E-mail from my university president. Wherein he commented that despite the enormous budget cuts (despite it seeming the world was crumbling around our ears), faculty kept teaching and students kept learning (we kept on keepin' on, we managed to keep despair and panic to a low rumble or at least on social media only).
But he also noted: barring unforeseen circumstances*, there will be no furlough days in the coming fiscal year.
Oh thank God. Oh that's a relief.
(*And yes, I know, 2016 is The Year Of Unforeseen Circumstances. Shut up and let me have this one thing, okay? And anyway, we are starting Fiscal Year 2017, so technically, as far as our finances here are concerned, we are on the point of killing 2016 dead and moving on.)
The furlough days bothered me on a very deep philosophical level (as deep as my philosophical levels ever get, which is to say, not very). It just felt wrong. I am a salaried person which means I see my work as "you work until the work is acceptably completed, even if that means taking stuff home or coming in for longer than the 40.5 hours or whatever you're technically being paid for in a week." But the furlough days went absolutely against that: one day, or one portion of a day, when you were technically not allowed to work, and while pretty much everyone I know flouted that, it bothered me. It bothered me A LOT. It also made me realize that some weeks I worked longer than what I was technically paid for (and it explains why I'm often the only one who drags in on Saturdays). (It does work out, though: some weeks I wind up "working" less than 40 hours). But it still bothered me.
Because I'm a rule-follower. And it caused me cognitive dissonance: For example, on grading: I like to do grading as soon as I possibly can, for two reasons: 1. It's a task I don't love, and so getting it out of the way makes me happy, and more importantly 2. Grading and giving feedback fast is good for the students and I know many of my students appreciate it because they have commented about it, or favorably compared me to people in other departments who sit on exams for a month before handing them back.
But furlough days effectively told me: if you grade today - which is what you would normally be doing - you are breaking the rules. And I also had people telling me: slow down on things like grading and explain to the students why. And then tell them to get in touch with their elected representatives if they have a problem with it. And you know? That would have taken more energy and "emotional spoons" than I had at that point. I was already sad and worried about the situation and didn't feel like devoting class time to it or dragging my students in to it (though it turned out a lot of them knew, and eventually I had to explain to them the furlough days thing because a couple days I had to take them such that my office hours were cancelled).
It caused cognitive dissonance because I felt like I was being told not to do something that other parts of my "employment contract" were telling me to do. It was trying to hold two contradictory ideas in my head at one time and my head wasn't quite big enough for both of them, and it made it hurt.
Just also the whole idea of having to TAKE furlough days, it made the whole budget-cut thing very "in your face" for me - like, with just a regular pay cut I could rebudget and move on, but with furlough days, I was REMINDED on a regular basis of what was happening, and it just felt like everything was falling apart around my ears. Didn't help that a colleague was let go "not for cause" but because there was no money and she was unprotected by tenure. Didn't help that about 2/3 of our administration took the golden parachute held out to them (And I fully expect this fall to be a bit of a horrorshow, as duties get reassigned and as some people are gonna be juggling way too many balls). It really did feel like we were circling some kind of a drain and the furlough days were just an unsettling reminder of that. (And the fact that I freaked out a little and way overestimated how much my pay was going to be cut, and spent a couple of months doing minimal for-fun purchases and contemplating things like whether I could survive without home internet or cable....)
As I said elsewhere, it upset my inner Sheldon Cooper on a deep level; some part of me was curled up in a fetal position murmuring repetitive soothing phrases and rocking back and forth. And I wound up doing things like obsessively reading all the Oklahoma news sites I knew of on a daily basis in case any clue cropped up about what was going on, or to be the first to hear of Total Doom And The Need To Seek A New Career. That didn't happen. (At least, not yet).
I'll relax a little once I see the new salary card (we don't do merit pay here and I honestly don't mind that; I'd probably be the person who wound up working herself into an early grave, not for the money, but to avoid the shame of being The Person Who Didn't Merit a Merit Increase).
There's also no mention of pay cuts, so I am choosing to be cautiously (possibly irrationally) optimistic and think that means there won't be any. No raises, of course, but that's how it's been pretty much since I was hired, and that's okay.
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