Scholarship PhD’s flyer to protest their situation
Scholarship PhD’s flyer to protest their situation
Door Christien Boomsma
By Christien Boomsma
Christien Boomsma
Christien is sinds 2016 achtergrondcoördinator bij UKrant. Ze plant de achtergrondverhalen en begeleidt de auteurs. Bij haar eigen verhalen ligt de focus op wetenschap en academisch leven. Daarnaast schrijft ze veel over onderwerpen als sociale veiligheid en maakt ze graag persoonlijke interviews. In haar vrije tijd schrijft ze jeugdboeken en geeft schrijftrainingen.Despite heavy criticism from current scholarship PhD’s and the Promovendi Netwerk Nederland (PNN) the UG just started recruiting new scholarship PhD’s.
‘This leads to dissatisfaction and agitation amongst the current scholarship PhD’s’, says Fieke Visser, one of the protesting PhD’s. ‘Many want to protect future scholarship PhD’s from this kind of contract.’
Job vacancy
The text on the posters reads like a regular job vacancy, but warns future scholarship PhD’s for the inequality of their position. ‘Would you like to earn on average 20.000 to 30.000 less over your PhD-trajectory than your fellow employee PhD? Get the honoured title ‘student’ instead of staff? Be at risk of around 38% or higher to experience serious mental health issues? (…) Yes? Then the University of Groningen is looking for YOU!’
With this campaign the PhD’s refer to a similar campaign held by PhD’s at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in 1998.
Court cases
Back then scholarship PhD’s also protested their unequal position with satirical recruitment flyers. The protests against what was then known as the ‘bursary system’ led to a series of court cases, which the UvA eventually lost in 2004.
The Dutch High Council ruled that the PhD’s were treated as employees and therefore should also be paid as such. A couple of years later the UG started working with scholarship PhD’s, which led to the current ‘experiment’ for which the Dutch minister of education allowed the university to hire PhD’s on a scholarship.