Still Working, No Longer Employed: The Limits of Institutional Imagination
To continue directing my research project, I had to become a Polish pensioner. Not because I wanted to retire from research, but because my university and the funding agency required it. When I asked whether my American Social Security benefits would suffice, the answer was no. I needed a Polish pension. How much of a pension? Apparently, it did not matter. Even one złoty a month would do.
After considerable bureaucratic maneuvering, I obtained my Polish pension. My university could now recognize me as the director of a research project whose funding period had been extended for another year.
There was just one problem. Once my employment contract ended, I lost access to the university systems I needed to direct the project.
Welcome to the world of Polish academic research, where institutional imagination sometimes seems to be in remarkably short supply.
When a Project Outlives an Employment Contract
My research project officially ended in early October, but the Polish National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki, NCN) approved a one-year no-cost extension. The reasons were straightforward. Two doctoral students working on the project have not yet defended their dissertations. Their doctoral work depends, in part, on articles that are still undergoing peer review or awaiting publication. Our postdoctoral researcher and I also have manuscripts under review, and some project funds remain available for research dissemination.
In other words, the original funding period may have ended, but the scholarly work has not.
No-cost extensions are a familiar feature of externally funded research. They recognize that research rarely proceeds according to the tidy timelines imagined in grant applications. Fieldwork takes unexpected turns, analysis raises new questions, journals take months—sometimes considerably longer—to review manuscripts, and doctoral dissertations follow their own institutional schedules.
A no-cost extension allows researchers to complete the work without requesting additional funding.
But there is a catch. No additional funding also means no additional salary money.
My employment contract ended when the original project period expired. Our postdoctoral researcher's contract will end in December. Neither of us will receive a salary during the extension, although we remain involved in completing the project's scholarly commitments.
And here is where things become interesting.
The termination of my employment contract automatically triggered the termination of my university email account and access to various administrative systems. Restoring the email account was relatively straightforward. Regaining access to the other systems has proved considerably more difficult. Most recently, I discovered that I could no longer use the university-assigned VPN.
These are not merely inconveniences. Without access to the appropriate systems, I cannot effectively oversee project expenditures, approve transactions, or carry out other administrative responsibilities associated with directing an externally funded research project.
My postdoctoral colleague will soon face a similar predicament. Although the project still has funds for dissemination, once her employment contract ends, she will lose access to Portal Pracownika, the university's employee portal, through which travel reimbursements are submitted.
The money exists. The research activities remain authorized. But the researcher may no longer have access to the mechanism for being reimbursed.
The Problem Is Not Incompetence
It would be easy to describe this situation as bureaucratic incompetence. I do not think that would be fair, or particularly illuminating.
From the perspective of university administration, the procedures may be perfectly logical. An employment contract ends; the employee's access to institutional systems is terminated. Such procedures undoubtedly serve legitimate administrative and security purposes.
The problem is not necessarily that anyone has failed to follow the rules. It is that the rules appear to have been designed around a particular understanding of who researchers are and how academic employment works.
The underlying assumption seems to be that principal investigators hold permanent university appointments. If a permanently employed professor receives a no-cost extension, their employment status remains unchanged. They retain their email account, access to financial systems, institutional credentials, and administrative authority. The project continues, and so does their ability to manage it.
But what happens when the principal investigator works on soft money?
For those unfamiliar with the expression, soft-money researchers depend on external grants and contracts to fund their salaries. Unlike permanently employed faculty, their continued employment is contingent on securing research funding. They may spend entire careers moving from one grant to another, producing publications, supervising students, and contributing to their institutions' research profiles without ever holding a permanent appointment.
I have spent much of my academic career working this way.
Yet the administrative structures of Polish universities do not always seem equipped to accommodate researchers whose institutional responsibilities continue after their employment contracts expire.
Affiliation Is Not the Same as Employment
What makes my situation particularly puzzling is that my relationship with the university did not begin with this grant.
I have been affiliated with the Center for Migration Studies (CeBaM) at Adam Mickiewicz University since its inception. My involvement in the Center's research activities is not contingent on a particular employment contract. Nor does it disappear when a grant-funded salary ends.
And yet, for purposes of accessing essential university systems, the expiration of my employment contract seems to have taken precedence over both my longstanding institutional affiliation and my continuing responsibilities as project director.
This is not an inevitable feature of academic administration. Many universities recognize forms of institutional affiliation that do not depend on current employment, including appointments as research associates, affiliated scholars, or non-resident fellows.
At Georgetown University, where I worked for many years, my employment has ended, but my institutional affiliation continues. I remain associated with the Center for Social Justice, and my official status in the university's human resources system is "retired, active." I can still use the Center's letterhead when writing recommendations for former students.
Of course, such affiliations do not automatically confer access to every university system. But they demonstrate that institutions can distinguish between employment status and continuing professional relationships.
Why should it be so difficult to make a similar distinction when a researcher remains responsible for an active, externally funded project?
The Limits of Institutional Imagination
What puzzles me most is not that my employment contract ended. There was no salary money left in the grant, and I understood that perfectly well.
What puzzles me is that both the university and the funding agency recognized the need for the project to continue, yet the administrative arrangements necessary to make that continuation possible seem not to have been considered.
The pension requirement makes the contradiction particularly striking.
Somehow, obtaining a Polish pension made it possible for me to retain my position as project director without an employment contract. I still do not fully understand the regulatory reasoning behind this requirement. But the university and NCN evidently recognized a way for me to remain responsible for the project after my salaried employment ended.
What they apparently did not anticipate was that I would still need access to university systems to fulfill those responsibilities.
The institution could imagine a project director without an employment contract. It could not quite imagine the practical implications of having one.
As an anthropologist, I find this especially interesting. Institutions classify people, establish categories of eligibility, and determine who belongs and on what terms. These classifications are necessary for administrative purposes, but they do not always correspond to the realities of people's lives.
Research funding operates according to one set of categories: principal investigators, research teams, project timelines, eligible expenditures, and reporting obligations.
University administration operates according to another: employees, employment contracts, institutional accounts, access privileges, and authorized users.
As long as these categories overlap, the system works reasonably well. When they cease to overlap, people can find themselves in an administrative no-man's-land.
The researcher remains responsible for the work but no longer fits the institutional category that makes performing it possible.
Imagining Research Differently
Polish universities have become increasingly engaged in externally funded research, including projects supported by national and international funding agencies. Such projects involve researchers with different employment arrangements, international careers, and institutional affiliations.
Yet administrative systems do not always appear to have kept pace with these changing realities.
Universities pride themselves on encouraging creativity, innovation, and the questioning of established assumptions. Research funding agencies routinely invite scholars to propose ambitious projects, cross disciplinary boundaries, and develop new approaches to complex problems.
Surely some of that imagination could be directed toward the institutional arrangements that make research possible.
I am not arguing that universities should continue employing researchers when grant funds are exhausted, nor that institutional security procedures should be abandoned. But there ought to be ways of maintaining the administrative access and institutional affiliation necessary to complete an approved research project.
A no-cost extension extends the life of a project. It does not necessarily extend the employment of the people responsible for completing it. But surely it should not deprive them of the institutional means to carry out their responsibilities.
Perhaps the larger issue is that Polish universities and research funding agencies have become adept at accommodating the changing timelines of research without adequately considering the changing employment circumstances of researchers.
And that leaves me with a question.
If we can imagine research continuing beyond the original funding period, why is it so difficult to imagine researchers continuing to carry out their responsibilities beyond the end of their employment contracts?
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