“The situation is explosive”, “the situation is difficult”: Sentences like these were heard more frequently at the Academic Senate (AS) of the Humboldt University on Tuesday. The topic was: What will happen to the postdoctoral positions after the surprising change to the Berlin University Act?
As reported, Red-Red-Green pushed through a regulation at the very last minute according to which post-docs – i.e. people who have completed their doctoral thesis – must always be offered follow-up employment at a qualification position, for example for a habilitation.
Great unrest at the university
There is a lot of unrest at the university, reported Reinhard Flogaus from the group of academic staff. For example, the Vice President for Budget, who was not present at the AS, said in another meeting that it could be much more difficult to approve extensions of Post Docs on parental leave, for example. Or promising professors at appointment negotiations that they could hire postdocs. In plain language this would mean: Post Docs at qualification positions would then no longer be employed at all.
Flogaus, whose group is principally committed to improving working conditions for researchers, made it clear that even for him the new rules go too far: “That was not what we were aiming for.” He demanded a significant increase in grants from the State of Berlin in order to be able to implement the new rules at all. Art spoke of a “high amount of millions” that was necessary to compensate: “We need additional money or we have to cut jobs.” She expects the law to come into force at the end of September or beginning of October.
Overall, art made a rather perplexed impression. “At the moment I don’t know how to do that,” she said at one point, at another she spoke of “big question marks”. In any case, she wanted to set up a working group to develop “creative solutions” for the HU. The state rectors’ conference is currently getting an overview of how many people are acutely affected and how much money the universities would need in total. In the HU-AS the number of 250 post docs who are currently employed at the university fell.
The Excellence Network is also affected
The excellence network of the Berlin University Alliance was also massively affected, said Kunst: Many excellence projects would work with postdocs. However, since the excellence funds are only paid for a certain period of time, these researchers cannot always be guaranteed continued employment.
There was a dissent in the AS on the question of what happens to the post docs who are already doing limited research at the HU. Could your contracts at least be renewed for a limited time? This question worried several members. Yes, said an employee at Kunsts. Law professor Martin Heger contradicted this: If time limits were incorrectly stated in the contract, an action could be taken retrospectively: “We have to get together very quickly.”
