In December 2014, kids filled the lobby of Bascom Hall as professors and teaching assistants held office hours amid the chaos—meanwhile, just down the hall, UW-Madison administration attempted to work through the noise.
The Teaching Assistants’ Association, UW-Madison’s graduate student union, planned this “play-in” to demand paid parental leave for UW-Madison faculty and TAs.
“It’s easy to forget that graduate students are people with families and our needs extend beyond our own food and housing,” said Katie Zaman, a TA in the sociology department. “We stayed for about four hours and attracted press attention and certainly were noticed by the administration.”
UW-Madison does not have any university-specific parental leave policy, but instead follows federal requirements. Faculty and staff are granted leave according to the Federal Family Medical Leave Act or the Wisconsin Family and Medical Leave Act, which guarantee six or 12 weeks, respectively, of leave for any university employee.
However, UW-Madison employees are required to use their federally mandated sick leave for the birth or adoption of a child.
Mike Bernard-Donals, vice provost for faculty and staff, said faculty fall under one of these two policies based on how much sick leave they have accrued during their time at the university.
According to a 2015 report by the Faculty Senate, UW-Madison and the University of Iowa are the only two Big Ten institutions without any university-specific parental leave policy. Eight of the other institutions—including Purdue University, Northwestern University and the University of Nebraska—have policies that provide paid teaching relief of 12 or more weeks.
Zaman said many TAs help each other by filling in for emergency or last-minute sick days because they cannot simply cancel their lectures or sections.
“That’s helpful to have that supportive environment, but we shouldn’t have to do that,” Zaman said.
Prior to TAA’s play-in, faculty within the College of Letters and Science created their own parental leave policy in 2013—it is now the only UW-Madison college to have such a policy for faculty.
According to Christa Olsen, a professor in the English department, in the absence of any decent policy for leave, women faculty members recommended that their time off be based off the percentage of their time teaching.
“That meant that having been here for three years, I had accrued enough leave that I could take off both classes in the fall following my childbirth,” Olsen said. “I was still doing service and I was still doing research, but the part of my schedule that is most tied to having to be somewhere was taken off the table.”
However, along with the benefits of the L&S parental leave policy, Olsen also noted four specific problems: the policy only applies to L&S faculty, how well the policy works depends on an individual’s circumstances and the policy essentially establishes childbirth and adoption as an illness.
Lastly, the policy applies solely to faculty, so TAs and administrative staff are not covered.
“The people who are the poorest paid and have the least flexibility and the most heavy supervision are the people who don’t have access to this,” she said. “Faculty, who have a lot of flexibility in our lives, get access to this.”
According to Olsen, even though this policy subsidizes professors’ teaching time, many still have to fulfill responsibilities such as research, writing and service.
“You’re still doing 60 percent of your job, and you’re not actually on leave,” she said.
Ramifications of not having a university-wide parental leave policy extend beyond just faculty and staff—students see the effects as well. Olsen said no matter how much faculty members care about their students, at times they balance challenging demands.
“When you have an infant that’s screaming and not sleeping, even if you want to be doing your very best as a teacher, you’re not going to be there,” she said.
The absence of a just policy might also keep UW-Madison from retaining and attracting competitive faculty.
“I know somebody who was considering a move to the UW System from another tenured position,” Olsen remarked. “The fact that there wasn’t a decent family- leave policy was a big part of why she didn’t accept a position here.”
However, UW-Madison is currently working to create a parental leave policy for all faculty and staff.
“I would like to see six weeks of paid parental leave,” Zaman stated. “It needs to be flexible, it needs to be paid.”
In April 2015, the Faculty Commission on Compensation Joint Governance Committee presented the Faculty Senate with recommendations for how to develop a policy that would include one semester of paid teaching leave for faculty.
“The chancellor suggested that we wanted to do something comprehensive that was not just for faculty, but included faculty, academic staff, university staff and other employees,” Bernard-Donals said.
If a work group is charged, faculty and staff can expect a new policy to be presented to the chancellor in two years, according to Bernard-Donals.
“If you think about reproductive justice as a whole, we need to be thinking about women’s health before they get pregnant, during the pregnancy, the time that they’re allowed to be with the child, and not just women, also men,” Zaman said.
