Universities across the US are forcing their employees to take unpaid leave, effectively reducing the salary budget without reflecting pay cuts on paper. But for most researchers, who cannot easily pause their studies, what furloughs really amount to is a simple reduction in income -- the same amount of work for less money.

Image: Flickr/hoyasmeg

"Especially in the sciences, [professors can't just stop] laboratory experiments or any ongoing monitoring they're doing," said John Curtis, Director of Research and Public Policy at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). "In most cases, [the end result is] just that they get a pay cut."

Last week (July 16), the University of California Board of Regents enacted a furlough plan to save $184.1 million by requiring their employees to take between 11 and 26 days of unpaid leave, amounting to a 4-10% reduction in pay. But the UC system isn't the first; several US schools have been quietly implementing similar plans in the past several months. The problem, of course, is that faculty aren't 9-to-5 employees, and walking away from academic work can be like trying to escape your own shadow.

"The teaching load is not being reduced, [nor] the expectations for producing," Curtis said. "It's something we really hadn't heard of except in isolated cases, and then all of a sudden this spring, probably about 12 public colleges or universities announced furloughs of one kind or another."

Among the casualties in this budgetary battle is Clemson University professor Julia Frugoli. In January, Clemson, a public university located in South Carolina, announced that all employees would be required to take five days of furlough by June 30, the end of the fiscal year, regardless of their source of funding. For Frugoli, that meant that she, as well as her technician and NSF grant-funded postdoc, would theoretically be forced to take a break from their time-sensitive gene expression experiments on plant nodules. In addition to the detriment to the experiments themselves, their subjects would suffer. "Doesn't matter whether the state furloughs us or not, somebody has to water those plants every single day, 365 days a year."

Frugoli sidestepped such consequences by simply taking lunches off campus. The specifics of the furlough required that employees leave campus, but it did allow them to fractionalize time away into as little as 15 minute chunks. "It was the way that almost everybody did it," she said. "Either lunches, or they'd come in later in the morning."

Other universities enacting furloughs include Arizona State University, where 10,069 faculty, staff and administrators took a total of 70,600 days without pay between January and June of this year. The University of Maryland furlough plan announced late last year required 6,976 faculty and staff to take at least one day of forced leave, but worked on a sliding scale such that only those earning more than $90,000 had to take the maximum of five days. The University of North Carolina has also instituted furloughs at all 17 of its institutions.

The University System of Georgia considered similar measures, but was blocked by clauses in faculty contracts forbidding the move. Instead, the school's administration rewrote the contracts to allow such actions to take place in the future. "We have a mechanism now to do furloughs if it should become necessary," said Georgia Board of Regents spokesperson John Millsaps.

Jerry Wilkinson, a professor of biology at the University of Maryland College Park and the current chair of the department, took his five days of forced leave all at once over the Christmas holiday. "I figured there was no point to delaying it," he said. Plus, "it was not allowed to interfere with teaching." Still, he said, he considers the furlough "a reasonable thing to do" because it allowed the university "to continue functioning without laying off people." It's a better option than cutting funding for graduate students, he said, which was also under consideration -- the worst case scenario involved losing 30% of the allocations for teaching assistants. "If you ask faculty if they'd give up a few days of their salary versus giving up a graduate student," Wilkinson said, "I think unanimously they would not hesitate."

Frugoli agreed that there are not a lot of alternative courses of action. "What I don't like is calling it a furlough," she said. "It implies that [the faculty] are not working. Well, they're working; they're just not getting paid."

"I just hope it doesn't happen again," Wilkinson said. "One round of furloughs is one thing. If it has to happen repeatedly, that I think changes the climate. People will start looking to see if there are better situations elsewhere."


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