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July 01, 2009, 01:50 PM ET
Righting a Wrong
Considering the turbulent financial times, it’s understandable that many universities are freezing faculty and administrative pay. What’s less understandable is why some of them are putting the kibosh on pay raises for grant-supported postdoctoral fellows, FemaleScienceProfessor writes in her latest post. She points out that not only does it make no financial sense to freeze the pay of externally supported postdocs, but it’s, well, downright unethical:
In fact, universities benefit financially from postdoctoral scholars because postdoctoral salaries may be part of the indirect cost calculation of a grant. Postdocs in the sciences bring money to a university. Freezing salaries of postdocs or other soft-money researchers is a money losing policy. …
I can’t think of a good reason why grant-funded salaries can’t be paid as budgeted in the grants. If the money exists in a grant for the specific purpose of paying a researcher, the researcher should get the budgeted money no matter what the university policy is regarding hiring/pay for faculty or staff.
Which is why she’s considering resorting to less-than-ethical means herself in order to award her postdoc his/her rightful raise:
One of the only ways to be granted an official exemption to the no-raise policy is if the person in question has another job offer. The job offer doesn’t have to be carved in stone — it can just be an email from someone at another institution expressing an intention to offer a position. I don’t want my postdoc to go out and get a real job offer (and he has said he wants to stay on here as a postdoc for another year or two), but I am pretty sure that I could get a colleague at another institution to send my postdoc an email expressing an interest in hiring him away from my institution (but without any real intention of doing so). With such a letter in hand, there’s a good chance I could get the raise approved.
So, tell us, readers: What would you do?
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