The head of the housing office is responsible for everything...

The leadership of the Ministry of Education and Science believes that rectors and directors should be responsible for increasing the salaries of teachers and researchers.

On February 27, 2013, the general meeting of the Society of Scientific Workers (SSR), formed a year ago, took place. As expected, there was a report on the work of the Society, elections of governing bodies; What was somewhat unusual was that the meeting was broadcast on the Internet, and voting on the issues put on the agenda of the general meeting was organized on the Internet, so that every member of the ONR could take part in it. The first part of the meeting took the form of a conference, at which several reports were made, presenting proposals on the main areas of the Society’s work [1] - combating plagiarism and the production of fictitious dissertations, improving the work of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, de-bureaucratizing competitions, procurement and teaching, etc.

Representatives of the leadership of the Ministry of Education and Science, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, and the Russian Humanitarian Science Foundation were invited to the meeting; not all of them came. The leadership of the RFBR was represented by the executive secretary of the Foundation, Vadim Shakhnov, who took an active part in the discussion of proposals regarding the work of the Foundation, and after lunch, the deputy spoke about some areas of work of the Ministry of Education and Science - the “Map of Science” project, projects of new federal targeted programs, as well as the fight against fake dissertations and plagiarism Igor Fedyukin.

There were many questions to him, especially the meeting participants were interested in the attitude of the ministry’s leadership to the proposals of the ONR, under which thousands of signatures were collected - on the need to increase the salaries of university teachers and the inadmissibility of the abolition of candidate and doctoral allowances (the last appeal collected about 5 thousand signatures - a record number of signatures scientific workers collected on the Internet).

Igor Fedyukin said that organizations now have significant freedom in the matter of remuneration, so they must ensure that employees receive normal salaries. So if a teacher is dissatisfied with something, he must go to the rector, and if his institution does not want to change anything, he can vote with his feet and change his place of work. There are no plans for a centralized, serious increase in official salaries. Regarding degree bonuses, the Deputy Minister did not speak out with any certainty, but said that, probably, after a certain transition period, bonuses are planned to be abolished.

Thus, the ministry took a distant position along these lines. We don’t have any “feudalism”, and every professor can easily come to the rector, saying that at Harvard they will give him a noticeably higher salary and he is ready to go there. It is especially easy to change jobs in the provinces. But for the rector, the main thing is not political loyalty, not connections with the governor and in Moscow, but exclusively the quality of education and scientific work at the university, and therefore there is a direct reason to take care of the employees. This is apparently how the sphere of higher education appears to be, looking at it from the ministry.

However, if rectors still have a certain reserve for increasing salaries due to, for example, income from students paying for their education, then directors of academic institutes have very modest opportunities. Therefore, without a corresponding increase in the budgetary funding of the institute, it is possible to increase official salaries by 2 times, either by firing half of the employees, or by taking away the money from grants and contracts from employees and redistributing these funds between them. Everyone can appreciate the reasonableness and feasibility of such salary increase options.

Igor Fedyukin was asked another salary-related question: does the ministry plan to introduce a system of individual salary grants (scholarships) issued on the basis of publication indicators, proposed by ONR? These proposals provide for a monthly payment of 30 thousand rubles. researchers and teachers who regularly publish in journals indexed in the Web of Science database. In the first year of the program, it would require, according to estimates, about 3 billion rubles.

And here the ministry’s position turned out to be distant: we are for such payments, but the financial capabilities of the Ministry of Education and Science are limited, and now we cannot do this. Those organizations that are interested in motivating employees introduce such bonuses on their own initiative.

One cannot help but get the impression that the Ministry of Education and Science is responsible only for those wonderful organizations that have the ability and desire to support publishing employees, and not for all of Russian science and education. And the Decree of the President of Russia, prescribing to ensure an increase in the share of Russian publications in the global array of publications indexed by Web of Science, was written specifically for directors and rectors.

It seems that the ministry continues to live in a comfortable reality, believing that saving drowning people is the work of the drowning people themselves.

E. O.

1. Proposals are presented on the ONR website http://onr-russia.ru/