John Browne

Now that the government has asked University sector to cut their pay budgets by 3%, the Universities seem to be finding novel ways of accomplising this.

If you’re not familiar with the University employment system then I shall attempt to outline it as I see it from the outside.

There are permanent members of staff; professors, lecturers, technicians, HR, Finance, administration at all levels, buildings department and ground staff, and then there are contract “employees” such as full time masters students, PHD students and of course the Post doctoral researchers.

The majority of the research work at Universities is conducted by postgraduate researchers persuing PHDs and Masters degrees and the post doctoral staff who are more experienced, all overseen by a senior lecturer who has a permanent position. The way it actually works is that the post doc will run the projects and oversee the students.

Now if you were looking for payroll budget cuts what would be the easiest thing to do? Letting go permanent staff is not an option, so the obvious route to take is to not renew the contracts of post doctoral staff and to not replace those that are moving on. So now we have no-one to do any research. Post docs are usualy paid out of the budget for the project they are working on, but it all goes through the university Payroll system. I bet you can see where I’m going with this! If you manage to cut your payroll by getting rid of researchers and you have no one to do the research then you have no need of research projects. Most of these projects are externally funded by Science Foundation Ireland, Enterprise Ireland, the European Union with some limited private sector involvement. I have heard anecdotedly on the grape vine unconfirmed rumours of projects that have been agreed to be funded by SFI and EI, for which money has been agreed and available being turned down by the University in order to ease the HR payroll 3% cut problem.

This means that the government saves money twice. On one hand the university has slashed it’s budget by rejecting projects, jobs and money from EI and SFI and then on the other side EI and SFI have money left over because they can’t invest it in research because the Universities won’t take it. This is a double saving for the government. On the other they have more engineers and scientists on the dole looking for jobs in an ever decreasing job market, the knowledge economy is up in smoke and the univeristies are a laughing stock.

At a time when really big and exciting science is being done at CERN and ITER our governement is killing our research and knowledge economy with budget cuts.

Knowledge Ecomomy my Arse.