In many cases, faculty (some of whom already do not receive summer support) will be asked to take furlough time in the middle of the instructional period of the academic calendar, but not on a day that they are scheduled to teach. Will faculty forgo preparing for classes on days they are forced to furlough? Will they abandon their research programs on those days? I suspect we all know the answer to that question...
Cynically, I cannot help but think that the university administrators and state legislators who decided on three weeks of furlough as a cost-cutting strategy were counting on the fact that faculty come to their teaching and research as more of a calling than a 9-to-5 job.
In other words, they're assuming that faculty will still be working on furlough days -- they just won't be getting paid for that work.
In light of how much the work of teaching and research already encroaches on what faculty might be tempted to consider their own time (which includes time when one probably ought to be sleeping), I regard this calculation as probably accurate and definitely crappy.
And, I'm inclined to say that department chairs at MRU and other universities where furloughs are being imposed ought to take the lead in helping their faculties make plans not to work for free on furlough days. There's a very pragmatic reason that department chairs ought to be on top of this: If it can be demonstrated that the same amount of teaching, research, and service can be accomplished for 12% less salary (which is what the furlough days at MRU will amount to), then the folks who control the money have a strong argument for actually cutting salaries by 12% -- or for demanding more productivity if salaries are maintained.
If you do more with less, you'll be expected to do even more with even less. The crisis cuts become permanent.
So, how to not end up doing work on a furlough day? Clearly, there needs to be a ranking of tasks.
Preparing for class on the next instructional day is important. Ideally, you'd want to get that done on the non-furlough day right before the class day, but given that plenty of Monday classes are prepped on Sundays, prep might foreseeably creep into a furlough day.
Grading, on the other hand, should be avoided like the plague on a furlough day. Giving useful feedback on student work (at least in my discipline) takes a lot longer than most people realize. If grading turn-around slows down in proportion to furlough days, that just helps students become more aware of the labor that contributes to their education.
With laboratory research, especially with experiments that need to be maintained over long periods of time, skipping a day due to a furlough may be out of the question. But if I were a department chair, I would have my faculty and staff tracking the actually hours spent on research during each furlough day. This tally of hours, plus an accounting of how much outside money (e.g., from federal funding agencies) is connected to each research project, and of how much outside money would be wasted if the faculty actually treated furlough days like no-work days, ought to be useful for constructing an argument (to deans, university presidents, state legislators, etc.) that furloughing researchers is a stupid idea.
A really clever department head could probably even use the data to mount an argument that the department is entitled to additional resources in order to keep the projects funded with outside money from crashing down. (Even projects funded with outside money depend on resources funded by universities -- support personnel, library resources, heating and cooling and internet, etc.)
Finally, committee work on furlough days? Not even an option. If it doesn't fit in a paid day, it shouldn't be happening. Department chairs ought to make this policy explicit.
After all, what gets an administrator's attention like a slow down in bureaucracy?
- Log in to post comments
BUT perhaps furloughs would make the number of committee meetings go down.... Don't committee meetings amount to the same amount of productivity as a true furlough?
Liking the suggestions on how to use the time off. And I do hope that the department heads have awesome administrative assistants and/or administrative skills to embark on the data collection.
Right back atcha
I agree with you that academics do not see their jobs as 9 to 5 and that management probably assumes employees will continue to work on furlough days. Thus furlough days are a euphemism for pay cut. The upside is that management is trying to prevent people from losing their jobs, so while is totally sucks to have to take a pay cut for doing the same amount of work, that is still better then not having a job at all. Why should MRUs be exempt from what is expected from other state or private workers in an economic downturn?
Danimal - There is generally a slight difference between furloughs and pay cuts from an administrative point of view. Furloughs disappear if not explicitly continued. Pay cuts remain if not explicitly removed. My guess is that there's a better chance at getting back to regular pay from a furlough than from a pay cut.
BUT perhaps furloughs would make the number of committee meetings go down.... Don't committee meetings amount to the same amount of productivity as a true furlough?
Liking the suggestions on how to use the time off. And I do hope that the department heads have awesome administrative assistants and/or administrative skills to embark on the data collection.
Would your advice be different for someone pre-tenure? I would worry that my tenure committee wouldn't care about efficiency per paid time - they would care about number of papers published and about student teaching evaluations. And taking real furlough days - at least, not working on research and not grading - would affect those.
Now committee work... there's no way that anyone should be meeting with a committee during a furlough day.
My MRU faculty is planning to lay off 60 people. My lab is probably safe since our PIs are amazing at bringing in the grant money, but it's not a nice atmosphere in the rest of the department at the moment. Even before this the support services had been cut to the bone, all the maintenance guys retired and weren't replaced. The door's been hanging off the corrosives cupboard for 6 months with the hinges completely rusted through, and we can't get a replacement!
Kim,
Good points re: research. My own view is that my research is mostly for me -- my institution benefits from it, but not as much as I do. If I want to get another job, it is my research that gets evaluated... So I do think it would be a mistake to cut one's research...
But what about class prep etc? Well, assume that you have a 50-40-10 load (teaching/research/service). You really can't cut research, that's fixed. If you are assuming a standard 40 hour work week (ha!), then 20 hours of that are "teaching related" and 4 are "service." A 12% cut in hours is about 5 hours lost per week, or something like 20% of the time you have for teaching and service. I'd be tempted to cut every 5th class, and not show up to every 5th committee meeting, etc. :)
@MRW. I would not be so sure about salaries going back up. My understanding is that academics are salaried employees (they don't punch a clock) and get paid to do a job regardless of how much they are paid (correct me if I am wrong). Therefore, I stand by furlough days being a euphemism for pay cut. I also suspect if you are unhappy you can leave for another position. Good luck with that. There are enough unemployed and tenure track positions so scarce that those without tenure can be easily replaced. The next step, after asking everyone to accept a salary cut, is to let people go. The pay cut is usually used to avoid having to let people go. No one should assume that they are irreplaceable. So do people really want to follow Dr. Free-Rides advice and piss of the administration? Currently if you are employed in a state funded University, be happy you have a job.
You've got this totally backwards. You are being done a favor by being furloughed rather than taking a pay cut.
Furlough is just a euphemism for a pay cut, and academics should be *grateful* that it is being characterized as a furlough rather than a pay cut. This is because if there is a pay cut, then your base pay has actually been cut and future raises come off this lower baseline. Conversely, a furlough does not lower your base pay for future raises.
Or in my case, they tell us that we need to take a 10% cut which will last at least 24 months, and that this will help them avoid laying off other employees. And since no one is jumping ship, we all know what will happen after month 24.
When I was an active professor, our contracts said we could do ouside consulting one day a week so long as it did not interfere with doing our university work. One had to get permission and report what one had done when it was over. I suppose one could do all the consulting one wished on furlough days, and thus get a considerable boost in total income.
This is a serious matter and is going to get worse rather than better. It is very good that people are thinking and discussing how to cope in the best possible way.
When I was department chair I operated on 'No tickee, no washee.", no free lunch. I think my attitude would be, you cut my resources by so much, you get that much less product.
I think Janet's advice is short-sighted and ultimately sets up a self-defeating race to the bottom. Better to strive to excel at research (and/or teaching) and increase one's own market value.
Alternately, from an altruistic perspective, pay cuts for faculty are often a preferable alternative to mass layoffs of support staff. Have you heard about what happened at Beth Israel Hospital?
Careful...careful...you're thinking like someone who would make an actual good administrator....
I think furloughs are OK when everyone doing work functions as a unit - when the employees, the administration, and the students are committed to the same goals, subject to similar pressures, and looking ultimately to achieve the same ends. In Dr. Free-Ride's case (and perhaps Dr. Isis's), the university system (the state and the administration) appear to have been very willing to sacrifice the needs of their employees for their own benefit. Since there isn't a reasonable expectation that the people running the system are committed to its well-being rather than their own, there isn't a reason to expect that giving extra work for free will result in better outcomes for anyone other than the administration (and legislators who would prefer to spend money elsewhere), and will decouple the costs of the work from the people paying for them (if I can get more work for free, there isn't a reason to expect that I should have to pay more to get more work).
These arguments are, of course, also good reasons to leave and to find someplace where the administration, faculty, and students have at least consistent missions - if the administration thinks that you are expendable, then perhaps they ought to find out whether that is in fact true. They seem to figure that there is an infinite supply of cannon fodder willing to work for cheap and willing to receive a substandard education. It might help to see if reality will dissuade them from that idea.
There is also the idea of listing the expenses the administration is committed to preserving for themselves as suggested alternative cuts - if we expect teachers to make 12% less money in order to pay for another Tucker Max speech, and that became public, the administration might have to explain why they are feathering their beds at everyone else's expense.
As alluded to above, I think professionals (professors, for example) are paid, not for the work that they do, but so they can do work. This is in contrast to the hourly wage slave who is paid for work done. If the best the university can do is a 10% pay cut in these hard times, this should make no difference to the work the professional does. At least so I think.
On the other hand, I think the concept of furlough is not appropriate for professionals. When it is put in place, it should result in less work being done. This should be lectures and tutoring sessions cancled, grade return slowed down, etc. so that the lack of work can be noticed by students and those outside the university. Of course, administrtors will say this should not be the case, but they are wrong.
Danimal,
In the short term, a furlough is the same as a pay cut, especially for someone like me who does not have tenure yet. In the long term, it is not. The fact that your base pay does not change, as Comrade Physioprof notes, is very important.
I also stand by my conjecture that a pay cut is more likely to become permanent than a furlough. Inertia and all that.
When the University of Hawaii faculty union went on strike in 2001, I was a soft-money researcher/post-doc (but faculty member). My salary was paid 100% out of my federal grant funds and I was working my tail off to land the coveted tenure-track position.
The strike did nothing for me -- I wasn't paid by the state anyway. It only hurt me (professionally and monetarily). But there was a huge ethical conundrum about crossing the picket line. Of course, there were many, many of the tenured research profs who came into the office everyday and got their research done as well -- they just did so 'unofficially' and so still were supposedly on strike while they were actually working.