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They will need to spend waaaay more money across Europe and insist on relaxing working rules if they are planning on attracting top talent. Shit like shutting d

They will need to spend waaaay more money across Europe and insist on relaxing working rules if they are planning on attracting top talent. Shit like shutting down VU earth science in Amsterdam after spending 20 million euros on new facilities should not fly. The same is true for the way soft money positions work. I know a nonzero number of people who have won ERC grants which are work millions of euros only to have the university they work at refuse to offer them a contract because they have reached the limit of years allowed to work on a temporary contract. This means they either have to find a new host for their erc or not accept the grant. I love working in Europe as a scientist and have done so for 10+ years. But I think there should be more of everything in order to compete with America.

jltsiren 1y ago
The issue with soft money positions is mostly that universities insist on being shitty employers. By default, all jobs are supposed to be open-ended. Fixed-term contracts are only allowed for legitimate reasons. Hiring someone for the expected duration of a PhD is a legitimate reason. The availability of funding is not. And even if the reason would be legitimate in isolation, multiple consecutive fixed-term contracts would be evidence that the employer has a permanent need for the employee, turning the contract automatically permanent. When I was still in Finland, people were speculating that all postdoc positions were technically illegal, as were tenure-track positions. But it was also understood that if someone actually insisted on enforcing the law, the government would have to change it. Because rewriting the laws is much easier than making universities change their ways.
- mnky9800n 1y ago
  Agreed. However, how shitty is it when you win a grant worth millions of euros, a large fraction of which would go directly into the university coffers and not your project, and the university responds with, "lol, no thanks."
  - triknomeister 1y ago
    Lack of ambition I call it. People have become too comfortable. Europe had become rich enough that throwing away such opportunities wouldn't affect them. Now it does, but they are too entrenched to see it. The number of times I've seen a position go empty just because people couldn't resolve their internal conflcits is too high. Also, there's apparently no punishment for letting positions go empty.
    - mnky9800n 1y ago
      I don't think that is it. I think the employment law is written outside the context of how academic research is funded. Unlike companies, academic researchers cannot do something good and then have it generate revenue. You can not build an app and then support it and then use the profits to continue developing new ideas. You can only continue to apply for money to fund ideas. In companies that generate revenue, many countries require permanent positions and just cause for firings with the assumption that as long as there is revenue and profit, the company can't simply lay off people to generate more profit. However, since there is no revenue generation at a university, there is no way to continue to support people who work there beyond the grants that fund their positions. And there is no way to acquire those funds internally except by layoffs which are not allowed because universities will not layoff permanent people to save on money since those permanent people decide the layoffs anyways (who lays off themselves?). This is compounded that many countries have different retirement laws for older professors and they can often times take up departmental resources through emeritus positions that would otherwise go to fund young people seeking permanent positions. I think that the solution is that university leadership should come from academic staff (e.g., a democratically elected faculty senate plus a rektor team as leader) and they decide layoffs so that administration can be laid off as well as academic teams. Second I think that there should be a reorganization of the university academic staff with responsibilities redistributed. Older professors should teach more and assume advisory positions instead of leadership ones in research projects, younger professors should not teach much at all and focus on driving research forward as research leaders, and there should be more focus on recruiting permanent technical staff to build larger teams at the expense of fewer PhD positions. And funding should change to have fewer grant funds and more long term funds that go towards institutions to build national lab like organizations across europe like there is in the USA, Germany with Helmholtz, etc. Of course this will all cost a lot of money and no one will do this. but i think without a reorg there will simply be more of the same and european innovation will continue to stagnate.

jltsiren 1y ago

The issue with soft money positions is mostly that universities insist on being shitty employers. By default, all jobs are supposed to be open-ended. Fixed-term contracts are only allowed for legitimate reasons. Hiring someone for the expected duration of a PhD is a legitimate reason. The availability of funding is not. And even if the reason would be legitimate in isolation, multiple consecutive fixed-term contracts would be evidence that the employer has a permanent need for the employee, turning the contract automatically permanent. When I was still in Finland, people were speculating that all postdoc positions were technically illegal, as were tenure-track positions. But it was also understood that if someone actually insisted on enforcing the law, the government would have to change it. Because rewriting the laws is much easier than making universities change their ways.

mnky9800n 1y ago
Agreed. However, how shitty is it when you win a grant worth millions of euros, a large fraction of which would go directly into the university coffers and not your project, and the university responds with, "lol, no thanks."
- triknomeister 1y ago
  Lack of ambition I call it. People have become too comfortable. Europe had become rich enough that throwing away such opportunities wouldn't affect them. Now it does, but they are too entrenched to see it. The number of times I've seen a position go empty just because people couldn't resolve their internal conflcits is too high. Also, there's apparently no punishment for letting positions go empty.
  - mnky9800n 1y ago
    I don't think that is it. I think the employment law is written outside the context of how academic research is funded. Unlike companies, academic researchers cannot do something good and then have it generate revenue. You can not build an app and then support it and then use the profits to continue developing new ideas. You can only continue to apply for money to fund ideas. In companies that generate revenue, many countries require permanent positions and just cause for firings with the assumption that as long as there is revenue and profit, the company can't simply lay off people to generate more profit. However, since there is no revenue generation at a university, there is no way to continue to support people who work there beyond the grants that fund their positions. And there is no way to acquire those funds internally except by layoffs which are not allowed because universities will not layoff permanent people to save on money since those permanent people decide the layoffs anyways (who lays off themselves?). This is compounded that many countries have different retirement laws for older professors and they can often times take up departmental resources through emeritus positions that would otherwise go to fund young people seeking permanent positions. I think that the solution is that university leadership should come from academic staff (e.g., a democratically elected faculty senate plus a rektor team as leader) and they decide layoffs so that administration can be laid off as well as academic teams. Second I think that there should be a reorganization of the university academic staff with responsibilities redistributed. Older professors should teach more and assume advisory positions instead of leadership ones in research projects, younger professors should not teach much at all and focus on driving research forward as research leaders, and there should be more focus on recruiting permanent technical staff to build larger teams at the expense of fewer PhD positions. And funding should change to have fewer grant funds and more long term funds that go towards institutions to build national lab like organizations across europe like there is in the USA, Germany with Helmholtz, etc. Of course this will all cost a lot of money and no one will do this. but i think without a reorg there will simply be more of the same and european innovation will continue to stagnate.