The proverbial ‘stick to beat’ – mainly used by people higher up in management – is an unjust argument to cause or prohibit an action. Such arguments are often used to cover up their own mismanagement, to please higher management, or to disguise underlying reasons.
A new financial model
This week, the Executive Board announced hat they devised a new model to distribute the government’s money for research across the faculties. The main message is that the new model is more transparent and more clear, implying it is therefore also more fair. The outcome is that the strongest science-oriented faculties (S&T and EEMCS) are getting less (more than 1 and 2 million euro, respectively), while BMS and ET get each about 2 million euro more. The questions are: is it more transparent? And is it more fair?
Understanding what is happening
A financial model to distribute funds is not a simple thing. And when a model is in place, adaptations are being made over the years to ‘repair’ some unwanted outcomes of a model, without having to change the model. Apparently, we have reached the situation where the current financial model has so many of such patches that a new model is needed with new rules that are clear and acceptable to the UT community as a whole.
What defines the new model? Apparently, 70% of the budget is determined on the basis of scientific staff and infrastructure. An additional 20% is determined by external money earned by the faculties from 2nd (NWO and the like) and 3rd (industry) projects. The remaining 10% is a strategic budget to align with the impact domains of the UT as a whole.
That sounds all very clear and transparent, but differentiation is being made, for example, between costly and less costly infrastructure. One can imagine that chemistry requires labs, with heavy infrastructure and stringent safety requirements, very different from office space required for social sciences. Moreover, the type of high-end equipment used in the natural sciences, also requires the presence of more support staff, think of technicians. So, this differentiation makes sense, but that also means that the model has several parameters that define how large these differences are. And it is exactly the choice of these parameters that defines the outcome of a model, not the model itself!
So, is a transparent model immediately also a more fair model? And is ‘transparency’ even the right way to present this new model? I’d argue ‘no’ on both accounts. Let’s start with the ‘transparency’ issue. The need for a more transparent model can be evident, and it can initiate the process to rethink an existing model. But the fact that the choice for the parameters within the model is way more important than the model itself in defining its outcome, makes clear that the outcome of the model should not be presented as ‘fair’ only on the basis of the transparency of the model. In other words: the choice of the parameters are political choices; they have nothing to do with transparency!
So, Executive Board, when presenting such a model, do not hammer on its transparency and the implication that ‘therefore’ it must be good. No, instead, you must defend the outcome of the model and on which basis the parameters were chosen to lead to this outcome! The earlier mentioned news item, alas, fails to do exactly that. And that means we are still in the dark about the real motivations of the Board to change the distribution of research money over the faculties. So, the model may be more transparent, but the motivation for it is the exact opposite…
Now, we’re left with the question: is the outcome more fair? Again, this is essentially a political choice, and in principle it is exactly the Board’s job to make such decisions. Personally, though, I find the outcome – less money to the more infrastructure-heavy, natural science-oriented faculties – highly questionable. In current times, where we have a shortage of people that are trained in the natural sciences and engineering, it sends the wrong signal to those that have to train the new generation of these scientists as well as to prospective students. More specifically, the news item mentions explicitly that the Board decides to distribute the sector plan money – government budget that was allocated specifically to decrease the workload of people in chemistry and physics – all over the whole UT. That does not sound fair to me.
Besides the questionable outcome, the timing of this news could not have come at a worse moment. First of all, the university as a whole is in financial trouble. That means that big decisions – and a new financial model is a big decision! – will have direct implications for looming reorganizations of other UT segments, and thus for future lay-offs. For S&T in particular, its Faculty Board may have been unable to strongly stand up for its own position due to the already evident deficit and its causes. More personally, with the ongoing dramatic reorganization, it feels like another stab in the back.
Jurriaan Huskens
Professor of Supramolecular Chemistry & Nanofabrication, faculty of Science & Technology
