15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut #15
Slaying the Dragons of Opportunity

Monday, May 3, 2010

Liberia c. 2002

[The latest addition to the Unit for Criticism's "15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Paycut" series on higher education is by George Gollin, professor of physics, writing on the St. Regis University diploma mill and the social obligations of academics. ]

"Slaying the Dragons of Opportunity"

Written by George Gollin (Physics)

The blood in the fields beyond the university makes me think about the struggle between good and evil, and my obligations.

I am a professor at a fine university, budget crisis notwithstanding, with an intact system of tenure. I am to be judged by my scholarship and teaching, but also my success at mitigating problems of community and society. I am expected to think deeply and carefully, to write clearly and honestly. It is a fortunate and protected position: I should be safe to speak truthfully about matters that are important.

There is a lot to say. It is wrong to tolerate human trafficking when evidence exists that should lead to arrests. It is wrong to ignore the sale of medical degrees to untrained customers. It is wrong to stand by while the importance of accessible higher education is devalued. It is wrong to value the institutional status quo above the safety of children. There is more, of course.

More than forty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. paraphrased an abolitionist minister of the nineteenth century to say “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” This is a profoundly optimistic statement, and one which I no longer believe to be true. I had felt that the dynamics of civil society were sufficiently informed by a collective sense of fairness and justice that the cultural pressures influencing our choices would ultimately point us in a good direction. The democratization of Eastern Europe, the changes in Northern Ireland, and the end of apartheid in South Africa were among the great triumphs of the last century which seemed to confirm this. Intractable conflicts could melt away. Over time we would move towards better schools and better healthcare, full employment, and regulatory protections that would keep the wolves at a distance. Public education, that great engine for social and economic progress, would receive adequate support.

But, to quote Hunter S. Thompson, there is too much “bad craziness” loose in the world. I do not think we can find our way back to a gentle equilibrium without challenging the evils that coil and flex below the disrupted surface of our civilization. A commander in chief in the throes of an oedipal fugue uses fabricated data to justify an invasion. The Supreme Court rules that commercial associations have the same right to free expression as flesh-and-blood human beings so that corporations can buy elections as if they were commodities. The principal virtue of a candidate for national office is experience at peeling the skins off large herbivores. Politicians curry favor with lunatics who advocate gun violence against elected officials. We abide this insanity.

The harsh consequences of inaction are fractal in their absence of scale. There is the collateral damage of shattered lives of people we know. One of my students deals with his younger brother’s death in a helicopter shoot-down over Fallujah, and his family’s fury at the “shit happens”-type response from the reptilian Donald Rumsfeld. Another learns of his uncle’s murder in the mass killings of Iraqi medical doctors by a violent faction intent on destroying the country’s health care infrastructure, but protected from prosecution thanks to their alignment with U.S. interests. There is more: we see the wreckage of cities crushed by the closure of mismanaged factories. Since the Holocaust there has been a succession of genocides: in Cambodia, Rwanda, and now in the Sudan.

We have a moral obligation to act, to buck the ugly trends, to bend the arc of history towards justice. Surprisingly, I have come to believe there is a way to do this, to deflect the trajectory of things in a good direction. In part it is a matter of paying attention.

Antonio Gramsci, the twentieth-century Italian political philosopher, described the means to effect social transformation as beginning with a “war of position” in which the seeds of change—new ideas—are injected into the public discourse. Over time, civil society will become less hostile to them so that a well-timed push, a “war of maneuver” in Gramsci’s terms, can move us off the status quo.

I suspect we are presented with opportunities when circumstances ripen and transformation becomes possible more often than we realize. One, which might have hastened the arrival of affordable healthcare in the United States if it had been recognized as such, was carried by the sad events surrounding Terri Schiavo. She had suffered extensive brain damage in 1990 and was maintained in a vegetative state for a number of years. When her husband tried to have her feeding tube removed in 2005, a horrifying legal brawl ensued which was hijacked for political gain by members of the United States Congress. Suddenly, legislators who had never supported the provision of even the most basic of services for the disadvantaged were pretending to care about the welfare of other humans. Their hypocrisy left them exposed. A well-prepared cohort of legislators could have introduced a “Comprehensive Quality of American Life Act” to address the important issues of healthcare, education in underprivileged communities, and so forth. It might have opened a national discussion that could have yielded comprehensive healthcare during the previous administration. At minimum, elected representatives who had briefly pretended to care about the public interest could have been asked why they had become so cold-hearted when they refused to support the initiative.

I bring a physicist’s vocabulary to this. Gramsci’s mechanism relies on a complex system’s “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” which you know as “the butterfly effect.” His wars of position and maneuver are what we call the “chaotic control” of a nonlinear system. With proper preparation, or a lucky alignment of events, a small nudge at just the right time can make a large difference in the future state of the world. The hard part is finding the butterfly and recognizing when it should move its wings.

Sometimes it can be made to work. In 2003 I learned of an awful thing called “St. Regis University,” a diploma mill run by a gang of high school dropouts in eastern Washington state. In spite of their lack of formal education, they had come to control significant portions of Liberia’s Ministry of Education and diplomatic corps, and were allowed to pretend that they ran a cluster of legitimate universities in Monrovia, Liberia. Even before the end of the country’s horrific civil war, at a time when the infant mortality rate was nearly 15%, these hoodlums were selling thousands of bogus degrees in medicine, engineering, and education each year, mostly to Americans, all the while earning millions of dollars at it. Surely their criminal activities were interfering with Liberia’s ability to rebuild after the civil war, as well as injecting unqualified individuals into positions of responsibility in the United States.

I wrote a long analysis of their business in hopes of triggering an investigation by the state of Washington. But Attorney General Gregoire, in the middle of a gubernatorial campaign that was going badly, buried my report. Two months later an official in Georgia wrote to Gregoire after a St. Regis salesmen sold degrees to public school teachers who received raises. Again, nothing happened. Then an Indianapolis television reporter named Sandra Chapman ambushed two St. Regis salesmen at a Chrysler plant. They had just sold $217,000 in bogus degrees to workers who were going to lose their jobs when the plant closed in a year. Chapman interviewed Jeff Weber, an Indiana official who thought he was powerless to act since he believed St. Regis was in Liberia. She also interviewed me.

That was the initial setup, the rough equivalent of Gramsci’s war of position.

I contacted Weber to show him proof that St. Regis was run from Washington state and suggested he write to the Attorney General. He sent her a strong letter that used the word “prosecute,” and gave me a copy on the sly.

I waited six weeks. It appeared that Gregoire was ignoring Weber’s letter so I sent it to a print reporter in Spokane who published a story three days later. He wrote that “Gregoire, who wants to be Washington's next governor, said through a spokeswoman that she’s aware of the issue [St. Regis] but wouldn’t say why a consumer protection action hasn't been initiated or if one is forthcoming” (Bill Morlin, Spokane Spokesman Review, August 14, 2004). One of my higher education friends in Oregon passed word to Gregoire that 60 Minutes was doing a diploma mill story and that CBS might stop by to ask about St. Regis. In reality the Oregon colleague had no idea if 60 Minutes was planning to interview the Attorney General.

It was like playground basketball: pass, pick, feint, shoot. We had suddenly shown gubernatorial candidate Gregoire why she had a stake in flattening St. Regis. My report finally made its way to Spokane, where an Assistant Attorney General opened an investigation that blossomed into an eight-agency federal criminal prosecution. That was our “war of maneuver,” in which we encouraged those in positions of responsibility to move in particular directions by taking advantage of a fortunate alignment of circumstances.

It worked. A few years later eight people pleaded guilty to various felonies. Most went to prison. The St. Regis prosecution triggered new legislation and enforcement policy in Alabama, Idaho, New Jersey, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming. The Federal Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 included material about diploma mills, driven by the St. Regis case. And more comprehensive legislation was introduced in the House of Representatives a few months ago.

That was our successful “war of position.” Christine Gregoire did win the 2004 election to became Governor of Washington, but by the slimmest margin of 125 votes, and only after two recounts.

Perhaps some observant citizen will recognize a harmonic convergence that opens an opportunity for transformation, that could move us from our Illinois status quo of corrupt politicians, flawed narratives resistant to change, and short-sighted planning that mortgages our future for the baubles of power and position. It is important that we be receptive to the possibility.

Doing good is part of my—our, if you are also a professor at this university— job description. It is required of us. Our promotions and tenure decisions are to include a reckoning along this dimension. We have an obligation to watch for opportunity, to work the fluctuations of micro-history, sometimes in opposition to dark forces.

When circumstance hands us a sword, we should rise to slay the dragon before us.
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15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut #14a
Ratemyadministrators.com

Sunday, April 11, 2010

posted under 15 Ways , budget crisis , Campus Faculty Association , furloughs , Gille , Global Campus , neoliberalism , University of Illinois by Unit for Criticism

[The latest additions to the Unit for Criticism's "15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Paycut" series on higher education are by Zsuzsa Gille, associate professor of sociology, writing on university administration from the perspective of neoliberalism, and James Treat, associate professor of religion, waxing lyrical (below)]

"Ratemyadministrators.com or, Finding a point of intervention in the neoliberal catch-22"

Written by Zsuzsa Gille (Sociology)

As we continue expressing our critique of how the University of Illinois deals with its fiscal crisis, it is important to see this moment as part of a longer and larger project. I am no expert in educational policies; I am a sociologist who studies globalization and neoliberalism, and it is that vantage point which I recommend for our consideration.

There are two key parts to the neoliberal agenda which have been implemented in U.S. public education. Both are self-generating, so I will call them vicious circle #1 and #2.

Vicious circle #1: The making of the irrelevant faculty class.

We have seen an intensificaton and acceleration of what Mario Tronti calls the withdrawal of capital from the class relationship.

Since the late 1980s a rapidly increasing portion of profit has come to derive not from actual production of useful commodities but from speculative ventures like the credit devices responsible for the current global financial crisis. In a similar move, our university has also started to seek out non-productive sources of profit, such as real estate development and the idea of hosting private corporations in its research park.

New technologies make possible the fast turnover of global finance capital as well as the “deskilling” of labor, so that employees in any given firm become more easily replaceable. In academia, we have seen the spread of “labor-saving” technologies, such as online (scantron-like) assessments, digital libraries, and PowerPoint presentations. I myself have embraced some of these technologies because they saved time I could dedicate to research.

But since these technologies enable the further growth of class size, they quickly transition from a “how-to” technique for saving time, to a “have-to” device for coping with an expanded workload. Increasingly their tendency is to justify a view of teaching as simply the operation of technologies: the plugging-in of existing digital and online platforms, templates and data-bases. The Global Campus initiative was the logical outcome of these technologies, which would have employed select faculty to develop standardized courses that anyone with some college education could then use—that is, sell—anywhere and at any time. Under current social conditions, online education of the kind now pursued by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, for example, ends up, no matter how noble its intentions, making faculty labor ever more irrelevant for the generation of academic revenues.

Vicious circle #2: Neoliberalism as cause and as solution to the present crisis.

The other trend has been the intentional under-development and de-funding of the public sector, resulting in colossal disasters, human tragedy, and economic crisis, to which, ironically, further privatization then becomes the only logical solution.

Think of Hurricane Katrina, the gravity of which was exacerbated by reduction of public funding for the maintenance of levees and emergency services. Think of the collapsed bridges, roads, and electric grids in different parts of the country resulting from the underfunding of public infrastructure. And think of the recent fiscal crisis, which in part resulted from of the dismantling of the regulatory apparatus for Wall Street.

While many academics conclude from these debacles that the public sector needs more funding, Republicans, and too often Democrats as well, conclude that it is best to give up on the public sector altogether and either eliminate or contract out an increasing number of state services and duties. Through this ingenious trick, the neoliberal reforms that cause these crises also become the solution to it. The University of Illinois’ current economic problems have been caused by public de-funding, but also by the channeling of dwindling funds to private entrepreneurial projects and to administrators who earn ever higher salaries. Although expanding administration, privatization and entrepreneurialism have demonstrably caused financial problems—like the creation of Global Campus–we are now expected to seek out more of the same to redress our crisis.

One way in which our administrators have gone about realizing this dubious agenda is by implementing an increasing set of quantitative measures aimed to discipline faculty labor. I believe it was in the 1990s that administrators started demanding that departments increase their rankings on a series of indexes, such as the students/FTE or majors/FTE ratios.

More recently, they started measuring not only departmental but also individual faculty performance, not by the quality of that faculty member’s teaching or research, but by the money the university spends on student per faculty. Such assessment calculates the “worth” of a faculty member by measuring his/her cost-effectiveness in producing instructional units. While public access to this data is partial at best, my own observations suggest that actual scoring has little effect on either the number of lines given to a department or a faculty member’s salary. Ironically, then, these metrics, while yielding a desired disciplinary effect, do not make the university’s economic foundation any sounder—even by the dubious calculus defines sound economy as the efficient production of instructional units.

What these metrics did was to legitimate administrative decisions by a) making them look scientific, and b) making low-performing units and faculty accept the view of themselves as unworthy—further eroding their ability to mobilize against inequality, attacks on academic freedom, and other grievances. These indexes also pit departments against departments, schools against schools, thus preventing faculty solidarity from developing.

Where does that leave us in terms of our tasks? While I think we must work at different scales, from federal through state to local—and the Campus Faculty Association is certainly doing the latter two, while AAUP is active at the federal level as well—one so-far neglected entry-point into both vicious circles I identified above is that of our lower-level administration: provosts, associate provosts, college deans, associate deans, and, yes, even department heads.

I recommend that faculty get together (perhaps on some future furlough day?) to create a webpage and scoring device on the analogy of the popular student website, ratemyprofessors.com. With too few exceptions, administrators at these levels have not only devised and imposed the above-mentioned metrics but have also used them to attest to their marketability in the ever more lucrative academic administrator job market. How many administrators have we lost just in the last three years who after wreaking havoc in several units were catapulted into even higher positions at other colleges exactly because they could boast such “success”?

If we created an alternative set of indices for administrators we could provide not only a more balanced evaluation of their performance but also turn the Panopticon back on them: let them fear us as much as they fear the people who appointed them. Let us then share their scoring with students, their parents, and the electorate. This is one way in which we can stop collaborating in their agenda of making faculty labor ever more irrelevant.

What are the metrics we should use for evaluating our mid-level administrations? How about the number of low-income students admitted, retained, and/or funded; the number of faculty positions created and retained? How about evaluating their effectiveness in keeping a high ratio of faculty to students or of keeping administrative salaries comparable to those of faculty?

No doubt, we need more creativity here. And here’s the cream of this pudding: while we are engaging in this creative politics we are also building solidarity and, dare I say, class culture without which, according to E.P. Thompson, there is no class politics, and certainly no viable faculty union.

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15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut #14b
"'Fur-lough, Sweet Chariot': An Academic Work Song"

Saturday, April 10, 2010

posted under 15 Ways , furloughs , James Treat , University of Illinois by Unit for Criticism

Jacobia Hotel, William H. Johnson, 1930

[In the next in our "15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut" series, James Treat, associate professor in Religion, offers a new variation on an old tune.]

"Fur-lough, Sweet Chariot": An Academic Work Song
(sung call-and-response, to the tune of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot")

Written by James Treat (Religion)

Chorus:
Fur-lough, sweet chariot
Coming for to send me home,
Fur-lough, sweet chariot,
Coming for to send me home.

I looked over Swanlund, and what did I see
Coming for to send me home?
A band of administrators coming after me,
Coming for to send me home.

Chorus

Sometimes I'm up, and sometimes I'm down,
(Coming for to send me home)
But still my soul feels tenure bound.
(Coming for to send me home)

Chorus

The saddest day that I can say,
(Coming for to send me home)
When Springfield swept my funds away.
(Coming for to send me home)

Chorus

If I get there before you do,
(Coming for to send me home)
I'll cut a check and pull you through.
(Coming for to send me home)

Chorus

If you get there before I do,
(Coming for to send me home)
Tell all my friends I'm furloughed too.
(Coming for to send me home)

Chorus

Swing Low Sweet Chariot, William H. Johnson, 1939

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15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut #12
"Teach Your Children Well"

Monday, March 22, 2010

posted under 15 Ways , budget crisis , Clancy , furloughs , University of Illinois by Unit for Criticism

[In the next in our "15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut" series, Kate Clancy, assistant professor in Anthropology, considers work in higher education from the perspective of parenting.]

"Teach Your Children Well"

Written by Kate Clancy (Anthropology)

My husband and I are both assistant professors and scientists. We both have laboratories, mentor a large number of students, and need to be in the office all the time. We have a beautiful daughter who is about to turn two, and have Monday through Friday full time daycare. In addition to the forty-five hours of work we get out of childcare, we trade off on Sundays (I work mornings, he works afternoons) and we work most nights once our daughter is asleep.

Our lives aren’t that flexible. We work all the time. Despite this, I am quite happy with my job – I feel free to pursue any research I find interesting; I teach bright students who, for the most part, are willing and eager to go along with all of my wacky ideas about active, democratic learning. I feel well supported by colleagues in my department, and in organizing for the Campus Faculty Association I have met a whole new set of wonderful peers and mentors across the university.

Recently a writer for a local website for mothers interviewed me, wanting my take on the furloughs. When the writer and I spoke by phone, I learned the angle she wanted the story to take: she saw the furlough as an opportunity any mom would jump at, as a way to spend more time with her kids. She wanted to know what my daughter and I would be doing together.

Did I miss the part where I could (and would) furlough my day care provider? Because we all know we don’t get that money back. Listen, I love my daughter and I have dropped every hobby I once had so I could maximize my time with her. But what are we teaching our kids if a furlough day turns into a field trip? I don’t want to teach my daughter that when my employer docks my pay despite excellent performance, that I should paste on a smile and head to the zoo (or worse, that I should work invisibly and without pay). That means I am taking my furlough in a way that maximizes, not minimizes impact. I am not going to be another working parent whose work life balance is invisible or disingenuous.

There is something I want both my daughter and my colleagues to learn, and that is to fight. This job encourages passivity. We all feel so lucky, after years of apprenticeship, to be one of those select few to have “made it” to the Holy Grail tenure-line job. We wonder how we got here, whether we are impostors after all, whether our colleagues will find out about us in classroom observations, grant proposals, or our tenure review. Before the relative privilege of a tenure-track faculty position comes years of huge risk with no promise of a financially or professionally secure life. And so we wait for the next moment, the next year, the next promotion, to speak up or stand up. We decide, in our offices, eating our lunches at our desks alone, that we’re doing okay and can just ride this crisis out. We forget that operating in isolation, while comfortable, is not actually scholarly. In an age of interdisciplinary scholarship, staying out of this mess will produce lower quality work than building relationships with colleagues and facing it.

I want my daughter to be a giant pain in the ass. I want her to know her worth. I want to teach her that when you stand up for yourself and get involved in local issues, that the effects on your psyche are permanent and that the effects on your local environment are long-ranging and long-lasting. My daughter watches my face for every emotion; she imitates my behavior and gauges my reaction to the world around us. If I slink away and take my pay cut and hide in my darkened office working on my furlough days, my daughter will learn passivity. If I stick around, get my colleagues to join the union, if I pass on these stories to her the way my dad passed on his about working with Vietnamese refugees, or the times my mother told me about how she stood up to her parents’ racism, I will be providing examples of what it means to stand up in conditions of uncertainty and risk. And I will show her it is possible to be relaxed while defying forces of injustice, and that even if they do their worst, everything will have been all right. I am a better scholar, mentor, teacher and parent when I help to make this fight public.

TA lines and contingent faculty are being cut despite their enormously important contributions to this campus; department budgets are slashed; student fees are on the rise; and I have a feeling tuition waivers for employees’ kids will be gone soon too. But this job and this life, the idea of a university that provides stable jobs and a quality education for the people of Illinois, for this, we must make time.

We have two of a total of four common furlough days left. On February 15th we met for a teach-in and on March 4th we joined campuses all over the country in solidarity. On the next common furlough day, April 6th, we will meet to organize this campus, and on April 21st to storm Springfield. So, two more days when I will not work, two more days that my daughter will be in childcare, two more days I will devote to the work we need to do to restructure this university.

The zoo will wait, though my heart aches to say it, because this fight helps to secure a good life for my daughter. This is the story I will pass on to her one day, because this is the life I want to model for her.

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15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut #8
"Against Voluntary Servitude"

Monday, February 22, 2010

posted under 15 Ways , budget crisis , furloughs , University of Illinois , Valente , voluntary pay cut by Unit for Criticism

[The next in our "15 Ways" series on the condition of higher education offers a reflection on the choice between furloughs and voluntary pay reductions.]

Written by Joseph Valente (English)

On January 20, our Interim Chancellor, Robert Easter, sent us all a message: “we are pleased to be able to offer... to our faculty and academic professionals... a voluntary and temporary salary reduction in lieu of a furlough if they so wish.”

That’s right, they were “pleased to offer” us hell or high water as a consumer choice. Those who acted quickly, signing up by February 8, were offered the “choice” to bypass the mess, hassle and indignity of being furloughed by simply submitting to the no-fuss option of voluntary servitude! Who could refuse a deal like that? And aren’t we all grateful for an administration benevolent enough to permit us such license?

Seriously, given the overeducated, hyper-credentialed audience he was addressing, you might think Bob Easter would be especially careful about adding gross insult to our collective intelligence to the unwarranted injury done our pocketbook. But perhaps that collective intelligence itself is overrated. According to Interim Vice-Provost Richard Wheeler's remarks in the Champaign News Gazette (1/21/10), people were approaching him with the entreaty, “We’re willing to give up the pay [as if they had a choice] because that’s necessary, but please don’t make us stop working.”

Now setting aside the nauseatingly craven identification it expresses with a currently abusive institution, this sentiment is just plain wrong on a number of different levels.

And so even though the Illinois readers of this blog will have already made their choice between hell and high water, I will trouble these readers to hear me out on why furloughs—much though I hate them—are a superior option to “voluntary” pay cuts.

1. The first problem with the sentiment described in the News Gazette is that it assumes the necessity of the pay cuts in the present financial crisis. But the amount saved by docking our pay amounts to less than 4 percent of the money the state legislature is illegally withholding from the university budget. Accordingly, the furloughs are unavailing in themselves and the savings they produce could be greatly exceeded by a combination of other measures, including a moratorium on all building projects and a corresponding abrogation of current contracts for developers, a moratorium on social and professional receptions, meals and other entertainments, a slashing of the athletic budget, especially for the many sports that do not pay for themselves, a temporary increase of student fees and tuition, a significant hike in parking fees and a restriction of all administrative supplements to the period of actual administrative service. If the state truly lacks the wherewithal to meet its legal obligations, it might consider lifting sales taxes, income taxes, user fees for highways, state parks, etc. In sum, the furloughs are not necessary, they are elective, a target of state and administrative opportunity made all the juicier by the soft-headed attitude of those employees eager, by Wheeler’s account, to work for nothing.

2. The sentiment assumes that voluntary servitude is a boon to the university (Easter claimed it indicated great devotion). But as Faculty Senate Executive Committee Chair Joyce Tolliver has observed (Champaign News-Gazette, 1/21/10), the damage to our educational mission wrought by all such draconian reductions to the budget are real, inescapable and long-lasting. All a voluntary pay cut accomplishes is to conceal the damage, so far as possible, from the eyes of the legislators who have inflicted the damage by withholding the monies owed the university on an ongoing basis. Such concealment can only make it all the more likely that they will continue to inflict the damage, by the same means, and in ever greater magnitude.

Moreover acceding to the notion of the “voluntary” pay cut also helps to dissimulate the entirely coercive nature of the injury done to the employees themselves. You get “cut” either way. Instead of making visible the malfeasance of the state government and the profound gutlessness of the university administration in confronting it, submission to voluntary servitude makes clear just how little professional self-respect the gratefully self-indentured possess. If one holds oneself and one’s office in so little esteem as to suffer willingly the outright theft of one’s proper remuneration by one’s employer, why in the world should one’s students appraise rightly or take seriously the worth of our joint enterprise? Certain Unit Heads have exhorted the faculty to “maintain the integrity of the classroom” by not cancelling sessions, but should you embrace being treated like an amateur, or worse a chump, as these officers recommend, you will only succeed in showing your classroom that you hold your own professional integrity very cheap indeed.

3. The sentiment assumes the pay cuts and furloughs are temporary, a one-off in the continuing devaluation of higher education in the state of Illinois. In papering over the effects of the legislators’ intellectual vandalism, those submitting to peonage only encourage the administration to institute more furloughs in future, “pleased,” as they will undoubtedly be, “to offer a voluntary and temporary pay cut” as an alternative. Those voluntary martyrs to state mismanagement are, in other words, encouraging Springfield to subject their colleagues, all of us, to further salary reductions, further hardship, next year, at which point the same acquiescence in the “voluntary pay cut” option will help to ease the crafting of a permanent furlough policy (I note that the University of Maryland is facing the possibility of a third year of furloughs). With this in mind, the sentiment recently expressed by Professor Burbules that University employees have the right to decide for themselves on either option (News Gazette 1/21/10), without being harassed, is entirely wrongheaded. While faculty have the legal right to choose either course, obviously, I have the moral right, and I am right, to denounce their choice thusly: in making it easier for the powers that be to continue the practice of pilfering our pay and corroding our work conditions, anyone who elects the voluntary pay cut is acting as the moral equivalent of a scab.

4. The sentiment assumes the virtue of being a “good citizen” is somehow divorced from the nature of the state being served. If you regularly profess the necessity of opposing unjust power and practice, why would you erase the lesson by complying with and endorsing, in full view of your students, this patent injustice. If you teach students to speak truth to power, why would you obviate that lesson by cooperating in the lies of the furlough system? Avoid the performative contradiction of rationalizing by your “voluntary” appearance in the classroom the sort of mendacity you speak of resisting in the classroom.

For all the reasons I have given, the way to take your furlough in the best interest of the university, the students who would emulate you, political principle, your families, and your own professional dignity is to foreground the damage and disruption furloughs can cause in the hope of preventing their future occurrence.

So don’t just take your furlough days. Take them on the days you teach. Mark your syllabi “Class Furloughed,” not just to give fair notice for the cancellation, but to underline the reason. Let your students, their parents, and the taxpayers at large know this: the Chancellor may be “pleased” to sell us a bill of goods—a variety of means for surrendering our salaries and our professional dignity, but we are not “buying it,” and they should not be either.

And if you've already opted for the pay reduction, it's not too late for you to "volunteer" to teach your students the meaning of substantive choice--by letting them know why you are "volunteering" to cancel your classes four times this semester. Read more

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15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut
#7 "The Furloughs in our Future"

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

posted under 15 Ways , budget crisis , Campus Faculty Association , furloughs , GEO , unionization , University of Illinois by Unit for Criticism

[The next in our series on higher education, 15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut, features the reflections of five members of the Graduate Employee’s Organization (GEO)]

Written by Melinda Bernardo (Research Assistant and Ph.D. Student, Anthropology); Peter Odell Campbell (Teaching Assistant and Ph.D. Student, Communication); Christina Ceisel (Teaching Assistant and Ph.D. Student, Institute of Communications Research); Brian Dolber (Teaching Assistant and Ph.D. Student, Communication), and Natalie Uhl (Research Assistant and Ph.D. Student, Anthropology).

If anything positive is happening as a result of the current economic situation in the state of Illinois, it is an unprecedented level of activism and solidarity on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois. Faculty have responded to the announcement of furloughs with teach-ins and planned rallies. Some faculty, especially those in the Campus Faculty Association (CFA) see collective bargaining through a recognized union as the logical outcome of this activism–but this is not an uncontroversial position. We want to use our contribution to Kritik to call for faculty unionization as the primary response to the University administration’s unacceptable policy approaches to the budget crisis.

It is hard to think about faculty being furloughed because, as Dianne Harris wrote in an earlier post in this series, we who engage in academics often find it difficult to conceptualize ourselves as laborers—as workers who bring a "lunch pail" to work every day. The announcement of furloughs is thus an opportunity to call attention to the work of academia as labor: not only to reveal the nature of our work as academics to others, but also to make it visible to ourselves. Paradoxically, the administration’s decision to enact a furlough policy that includes faculty might be a step toward making faculty unionization conceivable.

The problem is that, as academics, it isn’t just difficult to think of ourselves as laborers, but also that doing so can seem detrimental to the unique nature of our work. Furloughs and unionization share a common assumption: that the intellectual life to which we are devoted can be segmented into hourly wage labor and defined as just another component of capitalist production in the United States. If faculty come together for the purpose of collective bargaining with the University, then teaching, research, advising, mentoring–the life of the mind in which academics invest– will be, in the view of some, defined and constrained by a contract.

As graduate students who are also employees and members of a large local in the Illinois Federation of Teachers – the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO), AFT/IFT Local 6300, AFL-CIO – we face similar conceptual difficulties. Like faculty, it is hard to define when we are working and not, or to fit our labor into the space of an hourly work week. Unlike faculty, we simultaneously occupy two positions within the University: we are both students and workers. While it is often useful and necessary for the GEO to insist on drawing a bright line between these two roles, in practice, it is hard to see where this line really exists.

Take the tuition waivers that most graduate students rely on to make their years of education affordable. Tuition waivers enable us to perform our work as graduate employees. But a tuition waiver is only a necessary condition of our employment because of our simultaneous status as students (on this point see Harriet Murav's recent post). It is easier to think of graduate student unionization as appropriate if our employee and student status is separate, but in reality, our status as students is contingent on our status as workers, and vice-versa.

In our capacity as students, it is tempting to think of ourselves as apprentices – as young trainees being groomed for the life of the mind. The reality is that as soon as we arrive on campus, our status as employees puts the lie to this ideal. As teaching assistants, we function as cheap, efficient labor for the teaching and training of undergraduates, while as graduate assistants, we aid in the administrative functioning of the University. Our student and employee identities are inextricably connected–a reality that is also apparent in the dialogic relationship between our teaching and our research. As employees, we are subject to predictable attempts at exploitation and overwork by our employer.

Another bitter pill to swallow for faculty considering collective bargaining is the current lack of any real place in the shared governance of the University. If furloughs provide the impetus for faculty to unionize, this will mean that faculty—like graduate employees, staff, and service employees—are workers in the neoliberal university. The decision to unionize may require coming to grips with the reality of the faculty’s near total disenfranchisement from actual policymaking decisions at UIUC.

What we’ve learned through our activism in the GEO, and especially through our participation in the GEO's recent contract negotiation and strike, may seem like an irony or paradox. Collective bargaining–in requiring us to embrace our status as workers in the neoliberal model of the University – also grants us power to resist this very model. Faculty at UIUC must make the same decision. The only way to direct University policy away from privatization and corporatization is to recognize that they, like us, function in the current paradigm as workers in a factory or corporation.

Illinois faculty are framed as much as many kinds of workers in the University today. But unlike graduate employees and other unionized workers on campus, faculty do not yet have the power of collective bargaining. If faculty were to join graduate employees, academic professionals, and service workers in a collective of recognized unions at the University of Illinois, they would make a significant contribution to the effort to recover the University’s commitment to providing access to affordable high-quality education regardless of socioeconomic status, race, and ethnic background. They would also strengthen the University’s commitment to the research mission.

Despite lacking any real participation in the governance of the University, faculty still occupy a position of relative power and privilege. With this position comes significant responsibility–not only to resist furloughs, larger classes, and the diminution of research support in the here and now, but to resist these harmful tendencies also in, and for, the future.

As graduate students, we see the erosion of the University’s commitment to education and knowledge and the simultaneous preoccupation with production and profit. Ours is an urgent call: if furloughs can shine a light on the University as a factory churning out “instructional units,” then faculty must consider unionization as an urgent means of resistance and change.
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15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut
#5: "A Furlough to Arms"

Friday, February 5, 2010

posted under 15 Ways , budget crisis , Cary Nelson , furloughs , University of Illinois , voluntary pay cut by Unit for Criticism

[Cary Nelson's contribution to the "15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut" series on the condition of higher education is excerpted from the lecture he gave for the Unit for Criticism's January 25 colloquium, "Higher Education's Perfect Storm: What Can We Do?"]

Written by Cary Nelson (English/President, AAUP)

The requirement to choose between a 2% salary cut and self-selected furlough days is not simply a matter of convenience. It represents a series of fundamental political choices. We can lie about our likely activities and pledge to do no work for four days.

I would urge faculty members instead to pick furlough days and use one such day to self-report violations, then join the collective activities organized by the Campus Faculty Association, including their February 9 meeting and February 15 common action day/teach-in. Contrary to the Senate Executive Committee's call to "contain the damage," I do not believe we should make seamless cooperation our goal.

The list of prohibitions on furlough days is itself an unacceptable embarrassment to institutions like the University of Wisconsin which has distributed them. No visits to your office or your lab, no professional phone calls to students or colleagues, no research oriented reading or writing, no university work of any kind. Not only do these protocols offend academic freedom, they violate your human rights. Thus I regard self-reporting violations as a form of nonviolent professional disobedience, conscientious objection to the war against the faculty.

So, alternatively, you can admit the furloughs were really a salary cut and just take a 2% reduction. But then the two choices—pretending not to work, or admitting you will work without pay-- put the lie to each other. Apparently our senior administrators were not prepared for the news that some faculty members prefer not to lie. At the moment, we can either accept the administration’s paternalism on good faith, or we can resist. We can also let a thousand flowers bloom, resisting on one day, cooperating on another, hold a mass teach-in, volunteering in the community, and so forth. A public display of faculty/staff solidarity is an important component of an activist strategy. But do not delude yourselves into believing you can win public support for teaching and research if you limit yourself to volunteering in an old folks home or adopting a highway for a faculty cleanup project. You cannot build public admiration for our core activities indirectly. Moreover, unless deliberate noncompliance is part of our collective response, it will not have sufficient impact.

Taking the 2% salary cut is easier, but it includes no element of resistance. Combining a teach-in with nonviolent professional resistance establishes a full protocol for the faculty to assert its rights and its point of view. If at least 100 faculty members agree to identify furlough days and then publicly declare that they “read a book,” “talked with a student,” “worked in their lab,” etc., on one of the furlough days, then we can gain national publicity for a faculty collective voice.

I know some of you will say “We do not see the benefit of being confrontational,” and I also know what that really means. “My dignity is fragile,” “I am afraid of retaliation.” “If I keep my head down maybe the world will stay the same.” A research university is a roiling mix of fear, arrogance, and idealism. But the first of these, fear, is never far from the surface. I understand that. I’m no less subject to it than any of you. I have just learned to control it and move on. That is what you must do if you wish some control over your fate. That said, if the administration is foolish enough to punish you for reading a book, then let them reap what they will have sown. They would be the laughing stock of higher education. I do not believe they will go there.

Be assured, the furloughs are in place not because the university lacks the money to pay faculty/staff salaries but because there is a cash flow problem and the university prefers to spend the available funds in other ways, to protect other priorities.

Not, of course, that we really know what all those other priorities actually are. The faculty needs independent sources of information. We could fund an annual audit through the AAUP for about $4,000. The AAUP has already donated a general audit of the system and can now move on to detailed campus-by-campus reports. Short of that, there is every reason to distrust a university budget. We have never seen one that is adequate, never seen one that lists all resources available to an institution. Over the last year we have analyzed budgets for a dozen large institutions that claimed severe financial difficulty and found all the claims false. On the other hand we have found several small schools to be literally in jeopardy of financial collapse, but that is not the U of I’s situation.

Despite some loss from investments, total UI revenues grew from 3.573 billion in 2005 to 4.046 billion in 2008. Tuition and fees in the same period grew from 507 million to 662 million. Bonds payable are at $1 billion, but our total assets are over $5 billion. Interest payments on our debts come to only 2% of our budget. Our cash flow projections have to be modified by removing depreciation costs from the budget, since depreciation is not a cash expense. Overall, the UI is in excellent financial health.

The one alarming piece of financial data is that while expenditures on instruction increased only 12% from 2005 to 2008, and expenditures on research increased only 2%, three of the four administrative categories increased more than 20% in the same period. In the financial report on the UI system that the national AAUP just released, we conclude that the fact that UI administrative costs have increased at a substantially higher rate than expenditures on teaching and research suggests “the UI system has not be true to the core academic mission” (13).

Now ask yourselves this: if you look at senior administrator’s salaries three to five years from now, will they have been handsomely overcompensated for their 2010 furlough days? Will faculty and staff?

The assurance that the university will honor its core mission is thus the least reassuring thing one hears. For we are not in agreement about what our core mission is. We now have an honorable interim president, but some of the mid-level administrators who transferred funds to cover the losses from Global Campus or facilitated clouted admissions are still in place. The ideology that endorsed the Academy on Capitalism has not been rooted out. This remains an entrepreneurial campus looking toward defunding the humanities and the interpretive social sciences. Unless you are perceived as bringing in money, a perception that is often misleading, you have no reason to trust the administration.

For, short of outright gifts, dollars often come packed in a Trojan horse. The administration is well aware that the grants supporting big budget science or engineering research often do not cover all costs. So tuition income is siphoned off from other units. Global Campus is the model for every major initiative. And this system of robbing Peter to pay Paul operates without informed faculty consent. A ruling ideology and set of priorities have increasingly been imposed on the campus without adequate consultation or buy-in.

Our current system of shared governance is not adequate to address either the ideological differences or the compensation gap between faculty and administrators. That does not, however, mean that I am opposed to cooperating with good administrators. For nearly twenty years, a succession of deans and provosts and chancellors routinely posed the same question: “How are humanities, science, and social science disciplines evolving and how can Illinois be a leader in those changes?” They were eager to invest in the whole range of disciplines so as to make that happen.

But the world has changed. The administration is no longer genuinely interested in what the humanities have to offer the country. The sciences in many ways have it worse. Tenured humanities faculty members at least have intellectual control over their diminished patrimony. Scientists forced to turn to corporations to fund their work are frequently compelled to focus on producing marketable products, rather than on fundamental research. And now the university itself touts research that translates into products. If all this were just a local phenomenon, it could be reversed. But these are national and international trends.

The faculty needs an independent voice willing to speak truth to power. It needs an organization with sufficient membership and sufficient independent financial resources to be a decisive force on campus. The faculty senate, only intermittently reliable, is not a sufficiently independent or courageous voice. Like many senates nationwide, it can be corrupted by members hoping to use the body as a route to a well-paid administrative position. It can be compromised by a tendency to withhold critical information from the faculty as a whole.

The standard form of financially and legally empowered faculty organization is called a union, but there are examples of nonunion but dues paying faculty organizations—including nonunion AAUP chapters with majority membership--that also negotiate salary, benefits, shared governance, and academic freedom issues with the administration.

As it stands now, candidates for senior administrative positions come for an interview, assure us they love children, puppy dogs, and arts and humanities faculty, then do as they please as soon as they are on the job. Humanists lose their infrastructural support, and scientists lose their academic freedom.

Why on earth should two thousand PhDs cede their collective fates to a provost, a chancellor, or a president? Do they know more than we do? Are they more enlightened? Do they better understand what a university is or should be? Do they have research and teaching experience? Did you have that confidence in Joe White? Do you have that confidence in the board of trustees? Do you think the next administrator will be a philosopher king or queen?

The second chapter of my new book No University is an Island (NYU) is devoted to enumerating and analyzing the threats to academic freedom posed by higher education’s transformed administrative and cultural climate. I list sixteen, pointing out that the U of I regularly violates merely 15 of those. The key threats to academic freedom include:

1. INSTRUMENTALIZATION (the notion that higher education is first and foremost job training);
2. CONTINGENCY (the shift to faculty without job security and full academic freedom;
3.AUTHORITARIAN ADMINISTRATION;
4. ABUSES OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE;
5. ADMINISTRATION RESTRICTIONS ON THE USE OF COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY;
6. UNWARRANTED RESEARCH OVERSIGHT (as with institutional review boards);
7. NEOLIBERAL ASSAULTS ON ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES;
8. MANAGERIAL IDEOLOGY
9. CIRCUMVENTION OF SHARED GOVERNANCE;
10. GLOBALIZATION;
11. OPPOSITION TO HUMAN RIGHTS;
12. INADEQUATE GRIEVANCE PROCEDURES;
13. RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE;
14. POLITICAL INTOLERANCE;
15. LEGAL THREATS;
and finally
16. CLAIMS OF FINANCIAL CRISIS.

About the last threat, I say in part: The recession gives administrators the opportunity to claim financial crisis whether or not it is true. Their plans often demonstrate they do not share the same values, priorities, loyalties, goals, and sense of mission as the faculty.

Deciding how to deal with either real or imagined financial constraints entails fundamental moral and ethical issues. How well schools deal with them—whether they are even willing to address them—may depend on how staffing and compensation have evolved over the last two generations.

An institution that pays its president and its football coach half a million dollars a year or more, an institution that has bought into huge disparities between salaries for humanities and business faculty, an institution that already pays contingent faculty subminimum wages, may be ill-prepared to address the ethics of employment in a “crisis.” Nothing is more disingenuous in the context of an amoral salary schedule than an administrative declaration that “we all have to share the pain equally.”

If the worldwide recession continues, many institutions will face a fundamental choice—whether to exacerbate or ameliorate pay schedules and working conditions that are wholly unfair. Should campuses now reap the fruits of gradually enhanced exploitation or take this as an opportunity to address them? In any case, the central issue is always how you spend the money you have. That requires broad campus-wide consultation. Otherwise both shared governance and academic freedom will suffer.

The university has a cash flow problem, but the reason the faculty is being subjected to taxation without representation is that the administration has other priorities for spending the money is does have. The main problem is with Swanlund, not Springfield. There is one and only one solution to these problems—collective action. Reconceive faculty identity to embrace both careerism and community responsibility. Then act. The jury is still out on whether this faculty can rise to the occasion.

Long term, we will need to see the operational fruits of faculty solidarity. That will require:

A sustained conversation about the mission of the university and a search for faculty consensus about what that mission is. Until then, special pleading for disciplinary utility or funding is likely to be unsuccessful.
A broad campaign to create a coalition of students, faculty, parents, administrators, citizens, and legislators to revive the commitment to public higher education. It has begun in California, with the realization it is not a short-term goal.
A readjustment of the power relations between faculty and administration. That will mean broader faculty involvement in campus governance.

There really is no other choice. The only other option is to work at a university whose overall goals and practices many of us do not believe in. Meanwhile, idealism harnessed to progressive self-interest can overcome fear and arrogance. But only if we remake our lives.
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15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut
#4 "Where is My Lunch Pail?"

posted under 15 Ways , budget crisis , Dianne Harris , furloughs , University of Illinois by Unit for Criticism

Written by Dianne Harris (Director, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and Professor of Landscape Architecture, Architecture, Art History, and History)

As an architectural historian, I am a humanist who studies the history of human interactions with the built environment. As such, I’ve spent a fair amount of time asking questions—as so many humanists do—about the ways in which race, class, and gender serve as interlinked modalities through which spatial and material relations operate to constitute cultures, and the ways in which cultures create spaces that have much to tell us about the human condition. I’ve also sometimes studied the labor practices that result in specific built environments. But all that leaves me rather ill-equipped to grapple with the labor dilemmas in which we now find ourselves as faculty at the University of Illinois.

When it comes to understanding the furloughs we’ve been “asked” to take, my default mode is to ask questions based on tried-and-true modes of humanist inquiry. Why, for example, does the word “furlough” sound (at least to my ears) so very “classed” as a term? In the past “furlough” conjured a specific image in my mind: A man (the gendered traditions of the workplace rears its ugly head) in coveralls and a cap walks away from a factory after being furloughed, his grim expression a reminder of the hard times he’ll face with his family as they struggle to make ends meet. Clouds of steam rise in the background, and a factory whistle blows to signal the end of a workday as the factory worker slowly walks away from his daily endeavor, lunch pail swinging from his hand.

This image, manufactured somewhere in my overcrowded brain out of god-only-knows what fragments of a novel or a film, may or may not have any basis in reality. As we all know, and as we have been all-too-regularly reminded this year, work furloughs know no limits on class, race, or gender. Or do they? It’s certainly true that the furloughed worker on our campus will be everyone who holds a university position and is not paid on “soft” money, so the furlough, in that sense, is an equal opportunity offender.

But of course, women and people of color are often disproportionately placed in low- wage positions, and furloughs will hit harder on their pocketbooks. It can be no consolation to campus workers who makes $30,000 per year to know that their four mandatory furlough days this semester will be matched by a mathematically unparallel ten furlough days taken by a few administrators who make ten times their salary.

But my mental image of the furloughed factory worker also rankles because I can’t fit myself into that picture, and it’s not because I never imagined that professors—we of the largely privileged, white-collar, highly-educated, professional, and mostly comfortable middle classes—could never be laid off, or have our pay cut. In the years leading up to my employment on this campus, I spent plenty of time employed in jobs that paid low hourly wages, that had no job security whatsoever, that included no benefits, and that had generally lousy work conditions. Even after beginning my job here at the university, I many times imagined myself jobless, even potentially homeless, in my pre-tenure years (and my spouse can attest to my nearly neurotic tendency to imagine our family on the streets in the event that the sky should actually fall, which my mother has repeatedly assured me will one day happen).

Instead, I can’t fit myself into that picture because the work I do every day, that indeed all of us do everyday as university employees, makes it impossible to simply take our lunch pails and walk away. And even if we find ourselves grimly walking away from campus at the end of a workday, we’ll never hear that factory whistle blow, because our workday never ends, stretched as we are to meet the requirements of teaching, research, service and (in my case) administrative duties. I’m not complaining, and yes, I feel very fortunate most days to hold my job. But the damn whistle just never seems to blow, and where’s my lunch pail anyway?!

Several of my colleagues have already pointed out, on this blog and elsewhere, the lies that give logic to the furlough, so I won’t rehearse the flaws in the administration’s arguments about budgets. But as an architectural historian, I want to know how and when the space of the university—commissioned, designed, and built for the exercise of education and creative thought—became instead a space for the exercise of corporate capitalism, one in which my office became at least metaphorically analogous to the space of the factory floor, where the expectation increasingly is that I will generate money for the campus through my work in addition to educating students, and (perhaps) finding the time to do research and produce estimable scholarship. In the absence of a time clock, how can I simply walk away with that grim expression on my face, swinging my lunch pail as I leave on my furlough day? The administration, I suspect, not least in offering the option of “voluntary” pay reductions, knows that we all carry carefully cultivated mental images of ourselves as hard-working, white-collar professionals who cannot simply be furloughed (or furloughed simply). Or can we?

If furloughs are to mean anything at all—and it seems to me that they mean relatively little when it comes to truly making a difference in the university’s current cash flow problems—they have to be visible, they have to make an impact, and they have to hurt, not just the faculty, but students and administrators alike.

On February 15th and on March 4th, two days that have recently been designated for collective action, we must all pick up our imaginary lunch pails, punch out on our imaginary time clocks, and walk out, finding common cause with our colleagues in the Campus Faculty Association. We have to ignore the alarm bells in our heads that remind us of the mountain of work that lies in wait on our desks, of the students who need our attention, of the lecture that awaits preparation, of the article deadline that approaches, of the service projects that call for our time.

Instead, we’ll walk together swinging imaginary lunch pails, with hopes that in doing so, we’ll one day walk back to jobs that resemble those we hoped to fulfill when we became members of a university community that valued outstanding instruction, research excellence, and a devotion to community-enhancing service at a range of scales.
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15 Ways to Take Your Furlough
#2: "Dee-scending?"

Sunday, January 17, 2010

posted under 15 Ways , Fair Labor Standards Act , furlough , Rosenstock , University of Illinois by Unit for Criticism

[Here is the second of the posts the Unit for Criticism has commissioned for its series, "15 Ways to Take Your Furlough," a discussion of the condition of higher education at University of Illinois and elsewhere]

Written by Bruce Rosenstock (Religious Studies/Program in Jewish Culture & Society)

Not since the summer after my junior year in college when I worked as an elevator operator in a classic downtown Chicago skyscraper (I called out “Dee-scending!” instead of “Going Down!” and “Ass-cending!” instead of “Going Up!,” much to my puerile delight) have I considered myself to be a wage laborer. But now, under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act it turns out that the day that I am furloughed I am, by a legal fiction, turned into a wage laborer.

A blog post by University of Wisconsin law professor David Trubek explains this fiction in a humorous way, but let me give a briefer, drier account. Our appointments as faculty members are as salaried employees, and as such we are not paid overtime for any work we do, no matter how many hours beyond 40 hours each week we may work. In order to furlough us for a day, it is necessary to pretend (here’s the legal fiction) that we are paid for the work we do as if we were wage laborers for the week in which our furlough day falls (see FLSA 29 CFR 541.710 b: “Deductions from the pay of an employee of a public agency for absences due to a budget-required furlough shall not disqualify the employee from being paid on a salary basis except in the workweek in which the furlough occurs and for which the employee's pay is accordingly reduced”).

Federal labor law requires that if we did in fact work on our furlough day, we would need to be compensated at the overtime rate of 1.5 times the regular rate of pay. Failure to be given this compensation could trigger an audit (all it takes is one disgruntled employee) by the Department of Labor. It is for this reason that our administrators are so adamant about making sure that WE DO NOT WORK on our furlough day, and that anyone under our supervision who is covered by the furlough MUST NOT BE PERMITTED to work.

Also, our administrators are aware of the following law: anyone on salary who makes less than $455 per week cannot be put on furlough without triggering a possible claim for ALL PRIOR WORK OVER 40 HRS./WK as overtime. That is at least one reason why they set a lower limit of $30,000 ($455 x 52 = $23,660) for the furlough, in order to be sure not to trigger this claim (which would also allow EVERYONE IN THE SAME EMPLOYMENT CATEGORY to make the same claim for overtime.)

So, now that I see myself as a (furloughed) wage laborer one week each pay period, what do I about it? I am not complaining, let me make that perfectly clear. I actually feel proud of this newfound identity. I am also quite thankful that this status is a legal fiction and that I remain a tenured professor after all. I know that there are many, many millions of people whose lives as wage laborers are truly precarious, and I am also aware that there are many millions of wage laborers who are not only furloughed, but unemployed. No, I am not complaining.

I am not complaining, but I also want to honor the law and the status of wage laborer which the law was and is designed to protect. The Fair Labor Standards Act, passed in 1938, is one of the great pieces of New Deal legislation. If I actually work on my furlough day but report myself as not working (and all faculty at UI will report the days that they select as the furlough days), I seem, at least in my own eyes, to be denigrating the law and acting in complicity with the administration who are fully aware that most faculty will not actually refrain from ALL ACADEMIC WORK (not just teaching class) that day. So, what do I do? Believe me, this situation has made me both angry and frustrated, not because of the loss of money, but because of the bind I am placed in.

I have decided to act in perfect consistency with the law, at least as I now understand it. I am not going to work. I am also going to do my best to take furlough days only on Friday, the one day I don’t have a class. But I also don’t want to waste my time twiddling my thumbs as I wait until 5:00 pm to pick up a book or turn on email. I recalled that for a long time I have felt guilty about ignoring requests from the social action chair at my synagogue for volunteers to help out at one of the community’s food banks. So, I thought, here is my opportunity. I called the synagogue and discovered that the social action committee no longer was doing its food bank volunteer program, but I learned from the administrator of the synagogue, Kate Meghji, that as part of an MBA in non-profit administration she is getting here at UI she has developed a database of all the non-profits in our area. It occurred to me that we might use that database to connect other faculty with volunteer opportunities. Kate offered to see if certain non-profits might not like to do a one-day volunteer activity that would bring together a group of faculty who might be willing to select that day as their furlough day.

So, I intend to work with Kate on this and dedicate at least one of my four furlough days to volunteering in the community. I am hoping that this might become an opportunity for collective action. I think if a number of faculty joined in this as a way to spend one or more furlough days, it would be a great way to get some positive publicity for us as we seek to do something to draw the attention of the citizens of the state to the budget problems holding up the disbursement of our appropriations. And perhaps our administrators, who need to take two furlough days every pay period and who must for legal reasons be very careful not to be seen working on those days, perhaps they might join with some of us in this collective action. I hope to be able to make more information available about possible volunteering activities in the near future. Anyone interested in helping or participating, feel free to contact me at brsnstck@illinois.edu.

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15 Ways to Take Your Furlough
#1: “The Birth of the Furlough”

Thursday, January 14, 2010

posted under 15 Ways , furlough , Goodlad , higher education , University of Illinois by Unit for Criticism

[On January 5, 2010, Interim President Stanley Ikenberry announced a four-day furlough for eligible academic professionals and faculty as a “short-term measure to conserve cash” during Spring 2010. The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory has commissioned a series of posts entitled “15 Ways to Take Your Furlough.” We have invited contributors from a variety of disciplinary and institutional locales (including some from off campus) to discuss the condition of higher education at the University of Illinois and elsewhere.

The below essay by Lauren Goodlad, “The Birth of the Furlough,” is the first of the series.]

The Birth of the Furlough

Written by Lauren M.E. Goodlad (English/Director, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory)

Among the many remarkable aspects of the year just passed is the appearance of furlough—as both a noun and verb—on the lips of academics across the land. In Santa Barbara and College Park; Phoenix and Frisco; New Brunswick and Champaign-Urbana, 2009 marked the year when “furlough” penetrated the consciousness of public educators.

The furlough’s advent invites a host of questions and concerns. Who doesn’t wonder what this new-fangled practice bodes for the future of public research universities? For states like California and Illinois? Or even the United States?

One may begin by wondering what a furlough actually is. Is it a gussied up pay-cut, the budget wonk’s equivalent of “collateral damage”? Or is it an appropriate mechanism for stanching the red ink when states are no longer able—or willing—to pay for the services on which they rely?

One may also ponder if it’s actually possible to take a furlough when one already works around the clock, six or seven days a week, and twelve months—not nine!—a year. (How many faculty might actually pay to have an un-furlough—an extra day added to every month in order to meet their publication deadlines, finish grading their papers, prep for their classes, advise graduate students, and do their committee work?) Everywhere I turn I find colleagues asking themselves how to manage their mandated days of non-employment. How should they balance their unrelenting commitments against the commandment not to work? And how should they reconcile their temptation to work on in silence against their awareness that a furlough is no private affair between employer and employee—but a topic warranting sustained public discussion.

On the other hand, a too narrow focus on furloughs risks missing the point. To be furloughed is not simply to endure a one-time floating—or, if you like, filching—to allay the afflictions of one’s cash-strapped state. It is to live through a historical moment: not a four-day fluke but a Furlough Era. On one side of the zeitgeist is an economic crisis precipitated by the deregulated financial system that columnist Frank Rich describes as a “plot to wreck America” more lethal than terrorism . On the other hand is a crisis in higher education which has slowly evolved as states like Illinois have withdrawn support, resulting in successive rounds of budget cuts and tuition increases. The brunt of these changes has long been felt by students in need of affordable education; graduate student employees; non-tenure track instructors; and faculty in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

For students and employees of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (which hosts the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory), the tuition increases we have already seen—which are comparable to those only now being implemented in California—might have presented a manageable (if regrettable) shift toward partial privatization of a once proudly public institution of higher learning and research. Over the last ten years or so undergraduate tuition in LAS has been raised repeatedly (in 2009-10 it is just under $9,500). Meanwhile, the same period has seen permanent budget “assessments” on a yearly basis, including this year’s cash rescission. Why is it, then, that despite the ever greater efficiencies and revenues LAS provides, so many faculty, especially in the humanities and social sciences, have seen so little prosperity in the years prior to the current financial crisis? (We know that one answer is the rising cost of energy; but has that really eaten up the whole of the tuition increases and budget cuts enacted since 2001? And if so, why have the university’s efforts to reduce energy costs been so tepid?)

As many are only beginning to realize, the College’s biggest financial problem is arguably the diversion of LAS tuition dollars to units outside of LAS. In fact LAS generates considerably more than 100% of its operating budget in tuition revenues. When we consider this robust revenue-generating power alongside the fact that LAS relies on the state for less than 20% of its budget, we find that even the 7-10% cut in state funding which we have been told to anticipate ought to present a relatively containable crisis for this ultra-productive academic unit. After all, a 10% cut to less than 20% of the LAS budget means a shortfall of less than 2%. Yet even as I write, LAS administrators are preparing for much deeper cuts of 5, 10, or 15%. Why this discrepancy?

An article by Christopher Newfield in the 2009 issue of Profession suggests one kind of answer . According to Newfield colleges like LAS have long suffered from an unsustainable model of using the tuition dollars generated by low-cost and teaching-intensive programs to offset indirect research costs in other parts of the university. At the public research university Newfield uses for his case study “humanities and social science departments keep only a portion of their enrollment money, about one half and one-third, respectively. The sciences do somewhat better but are not at 100%. In comparison, engineering receives double its teaching workload money. The professional school receives closer to three times its workload money. Were this a medical school, the gap would be far larger” (277). The reason for this transfer of funding from high-enrollment fields with low research costs to low-enrollment fields with high research costs is, Newfield writes, “straightforward, though largely unknown…” High-end research “loses money for universities when one considers the large but underfunded indirect costs that modern research incurs” (277).

At the University of Illinois, diversion of LAS tuition revenues is exacerbated by the inadequate return LAS receives for the teaching it provides to majors in other campus units. While faculty in the humanities and social sciences feel the impact of this invisible subsidization, grad students and non-tenure-track instructors see even less in exchange for the services they provide. Students also bear the costs of these efficiencies as they pay more tuition for less access to the smaller classrooms that many prefer.

This brings us to our present crisis in which LAS, like every other campus unit, must face the shortfalls caused by a delinquent state that isn’t paying its bills on time. Voila le furlough: a “short-term measure for conserving cash” which, according to Interim President Stanley Ikenberry, will generate $17 million. (One might possibly think of it as a tax on university employees in anticipation of the tax increase on all Illinois citizens that our state legislators may enact after their reelections.)

I confess that what concerns me much more than the days of lost pay (much though I regret them) is the mentality of crisis management they may generate. Not the furlough itself, but the furloughisme. The University of Illinois, perhaps unique in the land, is weathering the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression while simultaneously reeling from a crisis of leadership at the highest levels of state and university governance. As the authors of a recent white paper for the humanities note, “The lack of administrative transparency that has characterized the past decade at Illinois has wrought serious damage to all aspects of the university.”

In her brilliant Kritik post last October, history professor Antoinette Burton described this corporate mentality as a “logic of instrumentalization.” It operates by first setting the agenda—articulating “the most important” problems and priorities—and then pursuing that agenda according to its internal dictates. The idea of shared governance with faculty receives lip-service at best. And indeed, how could faculty—or anyone else with a stake in the university’s future—meaningfully participate in governance when access to information is so systematically occluded? Who among us knows the extent of state support which each campus unit enjoys? Knows the budget model used to distribute revenues within and across campus units? Or the rates at which units are compensated for the teaching (“IU”s) they provide? Or the revenues that each unit generates in tuition, research grants, and gifts? Or the ratio between research grants and the share of indirect costs which the university must pick up to make good on these grants?

By far the biggest question that we face right now is this: Is the University of Illinois facing a temporary crisis of state funding or a permanent reduction that requires the reinvention of the university that we know? My sense from the deep budget cuts for which we are now asked to brace is that the answer to this question may have already been decided for us (though by whom it is hard to say). Recent emails from the temporary leaders now holding the bag for the previous administration advise us to “take innovative measures not just to ‘cut budgets’ but to grow revenues and reduce actual costs.” Fair enough. But isn’t that what LAS has been doing for the last ten years? What has it gotten in return for those hard-won efficiencies?

Of course, we must always think creatively and inventively; and there are undoubtedly desirable ways of generating revenue which many might welcome. But what kind of innovations can we reasonably expect if we decide in advance to treat our state like a permanent deadbeat, and to trust our future to a logic of crisis management? The point is not that we may not need or want to innovate and reinvent. But before we rush to introduce contingency plans for a 15% across-the-board cut, shouldn’t we talk about how we innovate and reinvent?

According to the latest estimates, in the last year or so the actual unemployment rate in the United States exceeds 17%. Meanwhile a recent article in the New York Times argues that lack of creativity is what most ails the business culture of today: “students need to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they need to learn finance or accounting.

What kind of education will the University of Illinois provide to our students to help them create the jobs of future? What will we do for those returning students who need higher education to reinvent themselves in the wake of their permanently furloughed careers? We know that we can offer impoverished programs in the arts and humanities, ever-larger classrooms taught by overworked faculty, and a teaching workforce dominated by underpaid and insecure graduate students and non-tenure track instructors. Is that what our legacy to this state will be?

The costs of 2010’s furlough will be borne by those employees this spring who lose pay for several days of hard work. But the costs of furloughisme at the University of Illinois, and elsewhere, may be borne by the youth of this state and this country. They may be borne by our children and our children’s children.

Let it not be so! I hope that all of us work together, during and after our semester of furloughs, to reject a future dominated by the logic of furloughisme.

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