) are all so much aware of the financial problems we currently face at the UT, but the present response – increasing earning capacity and cutting on scientific and support staff – will not help solving the real problem; we need to reduce the overhead. If we don’t, scientific staff will not be able to attract sufficient funds to do research, and research funders (often society!) will note that less work is getting done for their buck…
Jurriaan Huskens
Professor of Supramolecular Chemistry & Nanofabrication, faculty of Science & Technology
