The University of Wisconsin is -- like all other state agencies -- implementing furloughs for all faculty and staff, to reduce state expenditures: 16 days over the next two calendar years. So far, the plan is to close the university on four especially quiet days, such as the Friday after Thanksgiving, December 31, and the last Friday of Spring Break, and leave it up to departments and colleges to figure out the rest.
Furloughs are unfortunate, and probably not the most efficient way to save money. Administrators are spending huge amounts of time trying to figure out how to implement the policy. It's not Biddy Martin's fault that the Governor has imposed this policy
I'd rather take the 3.065% salary cut and be done with it.
But there are several Monty Pythonesque elements of the whole enterprise, beginning with the pointless rule (again, from the Governor's Office) that staff funded by federal or private grant money must also take furloughs, even though this will save precisely $0 and might even cost the University some money. And let's leave aside the complete stupidity of telling future Nobel Prize winning stem-cell genius James Thomson that he has to stay out of his lab for 16 days.
But it appears that we will actually be prohibited from working on our furlough days (something I learned from an email by a UW law professor Dave Trubek, published by Ann Althouse). There may even be sanctions threatened against those of us who continue to work on our forced absences.
Here's the relevant language, from UW System President Kevin Reilly's June 30 Proposed Furlough Implementation Plan:
6. Employees must be specifically directed not to work any time during which they are scheduled to be on furlough, without the specific authorization of their supervisor or manager. Such work includes being physically present in the work place, work at home, work online, work on the telephone, "working lunches," work on a Blackberry or work on a cell phone. All such unscheduled, unapproved work in furlough weeks is prohibited. Violation of this prohibition may result in discipline.
This raises the furlough issue to an entirely new level of absurdity. I' m not sure which is worse -- the obscure provisions of federal labor law that might require this kind of prohibition, the possibility that we may have to certify that we have not actually worked during our days off, or the prospect that we might face disciplinary action for reading, writing, thinking, or doing any of the other things that attracted us to academia in the first place. Maybe there will be seminars on how we can clear our minds, or not think of an orange, or something.
This may call for some civil disobedience, such as live-blogging reading the American Political Science Review, or running a hierarchical linear model just for the hell of it.
