In its annual review of policies for employees prior to the school year the University of Wyoming revised regulations for taking leave and sabbatical.
The revisions took effect in July 2018 and a memo for sabbaticals including a new form request that was adopted in October 2018, have been in effect this year.
Though less-than-robust family leave and sabbatical policies can disadvantage faculty with small children or women who give birth during the academic year, faculty generally are content with UW’s policy.
The national Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requires workplaces to give full-time employees unpaid leave for family and medical issues like serious illness or childbirth, unless there is valuable reason to substitute the unpaid leave with paid leave. This applies to employees who have worked at the institution for at least 12 months and give advance notice.
For the birth of a child, or equivalent scenarios, UW allows faculty 12 weeks of unpaid leave. These 12 weeks are combined for married couples who both work at UW, meaning if one spouse takes 6 weeks off, the other may take 6 weeks off, or another proportion equal the 12 total weeks. The University also requires employees to exhaust their paid leave (sick leave, vacation leave, etc.) before claiming FMLA unpaid leave.
“I do think that the [University] is following the federal guidelines and I think the ability to take the sick time and to be flexible with donations for sick time is a benefit that the University offers their employees,” said Mitzi Stewart, lecturer for the Communication and Journalism Department. “Other institutions don’t have to do that.”
Stewart said she was fortunate in being able to have her child in June last year and not needing to take leave. However, she feels UW’s current leave policy is generally fair for full-time employees — the University offers more than other institutes that only follow the minimum required by FMLA and do not offer the flexibility of using paid leave.
Offering better leave policies for women and men for the birth of a child is beneficial for companies too, Stewart said. Netflix, for example, allows women or men to take off as much time as they want, even if they didn’t personally birth the child (for adoptive parents, among others). This creates a certain loyalty to the company and workers tend to work more and harder after they come back from family leave.
Stewart feels that the United States as a whole needs to work on the FMLA policies to make it as fair as possible for everyone. Still, she still thinks she is lucky to be working with an institution that offers flexibility with their workers.
Unlike family and medical leave, faculty usually plan taking sabbatical to do research.
Daniel Fetsco, a lecturer for the Criminal Justice Department, said he wasn’t particularly interested in a sabbatical at the current moment, and since he worked outside UW as an attorney for 16 years previously, and wasn’t bothered with the leave policies.
“I’m already living the dream on some level in terms of time off relative to my old job as an attorney working all the time,” said Fetsco. “I’m still in this honeymoon period of just happy that I get a few months off in the summer.”
The sabbatical committee in the College of Arts and Sciences encourages faculty to use the sabbatical leave off campus. This could be difficult for younger faculty members with smaller children, said Sociology Program Coordinator Malcolm Holmes.
Fetsco agreed it would be difficult to leave campus on sabbatical while raising his one-year-old son.
“For the next 18 years, hopefully, [I] would want to be around him, raising him,” said Fetsco. “If it were short term and I could take him with, that would change my mind.”
Though traveling for sabbatical takes faculty away from their families, it also takes away a lot of the demands that go with being on campus, allowing faculty to focus on their research. The benefit of a lighter workload of regular duties helps balance out the pay cut, since annual pay for a sabbatical is 60 percent of faculty salary.
Revisions to the sabbatical policy, such as requiring well-defined project goals, don’t seem to be a problem for most faculty. Leaving campus for a year is a suggestion but not mandatory.
