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November 2004

This past year has been extremely exciting for BUPA!  To kick off the 2004-2005 academic year, BUPA and the Office of the Vice President of Research sponsored a barbecue for postdocs.  It was held on September 24th, and was attended by 75 postdocs.  This is record attendance for a postdoc function here at Brown!  The weather was fantastic, and everyone had a great time.  Special thanks to Assistant VP of Research Regina White for her support in planning this event.  You can view photos of the event here.   More social events are in the works, for example a monthly Postdoc Happy Hour.  The first will be held on November 19th.

In other news, Brown formed an ad hoc committee during the 2003-2004 academic year to explore improvements for postdocs.  The committee produced a report with several recommendations for changes at Brown.  The main points are highlighted below.  The entire report can also be downloaded here.

1. Clarify Brown’s definition of a postdoc.  The two most common titles are postdoctoral research associate and postdoctoral fellow. The university has no consistent method for defining postdocs across all departments.  Also, postdocs should be promoted to the title of Senior Postdoctoral Research Associate after three years, and to Research Scientist after six years.

2. Provide equal benefits to all postdocs.  In general, postdoctoral research associates are university employees and receive full benefits as employees.  Postdoctoral fellows generally bring their own funding, and thus are not considered Brown employees.  Therefore they do not receive university benefits.  This system leads to inequities within departments and labs, and unintentionally punishes postdocs for seeking independent funding.  The report recommends that the University provide Fellows access to health and dental benefits at the same individual costs as they are provided to associates.  The additional cost must be provided by the department, program, or the institutional allowance of the individual’s grant.  Implementing this will be quite difficult, requiring lots of work to assure that the changes are legal and in accordance with tax regulations.

3. The report does not recommend implementing university-wide salary minimums.  The large differences in the market pressures for different departments makes this impractical.  Salary should, however, be closely monitored by the mechanism recommended in point four.

4. A postdoc liason will be created within the Office of the Vice President of Research to work with BUPA.  The liason will  assist with organizing events and programs, gather information for distribution to postdocs, maintain information on current postdocs, and help develop grievance procedures for postdocs.

January 2003

We are pleased to announce that we are making good progress in our conversations with the Brown University administration. In December of 2002 we contacted the newly appointed Vice President for Research Andries Van Dam in order to continue with him the dialogue we had with Dean Fennell (Faculty) and Dean Estrup (Graduate School and Research). This resulted in our meeting with him, on January 2003, in which we presented the situation of postdocs on campus and suggested ways of improving the condition for postdocs. In that meeting, Vice President Van Dam suggested we write a bulletin to hand out to members of the administration. The bulletin was handed out and now we are meeting with a committee of administrators and representatives from various departments on campus, who’s goal is to create a report on ways to improve the situation for postdocs on campus.  In the first meeting of the committee, on November 2003, we made good progress in bringing everyone up to date on the conditions and concerns of postdocs. We are very optimistic that these meetings will result in positive changes for postdocs. 

 Some of the issues discussed in our initial meeting were:

What is the definition of a postdoc? Should there be a limit to the amount of teaching a postdoc is required to do? This is a tricky issue because setting a limit will exclude a population who are now considered postdocs. A reason for setting a limit is to avoid overburdening postdocs with teaching when research is their primary goal. In theory, the postocs that are spending most of their time teaching should be considered junior faculty. 

Should there be a limit to the number of years spent as a postdoc? This issue goes back to the definition of a postdoc, because one of the defining characteristics associated with a postdoctoral position is being in training. Setting a limit would force the school to offer postdocs a more permanent position, after a defined number of years. It might also terminate an ongoing collaboration between a postdoc and his advisor if the postdoc is not offered a permanent position. 

How to equalize benefits for all postdocs. This also goes back to the definition of a postdoc because the title defines the benefits. We discussed the possibility of a unified title for all postdocs.