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FSEC discusses proposed policies for postdocs
By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor
Calling postdoctoral scholars various names may never hurt them, but allowing them to work without a labor safety net at universities might, the Faculty Senate Executive Committee was told yesterday.
While they are called by many names, including research associates, visiting scholars and postdoctoral fellows, they all deserve policies and procedures that support them during their time spent at UB, Marilyn Morris, director of the Office of Postdoctoral Scholars, told the FSEC.
Morris presented a draft of the policies her office has compiled for university postdocs, which, among other things, dictate minimum and maximum expectations in terms of salary and length of employment, two areas that have provoked increasing debate nationwide. She ultimately will present the proposal to the Graduate School for approval.
A postdoc is someone who holds a doctoral degree or equivalent who is working in a "period of mentored advanced training to enhance the professional skills and research independence needed to pursue his or her chosen career path," according to Morris.
The title of postdoctoral fellow is used for those with awards financed by agencies outside a university or through a postdoctoral training grant.
"The postdoctoral fellow is really in a no-man's land, actually," Morris said. "They are not a graduate student. They are not an employee. They can get health insurance similar to that of a graduate student, and that is generally funded through their fellowships."
UB currently employs a total of 305 postdocs, primarily in the sciences, most of whom are funded through research grants.
"That's important because they are considered employees through the Research Foundation or the UB Foundation," Morris said. "We have a few through training grants and some with their own fellowship money, but that's a small percentage. That's significant because those individuals don't have the same benefits as those funded through research grants."
While the average full-time salary for postdocs at UB is $35,404, according to a study of some 150 postdocs at the Research Foundation, Morris said the range begins at $6,748 and goes as high as $70,980.
"Of interest is that there were 16 appointed at less than full-time," Morris noted. "Sometimes, of course, this is justified, but it's also a way of getting around (paying full-time) salaries.
Although she found "some reluctance to having some type of minimum salary" for postdocs at UB, Morris proposes a minimum of $30,000, which is in line with the lowest recommended salary of the public AAU schools she researched.
The average age of postdocs at UB is 36.2 and the median age is 34.1, two facts that coincide with another finding, that "on the books, there are some people who have been in the positions for a long time," Morris said. "That should not be the case, but we don't have any policies in place, so someone could be appointed a postdoc and 15 years later, he or she is still a postdoc," she said. "It is a temporary position; it's not a permanent position. People need to move on to other titles if they are going to be staying here."
Her proposed recommendation for UB is that initial one-year appointments be renewed annually "up to a maximum of five years," with exceptions granted "only after review by the Graduate School through its Office of Postdoctoral Scholars." Also, all postdoc positions should be posted through UBJobs, according to the proposal.
Debra Street, director of graduate studies for the Department of Sociology, noting that most postdoc salaries "are driven by biomedical sciences," remarked that "for a social scientist to get a $30,000 postdoc, they would perhaps think they are dead and in heaven."
Morris responded by saying that her proposed policies allow for departments to "justify a lower salary, but it requires that justification."
"Some of the arguments I've heard are that 'Postdocs are competitive and because they are competitive, I don't have to pay a lot of money for them.'"
Peter A. Nickerson, director of the pathology graduate program, asked whether setting a minimum salary would result in a reduction of the number of postdocs that UB hires. Morris replied that of the 305 postdocs at UB, only about 20 make under $30,000, so "we're not talking about a large number."
He added that the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences also will begin paying its graduate student assistants a minimum of $24,000, plus paying their tuition, and that some school faculty members have wondered whether or not postdocs should instead fill those positions.
Charles O Hershey, professor of medicine, said that Ph.D.s who become assistant professors are paid according to their discipline, "so it would make sense that the postdoc salary would depend on the discipline as well."
"We shouldn't need a trade union for postdocs to get a decent salary," he said.
Morris agreed, saying "We shouldn't and that might happen, because it is happening."
However, it was Morris' recommendation that "the faculty mentor and scholar determine some sort of written set of expectations, research benchmarks, some sort of idea of how the postdoc's performance would be evaluated and that there should be an annual evaluation" that brought on the most discussion at the meeting.
Hershey responded by saying "postdoc is not a job."
"This is someone who usually has had a fair degree of training, they know where they want to go, they are actually choosing which shop they want to work in, they want to work with that person," he said. "So this is really a collegial, personal type of relationship. There's money involved so there's a boss and trainee, but it's not like we have a formal system. He is coming here to learn Dr. X's skills. When you get your Ph.D., you are technically an independent investigator. How much formalization do we want? Is this really a trainer-teachee relationship?"
He continued that too many policies might "stifle the process."
"I think everyone here has exclaimed several times a day, 'Oh no, not another form!' The relationships in one lab are different than another lab. Yes, we want them to have a decent standard of labor and they should not be slave labor. On the other hand, these are not uninformed consumers."
Stella N. Batalama, professor of electrical engineering, said she also finds it "a little bit far-fetched to formalize this kind of relationship" and that applying policies might discourage some postdocs from applying to UB.
Morris said that her intent is to provide a means for faculty mentors to "indicate your expectations so the postdoc knows where they are going with regard to your project."
Dorothy S. Tao, associate librarian in Lockwood Library, said she supports the proposals. Tao recalled the case of a postdoc she knew who had traveled away from her husband specifically to work at UB but whose faculty mentor, imagining the postdoc was jealous of the mentor's position, "wasn't giving her anything to do; he started not to work with her."
"The upshot of it was, she did leave...it would have been great if there would have been someone else for her to work with. I have known postdocs at UB who have been here for 20 years. So this makes a lot of sense to me. The professor doesn't want the postdoc to leave because he has a 'slave,' I'm sorry to use that term, but that was really essentially what it was. And the postdoc was terrified because if he did something, this guy was not going to give him a good recommendation. And so what you are saying is they can leave. It's like an abused person: 'You can leave, but I'm going to kill you anyway.'"