Photo: Shutterstock Wageningen Graduate Schools estimate that 20 to 25 per cent of the PhD students will experience some measure of delay due to Covid-19 measures. In some cases, fieldwork or experiments cannot be carried out, and in others courses are postponed or researchers have been at home looking after their children.
The money is limited and is only intended for the worst cases
Wouter Hendriks, Dean of Research
‘So as well as the decentralized sources of compensation, there are two specific financial compensation instruments for PhD students and one for postdocs,’ says Wouter Hendriks, Dean of Research. Firstly, an emergency fund has been set up by the University Fund Wageningen to support students and PhD students who are not employed by the university.
Small number
Secondly, in the labour agreement negotiations for 2020, funds have been reserved in the form of a 0.45 per cent pay margin that can be used for financial compensation for PhD students and postdocs who are temporarily employed by the university (CAO-NU) and whose contract ends in 2021. This fund comes to about 650,000, enough to pay roughly 40 PhD or postdoc researchers for three months fulltime, including 35 per cent overhead costs. This is only a small number of the total of 900 PhDs with a contract. ‘We cannot compensate everyone by a long way,’ says Hendriks. ‘The money is limited and is only intended for the worst cases.’
It is a pity that it is only for PhD students with a contract at the university
Jasper Lamers, chair of the Wageningen PhD council
In all cases, says Hendriks, supervisors and managers are encouraged to look for possible solutions within the means at the disposal of their chair groups and Science Groups. That could entail adapting work plans so that the project can be rounded off within the appointed time. If that doesn’t solve it, a supervisor could apply for financial compensation for the PhD student. This was communicated to all supervisors in a letter of 5 August.
Contract
Jasper Lamers, chair of the Wageningen PhD council, is happy with the compensation possibility. ‘But it is a pity that it is only for PhD students with a contract at the university, since half the PhD students don’t have one. And that is precisely the group that we often think gets overlooked. They get lower salaries, for instance. So this reinforces the difference.’ Hendriks says the possibility to support PhD students without a contract as well will be looked into, on top of the emergency fund set up for that purpose. Compensation has already been arranged, for instance, for PhD candidates who are funded within the framework of the Wageningen Graduate School sandwich PhD and WOTRO programmes, who had to stay longer than planned in the Netherlands because of the Covid-19 measures.
To qualify for compensation, the PhD student or postdoc has to be able to prove that the delay was entirely caused by Covid-19 measures, that this compensation is essential for rounding off the project, and that no other solution can be found. ‘I don’t know exactly how that will be tested,’ says Lamers. ‘But I assume that you could submit a work plan for the planned experiments that you were unable to carry out.’ According to Hendriks, it was a deliberate choice to leave the application process open-ended, instead of making it hang on a checklist. ‘We want to help precisely the people who have been delayed due to Covid-19, and not for any other reason. So we leave it to the PhD student/ postdoc and the supervisor to argue the case.’
Tight deadline
The application for financial compensation goes through the Graduate Schools. For PhD students whose contract ends in December 2020, and for postdocs, the deadline is 28 August. According to Lamers, this is extremely tight. ‘I understand the need to hurry up because those contracts end soon, but the timing is unfortunate. If your supervisor happens to have gone on holiday for three weeks, you can’t submit on time. So I hope it will be possible to extend this deadline if someone can’t make it otherwise.’ Hendrik agrees that it is very short notice. ‘We can’t postpone it too long because we must allocate the money that is available for 2020 this year. We were still negotiating with the unions until the end of July.’ He also says the deadline probably won’t be strictly adhered to.
The supervisor should submit the application, after which a committee will evaluate it. Hendriks is on the committee himself, together with an HR worker, a representative of the PhD Council and a Graduate School director. It is highly unlikely that all the applications can be honoured. It will be announced later whether there will be any compensation for other groups of PhD students, such as those with a contract that ends after 2021.
Details of the different forms of compensation and how to apply for them can be found in this letter: