Hungarian scientists face sack

The jobs of hundreds of scientists at Hungary's universities are under threat after a government-mandated 7.5% raise for faculty on January 1 that came without guaranteeing universities enough money to cover the extra expense.

Hungary's universities-which are financed by the state-are now obliged to find an extra 4 billion Hungarian Forints (HUF) (USD $20 million) to fund the salary increases, and many are seeking to make large savings in science. As many as 2318 academic and support jobs could be cut in Hungarian universities in the next few months, according to a statement by Antal Stark, deputy under-secretary for Economic Affairs at the Hungarian Ministry of Education, reported earlier this month by Eduport, a Hungarian news portal for higher education. Among those jobs are 518 academic jobs, representing 3.4% of the country's total university teaching staff, and the most are in science.

An education ministry spokesperson confirmed the numbers for The Scientist, and noted that the government had increased spending on higher education by 4% in 2005.

The threat to science departments has triggered a protest from the deans of the faculties of science in Hungary, who have written to the government, urging them to give more money. "Science faculties are in a deep current financial crisis and have to fire many qualified staff," said György Kampis, the head of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, which is under threat.

Kampis praised the salary increases, noting that a full professor in Hungary earns HUF 400,000 a month (USD $2080), but said that the government had acted illegally by raising salaries without providing sufficient funds. Because the Eötvös science faculty must save HUF 700 million (USD $3.6 million) for salaries this year from a total budget of HUF 2.8 billion (USD $14.6 million), Kampis said that 80 scientists in tenured positions were set to lose their jobs. Eötvös currently has 6000 full-time graduate students, including 500 PhD students, and more than 600 academic staff.

"Many classical fields-which at the Eötvös have been so wonderfully successful, such as physics, mathematics, or biology-are seriously jeopardized. The university has limited means and resources, yet it would be a tragedy to let science bleed out. The current desperate situation brings the faculty of science close to the point where it has to fight for its mere survival," Kampis said.

The funding problems are putting particular pressure on science faculties because the overall tuition fee, or "norm," the government has set for physics or biology students-HUF 375,000 (USD $1950) per year per student-is the same as a university gets for educating a law or sociology student, even though the costs of educating a science student are much higher, Kampis said.

Daniel Margocsy, a history of science PhD student at Harvard University who has helped start an international petition against the closure of Kampis' department, criticized the universities for making arbitrary job cuts. "Younger, promising scholars are dismissed since they are not yet tenured and work on a contractual basis that can be easily terminated. Successful departments that actually contribute to the university's budget are threatened with dissolution," he told The Scientist.

Margocsy said that universities had resisted pressure to create a benchmarking system to objectively evaluate performance. "No one really checks whether faculty publish either in Hungarian or in international journals; no one checks how many undergraduate students attend a professor's lecture; no one checks how many PhD students a professor supervises," Margocsy said. "In fact, no one even checks whether professors actually hold their advertised courses or whether they regularly miss their lectures."

Correction (posted March 29): When originally posted, this story stated that professors in Hungary earn HUF 400,000 per year. They earn that amount per month. The Scientist regrets the error.

Links for this article
J. Burgermeister, "'Brain circulation' in Hungary," The Scientist, November 26, 2004
www.biomedcentral.com/news/20041126/02

Eduport
www.eduport.hu/

Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Science, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
teo.elte.hu/fs/deptofhaps.html

A. Csonka, "Hungarian researchers protest," The Scientist, May 25, 2004.
www.biomedcentral.com/news/20040525/03

Daniel Margocsy
www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~margocsy/

Petition to prevent the dissolution of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Eötvös Loránd University
www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?hpselte