Over the past seven years, the Career Development Committee has tried various formats for the Open Floor Debate session at each of its congresses. The session has now evolved into an ‘information and debate’ forum that provides ELSO participants with information about a particular topic through several invited speakers, and opens the floor for a general discussion that permits individuals in the audience to express their viewpoints on that topic and ELSO to represent those viewpoints at meetings with science policy makers, in its newsletter and in other articles.

To view accounts of past debates, please click on the appropriate year:   2000   2002   2003   2004   2005

2007

Tony Hyman kicked off the 2007 debate on A tenure-track career structure for European academics with his statement that not only did Europe not have an academic career structure but, he believes, no country in Europe can provide a simple description of its own career structure. He contrasted this to the advantages of the North American structure, which has clearly defined career stages and where progress from one stage to another (eg. from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor) is based on fulfilling agreed criteria and is not a competition with other candidates. We heard from Beate Scholz of the German research agency DFG about the Heisenberg professorship programme, which aims to appoint in the ‘Associate Professor’ niche of the German career structure.
Scholz talked also about some of the legal and political hurdles that must be overcome in attempting to change existing structures. Katarina Bjelke from the Karolinska Institutet’s Junior Faculty office described the university-wide career development programme that is being implemented at her institution, which includes a five-step ‘research’ track from doctoral student to Professor, as well as a ‘teaching’ track and a ‘senior researcher’ post that branches off the main researcher track. Finally, Janet Rossant described some of the strengths and weaknesses of the North American tenure-track system. She concluded that an ongoing career structure is they key issue much more so than tenure itself.

You can see the speakers’ PowerPoint presentations:

Beate Scholz
Tenure-track approaches to create a new paradigm in Germany

Katarina Bjelke
Teaching and research careers at the Karolinska Institutet: the Karolinska’s new tenure-track career system

Janet Rossant
Career structures in North America

Pietro De Camilli, Peter Walter and Nenad Ban joined the speakers on a panel that led the ensuing discussion. One important talking point was the question of whether or not tenure is really necessary for an academic career. Some thought it was crucial to give researchers the security to carry out long-term risky projects and for universities to be able to guarantee their supply of teachers, others felt that, in the current economic climate, there is no reason to give academics more job security than any other type of employee. Perhaps a form of ‘rolling tenure’ would be most appropriate, with appropriate ‘exit packages’ for those who fail to have their contracts renewed after review. Other important points made by many contributors to the debate concerned: the need for clear definitions of each stage in the career path; harmonisation of academic careers as an extension of the Bologna Process to harmonise degree structures; the transparency of appointments with international advertising of posts (perhaps co-ordinated one or two times a year) and the application of best practice regarding pension rights, health insurance and social security benefits, and how to address the need of dual career couples to find two jobs in one location. Last, but not least, by involving researchers at all stages of the career ladder from junior PI upwards in all the processes of departmental and institutional management, as in the US, we would create a ‘pipeline of excellence’ that would begin early on to train individuals in the skills that they might need as future leaders of our scientific institutions future.
The Initiative for Science in Europe (ISE)’s working group on academic career structures, chaired by Hyman,
is beginning the process of documenting the various career structures that exist in Europe and proposing an ideal model that would not be a ‘bolt-on’ version of the USA’s tenure-track system but something tailored to Europe’s unique needs.

Read further articles on this topic in the ELSO newsletter
Tenure-track for Europe’s researchers April 2006, issue 1
French law forbids tenure-track July 2006, issue 2
Editorial September 2006, issue 3
Editorial February 2007, issue 5
The tenure-track debate: career structures more important than tenure September 2007, issue 6