Furloughs were pitched by UC administrators as an alternative to layoffs - sort of. Employees were threatened with layoffs - or at least more layoffs - if they didn't support and accept the furloughs/ pay cuts. Berkeley Law Dean and Yudof advisor Chris Edley's denunciation of the delay-the-cuts petition said that delay in pay cuts "would create many more layoffs -- because such a huge proportion of UC expenditures are in salaries."

Layoffs are happening anyway: 300 upcoming at UC Berkeley, 800 at UCSD last June, and, in July, the one year advance notice received by the 67 lecturers in the UCLA College of Letters and Sciences who are past their 6th-year review.

Please send more layoff news as you receive it locally, which is where layoff news often stays.

THANKS to commentators for correcting my mistake on the status of the UC lecturers. Please READ the comments, which contain much fuller information about layoffs than I linked to here.

On the use of furlough days, all UCOP had to do was keep quiet. Why couldn't it?

Faculty around the system spent weeks discussing whether 6 or 10 or some other number of their up to 26 days of furlough might be applied to instruction, and Academic Council's August 5th statement on furlough implementation recommended that 6 furlough days be assigned to days of instruction and that up to 10 be allowed. Council's recommendation rests on longstanding faculty obligations to partition their workload among teaching, research and service according to their own professional judgment in formal consultation with their department, the Senate, and immediate administrators (faculty are responsible for "approval of course content and manner of instruction" APM-015). Council's recommendation was also in compliance with APM-005 (via President Robert Sproul in 1935), which states that the planning and committee supervision and reporting of an individual's workload does not violate academic freedom if the plan is "reasonable" and "the plan has come into being through the democratic means of discussion and mutual give and take, within the Faculty, rather than arbitrarily imposed from without."

But then UCOP declared that the number of instructional furlough days would be zero. They would all occur on research and service days, or could be used to make money outside the university via consulting.

I believe this is the first direct intervention by UCOP into faculty teaching decisions since World War II. Please send information to the contrary, if any exists. It rests on the President's new emergency powers (paragraph 2), granted less than six weeks before this use.

We get a fair amount of email, and haven't yet heard a good word about this decision. Many faculty had been opposed to canceling lectures - we try desperately to cram in material and hate to cut even five minutes of class, and we do fret about our alleged unpopularity with taxpayers - but these faculty were still in favor of faculty choice. Other faculty members describe the decision as a challenge to shared governance, as an assault on the mission of public universities, as "authoritarian" and "Stalinist." Note the general tone of the comments on each of these posts. The decision adds the insult of an order about teaching to the injury of pay cuts and budget cuts, and it shows.

The problems go on. The decision is more draconian than that at CSU, explicitly rejects an Academic Senate position about teaching (the heart of faculty authority), and puts PR concerns ahead of faculty's stated preferences and of their professional autonomy. It increases the gap between UCOP and the campuses by building on its summer precedent of overriding formal faculty bodies, unions, and the majority views of those who speak out (the UCI petition for delay and better thinking that attracted 2800 signatures in 5 days, UC Berkeley Professor George Lakoff's letter which received 1000 signatures in the same period, the 2:1 preference for a rethink expressed in a poll on this modest blog). It replaces calls for "university-wide open dialogue" with old-school top-down control. It increases the gap between Berkeley and the other campuses (to its credit, Berkeley used a preexisting calendar reform as a partial furlough workaround -- 6 days converted to teaching duty without lectures -- and backfilled lower-end professorial pay with the help of Senate research funds). It hardens the status gap between the science faculty, who mostly can top-up via extramural grants, and the non-science faculty, who mostly cannot, for it invites the former to engage in outside consulting, and the latter to spend more unpaid time with their students, which it implies that state-paid faculty would, absent a UCOP prohibition, be happy to harm.

None of this fits with the fundamental principles of a university, based on free exchange, collaborative co-governance, dialogical testing of all ideas, full evidence for major claims, and mutual accommodation. So why does UCOP act this way?

Much of the answer is that it is now a business center with little contact with academic activities. For years now, many of UCOP's administrative functions have been duplicated and surpassed on the campuses - technology transfer, capital projects planning, collaborative research support. Even the Education Abroad Program, with its complex systemwide and international infrastructure, had lost much of its enrollment to departmental and campus alternatives. In the absence of a meaningful daily role in the system - and deep knowledge of the campuses - UCOP seems to have become closer to outside political constituencies, particularly the Regents, associated donor circles, and the Governor than it is to the campuses. In the process, it lost the political clout to exert a unifying and balancing influence within the system, and seems also to have lost its intellectual and ethical vision of what ex-President Bob Dynes called "One University." That vision had been egalitarian, oriented towards top-quality education for all, and also towards the highest evolution of each of UC's campuses. But for years campuses have mostly approached UCOP to cut the best deal for themselves, and to placate them in ares like bond funding, state general fund distribution, indirect cost recovery, and legislative relations where UCOP has final say.

UCOP has been sliding for some time towards replacing service with authority (see the UCPB restructuring memo for a detailed discussion). It has also focused on top-level state political and business affairs, with particular loving devotion to the Governor's office. Some of us have long criticized this imbalance. I got more proof of it during a trip to Sacramento with a faculty group in early 2008: several leg staffers complained that UCOP cuts deals with the Governor behind the legislature's back, asks for less than the leg would give it, and was unable to resolve the compensation scandals that had lingered for several years.

We have a new president in UCOP, and yet the biggest surprise is how little has changed. President Yudof's most visible public statements are a defense of executive compensation, his least temperate comment was reserved for a legislator concerned with accountability, and he has been entirely silent on a deeply unpopular Governor Schwarzenegger's inflicting of the largest cuts on California higher education in its modern history.

President Yudof has better graphics and more tweets than this predecessor - 100% more tweets - but the strategy of deference to a destructive executive remains largely the same. So does the disproportionate attention to senior management needs that alienates the legislative majority and increases the chances for public funding cuts.

This is where we get back to the furlough question. The point of the faculty taking some of the furlough on instructional days was not to shortchange our students: we know them, care about them and teach them. The point, as many on this blog, Option 4's page, and elsewhere have observed, was to "make the cuts visible." Instructional furloughs were to be a useful teaching tool. And yet they also implicitly posed a challenge to UCOP, in three ways.

They said, implicitly, "your years of silence on the damage the cuts do has failed."
They said, "we are now going to address the public ourselves, through our own workplace."
They said, "the 'new normal' for state funding your mistakes helped create is not acceptable to us."

UCOP's reply to the people most affected by the state funding cuts that UCOP silence had helped produce - campus classroom teachers and related staff - is now this:

you'll take these cuts in silence too.

UC to UCOP: we can't afford your strategies anymore. We need to try our own.

Dear Henry, Gene, Melvin, David [UCSB's Chancellor, EVC, Dean of Social Sciences, Executive Dean]:

As you know, there has been support on this campus for taking some furlough days during instructional days (and, as I and others argued at the town meeting, a strong argument can be made for taking all furlough days on instructional days). The 8/21 message from Interim UC Provost Lawrence Pitts (pasted in below) appears to be a direct order from UCOP that no furlough days be taken on instructional days. How will our administration respond if/when faculty decide to violate this apparent directive? I won't repeat the arguments for taking furlough days on instructional days, but I will note that this directive seems to me (and to many others) to violate our principles of shared governance, as well as individual campus autonomy.

Hoping for clarification,
Rich Appelbaum

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 constantly, and it vitally informs their teaching. Service assignments that make up a small part of our assessed "merit" (committees, professional offices, etc.) will have to be sandwiched in somewhere. as they always are; for the most part they will continue to be done, as at present, out of sense of duty to the university and the professions. The only fair and reasonable assignment of furlough days would allocate approximately half of them to instructional days, as instruction comprises about half of the expected--and evaluated and compensated--workload of faculty.

It is reassuring to learn that the Academic Council opposed the plan embodied in the Pitts directive. So much for shared governance. Apparently all of the chancellors were consulted in advance of this announcement, according to Senate Chair Mary Croughan's accompanying memo. It is not clear how the individual chancellors stood, or whether they were united or divided in advising on this decision. Nor is it suggested that individual campus senates were consulted.

The Pitts and Croghan memos indicate that the main impetus for requiring that no furlough days be taken on instructional days was the fear of adverse public reaction to inflicting harm on students who have already suffered a string of recent tuition increases. Yet obviously this "harm" would not have been perpetrated by faculty, but rather by the governor, legislature, and regents, who together chose this draconian method of reducing expenditures. On the contrary to their reasoning, one important reason for taking a fair portion of our furloughs on teaching days--a reason already well and repeatedly articulated in faculty town halls and other gatherings across the system and supported by hundreds of faculty--is precisely to make the public aware of the consequences, not only for this year's students but for California higher education in general over the longer term, of the unwise and irresponsible revenue and fiscal policies that the state has too long been pursuing. The UC system is in jeopardy already. Not only are students asked to bear an ever higher portion of instructional and other costs; privatization is underway as more and more of the universities' budgets are coming from external sources. On top of being unable to hire replacement faculty, we can expect even more departures from all of our UC faculties for other jobs as a result of these arbitrary and unreasonable policy decisions.

UC faculties should strenuously object to the Pitts furlough policy. We should be prepared to organize on individual campuses and system-wide to follow the reasonable plans already well advanced around the system to apportion a fair complement of teaching days as furlough days, while making alternate educational experiences available for students. Also, in light of this latest development, faculty should seriously consider organizing in some independent manner in order to have adequate representation. We should communicate our objections to this UCOP policy by individual emails to our chancellors and urge them to explore immediately the extent of possible individual campus autonomy in crafting furlough days policies.

by Mary Furner

The Berkeley EVC's announcement that 3 teaching days per term will be converted to reading days has been posted on Brad de Long's blog. The EVC also states that the recommendation comes from a study group recommendation delivered to him in May, before the current budget crisis, summer-long furlough debate, and recent UCOP decision to ban furloughs on instructional days.

The official Berkeley plan is very similar to a plan circulated at UCSB by the History Department and others to respond to the furlough by converting week 10 on the 10-week quarter system to a reading week. This kind of plan has been prohibited. It appears that Berkeley will offer reduced instructional days, but not the other campuses.

de Long's entry is weirdly oblivious to the furlough issue raging all around him.

The administration at UCI, following UCOP's lead, has been driving a wedge between faculty and students-staff since this whole budget crisis began. Unfortunately, according to Mary Croughan's response to the Pitt memo, the faculty seems to stand, like the proverbial cheese -- completely alone.

When the furloughs were first implemented, I remember talk that this was not going to be a salary cut, because we wouldn't be asked to do more work for less pay, we would, as a faculty be asked to work less for less, like the staffers at the DMV and the nurses of the state public health offices. If you have visited a state office recently, you can tell that the employees are overworked the lines are long, and in the immortal words of one UC Chancellor, workers are "spending more time with their families."

There will no doubt, be a great deal of comment on the furlough memo, but let me state first and foremost, that there is a class of assistant professor in the humanities, arts and social sciences who is going to be hit hardest and whose voices will not be heard, especially by the fictional "public" whose resentment of the professorial class is being inflamed by our own administration's anxiety about the "image" problem.

There are families at UCI whose sole breadwinner is an assistant professor making 62K a year. With a furlough, this prof will be making less than 60K a year. Now I know that no one is going to cry for us -- yet -- but when you consider that this person has spent eight years in Ph.D. training, sacrificing a bigger pay check for some modicum of job security and employment stability, you know that the social contract of academic employment for humanities, social sciences and arts professors has for all intents and purposes been broken. Asking a med school prof making six figures for a bit sacrifice is very different from asking an assistant professor to do so. But our Chancellor is asking for unity at this time, threatening to characterize voices of dissent as coming from the unfaithful and the traitorous. But lest anyone be mistaken, the contract was broken not by the faculty, but by state legislators, and University administrators, I name you Bob Dynes for signing away our future with Schwarzenegger. The "people" and the "public" are being used as a bludgeon...by the pseudopopulist administrative class.

An untenured professor may indeed want to spend more time with his/her family, but at what cost to the family budget?

While I was at the University of Minnesota and here at UCI, there was much hand-wringing about the lack of minority students in the Ph.d. pipeline. There are barely any working class students in the pipelines either. With the massive cuts that threaten the integrity of our very mission, I wonder what the administration will do to justify its destructive attitude toward the alleged mission of a public university and its constituents and employees. They're people too....

The administration often acts as if the faculty is a pr liability, rather than its most critical asset.

Commentary shall be forthcoming.

CHANCELLORS
ACADEMIC COUNCIL CHAIR CROUGHAN

Colleagues:

After speaking at length with all of you and a number of other people with an interest in the issue, we have decided that faculty furlough days will not occur on instructional days (days for which a faculty member is scheduled to give lectures, lead classes or workshops, have scheduled office hours, or have other scheduled face-to-face responsibilities for students).

The furloughs that have been necessitated by the severe University underfunding by the State are causing significant problems for faculty who have restrictions on research and service as well as increased teaching workloads; employees who have fewer days to do their work and sometimes fewer colleagues to help them; administrators who have reduced staff and budgets to accomplish their complex tasks; on top of lower salaries for everyone. Students too will suffer the effects of the underfunding--larger and fewer classes, and increased fees, as were imposed for this fall instruction period, among other burdens. In such difficult times, I believe
that we must do everything we can to ensure that the students continue to receive all of their instruction. 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 mission. 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.

We understand that the furlough plan will cause hardships for the entire University family. As such, the President and the Regents are committed to do everything possible to ensure that the plan ends after 12 months.

We will continue to work closely with faculty, students, staff and administrators to find the most efficient and thoughtful way to address the problems that will arise this year. You have my pledge that we will make the University as effective and productive as we can under the current budget problems, after which we will help you all plan for better times ahead.

Best wishes,


Lawrence H. Pitts
Interim Provost and Executive Vice President
Academic Affairs

cc: President Yudof
Executive Vice President Lapp
Senior Vice President Dooley
Vice President Lenz
Vice Provost Greenstein
Interim Executive Director Price

This memo was distributed to some Senate committee chairs with the following explanation from Senate Chair Mary Croughan

Dear Council Colleagues



I have received word from Provost Pitts regarding the decision as to whether furloughs can affect instructional days. As you will see below (and attached), the decision was made to not have faculty furlough days take place on instructional days (days for which a faculty member is scheduled to give lectures, lead classes or workshops, have scheduled office hours, or have other scheduled face-to-face responsibilities for students).

This decision was made after Provost Pitts and others developed a proposal on the pros and cons of having furlough days taken on instructional days. I want to take this opportunity to thank Helen Henry, Steve Plaxe, and Bob Powell for their extraordinary work on the proposal; they ensured that the proposal maintained the sentiments expressed at Council. The proposal was then discussed with the EVCs, Chancellors, State Government Relations, and Public Affairs. With the exception of our Council statement endorsing the concept that furloughs should affect instructional days, nearly all other groups expressed very strong concerns that the public would perceive that the students were receiving less education following several years of fee increases and anticipated additional increases. The "optics" with the public and legislature regarding potential future fee increases proved a driving factor in the decision to not have furloughs taken on instructional days.

I know that many of you have been awaiting this document; I'm sorry not to be bringing you news in line with Council's recommendation. But the President and Provost look forward to discussing their decision with those of you present at the September Council meeting.

All the best,

Mary

One of the big midsummer issues is what to do with the furloughs. A large majority of the email I've received advocates "making the cuts visible" by putting furloughs on teaching days. Many writers report some faculty opposition, mostly invoking fear of a public backlash that will hurt the university even more than it already has been.

The systemwide Academic Senate has now posted the recommendations for furlough implementation that emerged from the July 29th Academic Council meeting. Their two key statements:

• "While Council members acknowledge that students are already being negatively impacted through increased fees, staff reductions, and loss of services on furlough days, the Academic Council unanimously supported the concept that furloughs should affect instructional days."
• "following a lengthy debate, the Academic Council makes the following request and recommendation: (1) that the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs institute a systemwide standard of six furlough days assigned to days of instruction over the nine month academic calendar; and (2) that he approve campus requests for changes to their academic calendars that place furloughs on specified instructional days for up to ten days."

I read this to mean that 6 instructional furlough days would be the systemwide floor, with some campuses going as high as 10. This sets a range of 2-3 days per quarter of instruction canceled because of furloughs. The administrative proposals I've seen all stick with six in total. However, proposals from some departments, councils of chairs, and other groups on several campuses have called for stronger medicine. One proposal was to cancel all three "dead weeks" at the end of each of the year's three quarters, meaning all of a faculty member's 14 furlough days (if on a pre-cut salary of $90,000 or up) would fall on those days.

Conflicting views of furloughs stem partially from two different audiences for this visibility. One is students and their parents, and here the goal is to clue Californians in to the fact that you can't keep expecting the same or better for UC while letting the state pay less and less. The other audience is UCOP and the Regents, who seemed to take their faculty and staff for granted and put up no obvious fight for them.

The visible furloughs are thus likely to be deployed for two overlapping but distinct projects: public education (for students and parents), and a partial strike (for the President and the Regents).

The work action is important for putting "shared" back into "shared governance," and for encouraging UCOP to fight harder for UC. Many faculty felt betrayed by UCOP's actions and the Regents lopsided support (see Option 4 spokesperson Lisa Hajjar's forceful expression of this point). As it is, UCOP assumes on the basis of past experience that the faculty will grumblingly comply even with cuts as disastrous as 25%, and has no urgent reason to risk anything to fight for their interests in proper salaries, teaching conditions, research time, etc. My experience convinced me that in the abstract UCOP wants to do the right thing, but is timid if not intimidated, has no strong vision of its own, and is buffeted by the state's many contradictory pressures. Thus it won't respond to the faculty until their pressure on UCOP is on the same scale as that of others in the state, starting with the governor.

The public education side is even more important. In spite of repeated requests from me and many other systemwide Senate leaders past and present that UCOP advocate long and hard for correct levels of public funding, they have never done this. Can faculty and staff step in and do a campaign on their own? The success of the visible furloughs will depend on embedding canceled classes in an explanatory context that describes the operating cuts, their impact on UC education, and a vision of public education that explains the direct link between proper funding and a better future for our students and the state. The campaign should be in place before the first class is canceled.

Jeffrey Bergamini of UC Davis has developed a UC pay search tool. One finding is that the furlough's pay reductions yield around $600 million, not the $184.1 million described on p 5 of Regents's J2. Charles Schwartz first raised the issue in mid-June of the gap between stated and projected furlough revenues. If there is a simple explanation for this, UCOP has not given it. It has not in fact addressed the question at all.

Bergamini also suggests that the lower amount of savings could come from the upper brackets.

Why aren't CFA as well as the U.C. faculty and staff and all other state workers being asked to balance the State's budget difficulties on their backs making a huge stink about the fact that they are essentially being given the equivalent of an additional 9.5 to 19.5% minimum tax hike (not a paycut) while the remainder of the citizens, including those who could most afford it--the people making $250,000 or more, are being asked to contribute NOTHING to resolve the State's budget crisis because the governor wants to look as if he has refused to raise taxes !! ?? Fundamentally. this kind of illegal additional tax on only some of the State's citizens should be found illegal by the State Attorney General! What if we all wrote the Attorney General regarding this?

Professor Lynda Koolish

UCSC's Senate Executive Committee (SEC) has written a memo on Furlough Plan Implementation. It identifies 10 "common" furlough days to be taken during the academic year. Noing that President Yudof has delegated furlough implementation to the campuses, Santa Cruz's SEC states that,

we endorse highly visible campus closure during periods of instruction to achieve significant portions of our allocated furloughs as both recognition of our current fiscal emergency, and as the most fiscally responsible means for achieving cost savings to the campus.

There are currently debates among faculty on most campuses about how the furloughs might best be implemented, and I will post more news on this as I receive it.

2010

• The Case of the Invisible Furlough (Roxie's World 2/22/10)
• Gov Ordered to Halt Furloughs (LAT 1/1/10)

2009

• UCSD's "Hard" Closure (Christopher Newfield 12/9/09)
• How Will You Use Your Furlough Days? (UC Newsroom 10/19/09)
• Furloughs save less than expected, study says (SF Gate 10/16/09)
• The High Cost of Furloughs (UCB Labor Research 10/09)
• UC Davis Furlough Information (UCD Dateline 9/18/09)
• UCOP Salary Top-Up Program for Grant Getters (UCI EVC 9/15/09)
• UCOP Says Unit 18 Lecturers will not participate in furloughs (Changing Universities 9/8/09)
• Furloughs to Close R.I. State Government (WSJ 9/2/09)
• Furloughs Pushing State Workers Into Poverty (LAT 8/30/09)
• UC Davis Furlough and Budget Reductions (UCD Dateline 8/28/09)
• UCSB Senate Response to Pitts Furlough Memo (Joel Michaelsen 8/28/09)
• UCLA Furlough News and Discussion (UCLA Today 8/27/09)
• UCSD Furlough Policy (UCSD 8/25/09)
• UCSB Prof Calls For Strong Response to UCOP Furlough Ruling (Remaking 8/25/09)
• UC Berkeley Mitigations in the Furlough Program (George Breslauer 8/24/09)
• UC Provost Pitts Memo Banning Furloughs on Instructional Days (Remaking 8/23/09)
• UC Berkeley Furlough News (UCB 8/20/09)
• CSU Long Beach Furlough Q & A (CSU LB 8/11/09)
• UCSD Administration Furlough Statement (UCSD 8/5/09)
• Systemwide Academic Senate Statement on Furlough Implementation (UC Senate 8/5/09)
• UC Davis Senate Response to Pitts Furlough Memo (UCD 8/1/09)
• UCSC Faculty Association: Furloughs Must Be Negotiated (Shelly Errington 7/31/09)
• Irvine Division of Senate on Furlough Implementation (Mary Croughan 7/28/09)