By Regina Schwendener

According to ETH statistics third-party funding accounted for around 31 per cent of the jobs in the departments for head assistants, scientific staff and assistants in 2003. The remainder, according to ETH Controlling, were financed by the departments, from their basic mandate funds, or by supplementary funds granted by the ETH Executive Board (likewise ETH funds). Around 5,000 of the 8,000 people working at ETH today work on time-limited contracts.

Not always problematic

There is a decree concerning the employment of scientific staff at ETH that regulates the maximum length of contracts. Regulations, according to head of personnel, Piero Cereghetti, which were not always strictly adhered to in the past. On signing a time-limited contract one generally knows what this means. And Cereghetti spells it out; "ETH Zurich sets great store by the principle of rotating scientific positions in order to give as many young, motivated scientists as possible the chance of a launching pad for a successful career, a policy, moreover, that enables the university to react flexibly to changes in a rapidly changing teaching and research environment". And apart from this, he points out, it wasn't always the case that problems arose when a professor retires. The personnel department is only called upon to assist in around half of the 20 retirements each year and, where necessary, a social plan springs into action.

Problems must be taken seriously

Nevertheless, the ETH ombudsman, Professor Hans Eppenberger, has been busier than usual recently with an increasing number of requests for assistance from ETH workers from the categories in question. Eppenberger sums up, "There are people at ETH who count their employer among their family, and they draw part of their identity from this. They are now being sent away and a lot of know-how usually leaves with them". He wonders whether it really makes sense to start from scratch time and again and to insist on regulations. It is becoming increasingly important, he considers, to include the candidate's social competence as one of the criteria when a professorship is filled.

Only around three per cent of researchers and assistants succeed in getting a professorship. Researchers, head assistants and lecturers at ETH are widely perceived to be a major support in both research and teaching. However, they themselves are receiving increasingly less support. "The really serious problems usually arise when a professor retires who has been lax in his or her responsibilities towards the–generally young–scientists," says Theo Wallimann, ETH professor of cell biology. And he adds, "Good people are often employed with the promise of a permanent contact somewhere down the line and are then often left in uncertainty until they are too old or too specialised to find a job anywhere else." Not good, but he points to an even more disquieting trend that has followed in the wake of budget austerity; slowly but surely these positions are being eliminated.

"Cheap" substitutes?

"In the future, in addition to staff working on time-limited contracts, our academic research institutions will employ more, mostly "cheaper", postdocs from outside Switzerland. This will lead to a situation where we only have professors and "'very cheap" PhD-students" Wallimann prophesies. Because there will be practically no more permanent contracts of the type that previously provided jobs for highly qualified researchers. They were the people who, with their methodological continuity, contributed in no small measure to success in research of a professorship. This is confirmed when one examines the research groups surrounding recent Swiss Nobel Prize winners.

The young academics recruitment programme, launched by the Swiss National Science Foundation some years ago, was a good approach but had led into a blind alley in many cases because after the time-limited, professorial positions had been granted the corresponding tenured professorships had been lacking at the universities. If young academics were really to be fostered then transparent career paths and clear merit-system criteria were called for, such as the number and quality of scientific publications, fund-raising capabilities, teaching quality or the number of supervisions of diploma or doctorate theses amongst other things, according to Wallimann.

Graduate students and scientists are an important element in teaching and research. But reconciling time-limited contracts with their own careers is causing them headaches. large

Looking for solutions

The academic association of scientific staff at ETH Zurich (AVETH) considers it necessary that ETH can also offer permanent positions for this category of workers, side by side with–a majority of–time-limited positions, say the associations' co-presidents Klaus Haller and Paolo Losio. Only then will ETH be able to hold on to know-how if equipment and infrastructure is used over many years and not just for a limited period. This is precisely where graduate and post-graduate students can gain. In the same vein there were also long-term research plans that required continuity and could not be suitably carried out by workers on time-limited contracts, alone. Haller says, "An ETH internal solution should be found for workers on permanent contracts when a professor retires. One measure the Executive Board could take to counter these problems in a preventative manner is to ensure that workers employed in permanent positions are not considerably younger than the professor employing them."

Title at EPF Lausanne

At EPF Lausanne AVETH's counterpart ACIDE (Association du Corps intermédiaire de l'EPFL) has taken the initiative and presented its strategy with a career plan aimed at fostering their members. Jean-Louis Staehli, board member of ACIDE explains, "We want to give the career path of the scientific workers at EPF Lausanne some sort of structure by introducing new academic titles that reflect their function and occupation. These titles will be allocated after a peer-review process requested by the researcher, himself, and we hope that this will lend impetus to the entire category." At the same time the title should be a mark of recognition for all the work that these people carry out. For example, today's "scientific assistant" ("wissenschaftlicher Adjunkt") who fulfils similar functions to a professor, should be able to obtain the title of a titular professor. At EPF Lausanne there were many more non-professorial lecturers than professors, says Staehli.

Wanted: social competence

Asked about problems when it comes to types of working contracts Staehli says, "At EPF Lausanne time-limited contracts for scientific staff run for a maximum of four years. At this point a decision has to be taken whether to terminate the employment of the worker or transfer them to a permanent contract. This regulation proposed by ACIDE would put an end to the current situation where a worker can be let go at an age when he or she has practically no chance of following up his or her career outside an academic institution." This would also mean that a research team would be obliged to put at least a minimal amount of planning into their timetables. There even used to be workers at EPF Lausanne who worked for 20 years on annually renewable yearly contracts. "We find it unfair that someone is lured into working for nine years on a time-limited contract without a certain level of job protection that circumvents the permanent contract only to throw them out at a relatively advanced age." On the other side, ETH doesn't take a risk, anymore by offering a permanent contract to someone, if the position has to be cancelled, later due to the retirement of the superior or because a research project is terminated.

Tenure track solution

Stäheli goes on to say that, at EPF Lausanne, as well there was a clear tendency to reduce the number of scientific workers on permanent contracts. It was absolutely vital to adapt the number of professors to the increasing number of students. In view of the fact that public funding was likely to increase very little–if at all–in future, university administrators preferred to create tenure track assistant professorships–positions for which scientific workers could also apply–instead of offering permanent work contracts. This measure will mean that the relative proportion of professors will grow in the coming years and research teams will tend to be smaller. But ACIDE does not think, says Staehli, that the system will function without permanent contracts for scientific workers.

There is no middle way

"In point of fact, without an adequate number and level of scientific staff very little would be done at a university. Why this is not more talked about is probably for the same reason that junior officers are undervalued in the armed services," says ETH Nobel laureate Richard Ernst, with a grin. The problem of our category of mid-level scientists is that we follow a kind of hybrid system that is situated somewhere between the German institutional system, with the professor and the privy councillor as absolute rulers leading a hierarchy of 'mid-level serfs', and the US American system with a high number of professors heading small research teams but without workers on permanent contracts. Ernst goes on to say, "We try to combine the advantages of both but tend to ignore the fundamental incompatibility of the two systems. We think we have vanquished the German system but we are still a long way away from the American one." To be entirely consistent the permanent, independent layer of scientific staff positions would have to be abolished and the number of professors tripled, says the Nobel laureate. "Naturally, funding would not be tripled and that would mean that, on average, professors would have less funding at their disposal." And he sums up, "The problem of the scientific staff employment can only be solved if we decide on either the old German approach or the American one with many more professors. There is no middle way!"