I’ve flown to Tarragona to give two courses in facial development to a group of trainees in neuroradiology. On the way to the plane, I picked up a copy of Le Monde, graciously offered by Air France.
An article entitled, Excellent career paths for professor-researchers caught my attention. Remember, in France, it is possible to be a simple researcher (like myself) and not have teaching obligations, in which case your administration is a research organization and not a university. There are 400-500 positions like these a year up for grabs across all disciplines of knowledge and around the country, whereas there are 2000 junior and 1000 senior professorships a year (out of pools of 17K, 38K and 20K respectively), according to the article. It sounds like a lot, but for a given discipline, it’s not, or relative to the annual production of Ph.D.s, either. Another saga.
Roughly translating, the French Minister of Research and Education, Valérie Pécresse, will shortly announce a series of gestures to help the heavily put-upon population of junior professors. While laudable, they are very much of a drop in the bucket, and the comments on the Le Monde site after the article are indeed to that effect. Everything does have a cost, but from my point of view, effective management of human resources in French research are not very high priority in the national budget.
The first welcome measure, will be to allow the Ph.D. and postdoc years to count as professional experience on the salary/benefits grid – the Ph.D. will count as two years’ work. Given that professor salaries evolve not quite in pace with inflation, although tenure is obtained from the outset and seniority helps boost the scale, it is important to start out as high up as possible. This measure is estimated to cost 56.2 million euros over three years, of which 20.4 million euros are budgeted in 2009.
[This is a pitifully trivial amount of money out of the national budget, when my husband is managing billions on behalf of one single military procurement program!]
The beginning junior professor (maitre de conférences, or MdC) fresh out of the Ph.D. (which never happens anymore) gets approximately 1700 euros in their pocket after benefits withholding each month, and this measure will bring it up to about 1800 euros. If they need to rent, rules are that you must ensure 3-4x the rent in income. While a single person may be able to find something to live in for 600 euros/month, what about if they have a family? By this point in the career, one is in one’s 30s. So this is a step in the right direction, but insufficient. A MdC with 15 years’ seniority on the Le Monde comment thread earns 2600 euros a month; I earn 2300. (Unlike the French, I have an American indifference to revealing my salary to all; what with the fluctuating exchange rate it’s approximately equivalent to that of a tight-belted American high school teacher .) As everywhere else, being allowed to indulge our passion for what we do appears to be part of our salary.
The other measure is getting people properly hot under the collar.
The idea is to create 130 positions associated with a start-up incentive, awkwardly named “university/research organization chairs”, among the 2000 per year for MdC. These MdC will have a teaching load of ‘only’ 64 hours a year instead of the current 192, in order to free them up for research. They will also get a salary boost of 500 to 1200 euros a month for five years, and their own research budget of 10-20K euros per year over the same interval. This allows the university to offer a similar incentive program to the national research organizations INSERM (the Avenir program) and CNRS (ATIPE) and once by the Ministry of Research itself (ACI) – initiatives described in this Science News Focus and sadly, already out of date.
Again, this new measure is a laudable idea, but again it will be implemented with not enough means. It will make a position at the university much more attractive for someone like me, who never even applied for one.
Problems:
Some worry that these 130 positions per year will lure away scientists from the research organizations, to the benefit of the universities. This is based on the fact that no new positions will be created nationally – the French expression for this is “undress Peter to dress Paul”. But there are so few of these relative to the applicant pool, I can’t get worried over that. Each research organization should continue to fight to get Mme Pecresse to obtain a bigger budget for all of French research, of which a large chunk will continue to go to their personnel salaries.
Others, wonder what will happen to laureates after their golden youth has been (mis)spent. I was particularly sensitive to this argument because as one of an early crop of Avenir laureates, I served as a learning experience for the entire new office at the INSERM. Now that my three years are finished, I find myself back in exactly the same place from which the program aspired to free me – dependent to some respect on the patronage of my more senior colleagues. I don’t mind overly, but that was not the point of these programs. One particularly painful personal jolt was to drop back from 2300 euros a month at the time to 1700, but other kinks were unpleasant as well. The fact that the new chairs can renew once means that it is theoretically possible to have such a start-up package go for five or even ten years. If the reform lasts that long.
However, what a start-up! Not even close enough money to hire technical help, not to mention equip most sorts of science labs. MdC conducting literary research might find it sufficient. The science grants one is supposed to be well-positioned to seek during or after this boost, offered by the still-new Agence Nationale pour la Recherche, do allow for a personnel budget but not for one’s own salary or overhead, like an equivalent NIH or European Research Framework Programme budget. It remains to be seen by hindsight if the cream of the crop so chosen are better at bringing in outside grants than anyone else in the long run.
I don’t want to complain too loudly, because it could be worse. But while anyone is implementing reforms to promote national research excellence, it’s a good time to suggest that they first get the money to put where their mouth is in order to carry through with their good intentions.
Hi Helen, yes it could be worse.
by comparison, entry-level salaries for tenured researchers ‘Ricercatori’ in Italy (does not happen often before you hit your 40s) is somewhere between 1200 and 1700 euros per month after withholding, depending on whether you are in a University or a National Lab.
By the time you are in those positions, for those very few who really make it, your sons may well be 10 years old.
So, now I know why I know of many Italian scientists working in France… :-|
Anyhow, we could certainly live in Burkina Faso , which has a particularly limited science budget. But we don’t. We live in countries that aspire to be internationally competitive and attract “the best young minds”, bemoaning the brain drain on a regular basis. If our countries are rich enough for such aspirations, then they should assume their real cost.
In Paris, for an Italian researcher’s salary, you could rent a 19 m2 (204 ft2) studio maximum; most propositions go down to 8 m2 for a parking spot. I checked. Ideal for family life.
If you were willing to up your transportation time, you could get a 30 m2 (322 ft2) place outside the city for you and yours. Then again, in Toulouse, you could rent a two-bedroom apartment with double the surface for the same price.
I would aim at a 19m^2 spot in Paris, though I surely should stack my bed on top of my kitchen and my bathroom. I don’t know where I would put my magazines. Perhaps on a vertically sliding book-case, so I could access it from all three rooms.
Ciao Heather! 8-}
“the Ph.D. will count as two years’ work.”
HAHAHAHA! Ha.
Yeah, well, it was a compromise because many have said, “why should we be paying people to do their studies, even retroactively?” Doctors are paid during their studies, at least later on. So that was the argument.
The first welcome measure, will be to allow the Ph.D. and postdoc years to count as professional experience on the salary/benefits grid – the Ph.D. will count as two years’ work.
Yes! But I suggest that we should consider going further and regard them as employees from Day 1 – i.e. scrap studentships and treat those undergoing Ph.D. training as apprentices.
_ i.e. scrap studentships and treat those undergoing Ph.D. training as apprentices._
Excellent idea.
I should add that I am not aware that INSERM employees can go back to their doctoral training to say when they started working (one is supposed to put in 37.5 years here to retire). In addition, many people of my generation were supported by fellowships at that time of their lives. This is changing (and for the better) so that studentships that come through the Ministry of Research, now are proper salaries with withholding – which are more expensive for the employer.
For me, though, it means I must work until I am 70, which is funny in a country where rail workers have been known to go on strike to protect their privilege to retire at age 50. If my health is good, why not? Some people are actively pushed out the door, to the greater detriment of the community.
For me, though, it means I must work until I am 70, which is funny in a country where rail workers have been known to go on strike to protect their privilege to retire at age 50
I’m fairly certain that I will have to work until I am at least 70, and very likely longer. The typical pattern of retiring at 65 (for US academics) is a thing of the past. Some of my teaching colleagues are older than 65; the ones who manage this best have remained slender and physically fit. I try to remember this whenever I stray into the ice cream aisle at the grocery store, or when I think I’m too tired to go running. The genes for longevity and good health in old age are a given in my family, but they wouldn’t do much good for an obese person with type 2 diabetes.
A friend of mine started working for the FBI out of high school, and retired on a very comfortable income at age 50.