For those of us on the faculty, the concept of “furlough days” is as disconnected from reality as the concept of “sick days.”
Every month we have to fill out and submit a form that lists the specific hours on specific days that we took “sick leave.” The bureaucratic fiction behind this ritual is that faculty work 9-5 days and 40-hour weeks and that any day missed because of a cold is a day of productivity lost forever.
After months of delay, the budget numbers are now in. State lawmakers have approved a pay package that boosts UW System faculty and academic staff pay by 2 percent for AY 2007-2008, 2 percent again for AY 2008-2009, and another 1 percent in April 2009. For reference, faculty salaries systemwide are about 8.5 percent behind peer colleges and universities, and academic staff salaries are about 20 percent behind, according to System President Kevin Reilly. Clearly this package will do little to close those gaps. And undoubtedly, there will continue to be handwringing over a brain drain as some of the best and brightest on this campus get recruited away by universities willing to pay substantially more.
Saving the University (so far) from a far more severe haemorrhage of talent is a surprisingly simple fact: Many of us still love the University of Wisconsin and the city of Madison enough to ignore the lure of higher pay.