Date: 2010-05-12
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

I yield myself 3 minutes. Mr. Chairman. in much of the history of the United States. and certainly in the most recent history of the United States. we have made a decision to build much of our economy on the backs of the best and the brightest that this country has to offer. to go to the research universities and to other universities and develop grants from Federal agencies to the National Science Foundation. from NIH and from the other agencies to do the research necessary to drive basic discovery. and to drive from that discovery innovation. and from that innovation economic growth. And its served this economy and its served this Nation very. very well over the last 50 years. But we have a problem here. We have a situation where the best and the brightest people. among the most talented. a select group of people. the postdoctoral individuals. people whove had their masters degrees and their Ph.D.s in sciences and engineering and mathematics and a whole range of fields participate in that research. They. in many instances. write the grants for that research. The grants are awarded to the universities based upon their work. Those grants provide for escalators so that the principal investigator and the postdocs that he hires. those very bright graduates of our university system to run the labs. to do the research. to assist that individual. that they be provided for. And yet we find out that in many instances. universities are withholding information that these students have an absolute right under State law to have. And that right is to understand how they are paid and the availability of money in these grants for their increases. In most of these grants. the Federal institutions and others require that escalators be built into. The universities require when the postdocs and the principal investigators write these grants to submit to the Federal Government and to the agencies that they include an escalator. And what are the universities doing? In the case of University of California. Berkeley. they withhold. They then take 53 percent in overhead charges. So in a $1 million grant. they get an additional over $500.000 to administer that grant. They take that share of the escalators for themselves. but they dont pass it on to these brilliant young people who are also nowbecause theyve postponed. in many instances. having a family and buying a home. they now become among the lowestpaid people in the region. All this amendment says is. if they are entitled to the information under the law. that the university should have to provide it. The University of California has been telling these postdocs and telling the Congress of the United States for over a year that they would provide this information. and they have failed to do that. So what were saying is that these students are entitled to the law. to that information. It creates no new right. It creates nothing new in collective bargaining. This is not the purpose. The purpose is tothe information that they are entitled to under the law they have. This is really about the very contracts that the university is administering. And yet a year later after the request by both Members of Congress and the postdoc graduates. theyre told that the information is not available. If the information isnt available. it raises questions about the overhead. the $850 million that the University of California took for the purposes of administering these grants. I reserve the balance of my time.