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Universities around the country, but particularly in California, are furloughing faculty and staff for the first time in the fall. On many campuses, the furlough plans remain amorphous, with staff unions or faculty passing resolutions and university administrators countering with contradictory mandates. It's a mess.
If you're a state worker in California, you may be asking what the big friggin' deal is--after all, most state employees (but not yet faculty) have for the past several months been ordered to take as many three days a month as furlough days, which means that many state workers have now given up the equivalent of a month's salary.
There are many issues that make furloughs at universities, and particularly furloughs of faculty, a particularly sticky wicket:
- Faculty teach students who pay tuition and fees in expectation of a very specific number of instructional hours.
- Faculty work hours are not necessarily between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
- Faculty are already frequently expected to perform teaching or service duties for which they are not fully remunerated.
Faculty bloggers have, of course, been weighing in on issues of fairness and workload.
The most eye-opening post for me came from Janet Stemwedel, a faculty member at a California State University campus. In it, I learned that faculty at CSU will be considered insubordinate if they work on a furlough day.
Stemwedel also thinks through the impact mandated furloughs will have on those faculty going up for tenure in the coming year and beyond:
My first thought, in reading this, was to wonder whether it would be more beneficial to take an extra year building the case for tenure, or to reduce the expectations on scholarly work, teaching, and service for the current academic year by 9.23% This might depend on whether bringing a particular piece of research to completion, getting manuscripts written, submitted, revised, and published, etc., requires more than 90% of the standard amount of time, effort, and luck. Plus, figuring out the rhythm of research, teaching, and service in an academic year with furlough days will itself require time and effort.
In any case, lowering the bar for AY09-10 by 9.23% is not an option on the table, so the question is moot.
I do hope this provision will insulate our probationary faculty from bearing more than their share of the pain. Burning out our recently acquired talent would be a bad thing, especially since these are the folks we hope will be carrying the university forward two or three decades down the road. And, I hope that department chairs will get on the case of their probationary faculty to ensure that they don't work when they shouldn't be working. Under normal circumstances one should not have to spend 100% of one's waking hours working for tenure. In these decidedly abnormal circumstances, one should definitely protect at least 9.23% of one's waking hours from the all-consuming tenure chase.
Mary Furner has further reflections on the impact of furloughs on research and why it's not fair for the University of California administration to forbid faculty systemwide from taking furloughs on instructional days:
UCOP’s decision to ban taking furlough days on teaching days is entirely unacceptable, comprising one more egregious assault on the mission of the CA public universities. The most unsettling piece of Interim Provost Pitts' statement is contained in the quote below, which displays a shocking misrepresentation of the mission of the state's research universities.
Asking the faculty to carry a full teaching load during furloughs is a large request, but in my mind is justified by the University's paramount teaching mision. Research is permitted on furlough days, but for many faculty this extra research will not be remunerated unless they have grants in which there are funds that can be reallocated to pay for increased effort. And since furlough days are not "service days", they can be used for outside professional activities that may be remunerated.
To say that teaching is "the paramount mission" belies the fact that these top-tier institutions exist in order to produce scholarly research as well as to teach undergraduates and train future scholars and professionals. Any reasonable awareness of the merit evaluation process in the UC system should convey the message that research weighs even more heavily than teaching in the achievement of promotions, tenure, and step increases within rank. Pitts' statement that "research will be permitted on furlough days" is almost laughable. University faculty do not do research "on the clock." They do it
