The University’s Faculty Senate will begin negotiations in mid-September with the Office of Academic Affairs and the Office of Finance and Administration in hopes of establishing a paid parental leave policy for University faculty.
Industrial engineering professor Fereydoun Aghazadeh and English professor Lillian Bridwell-Bowles first proposed the policy in Faculty Senate Resolution 16-08 in April. The resolution was unanimously approved by the Faculty Senate at its May 10  meeting.
Faculty Senate President Kevin Cope said the Senate’s summer recess, compounded with the region’s flooding in August, slowed the proposal’s progress. Cope said the Senate will begin actively pursuing the policy when its 2016-2017 session convenes on Wednesday.
Cope said it’s important for the University to set the standard for employee welfare and benefits for local business and industry. The University currently lags behind other educational institutions, and establishing a sufficient paid parental leave policy would begin to close the gap, he said.
In the resolution, Aghazadeh and Bridwell-Bowles cited the policies of eight public and private universities as examples of institutional standards the University could model its potential policy after. Five SEC schools were featured in the mix, including the University of Alabama and the University of Arkansas, which provide up to eight and six weeks of paid parental leave, respectively.
The University’s current leave policy, last revised in November 2004, does not include a policy dedicated to paid parental leave. Instead, it refers faculty to the University’s family medical leave and sick leave policies.
Faculty members can accrue paid sick leave hours at varying rates depending on the faculty member’s period of employment with the University.
The current policy can impose an unfair financial hardship on young faculty members, Aghazadeh said. Young academics typically do not have significant savings, but postponing having a child until a sufficient number of paid sick leave hours have been accrued is often impractical, he said.
Aghazadeh said he began investigating the University’s paid parental leave policy after an encounter with a young female colleague several years ago. The woman, a hard-worker and accomplished professor, returned to the University days after giving birth because she did not have enough paid sick leave hours to cover maternity leave, he said.
Bridwell-Bowles said she has discussed similar hardships with University colleagues. The policy change could be an important morale booster for faculty members and could increase employee satisfaction, flexibility and performance, Aghazadeh said.
While instituting a paid parental leave policy is important for retaining current faculty members, it’s especially important for recruiting young faculty, she said.
The graying of University faculty is a national trend, with faculty ages 55 and older comprising more than 33 percent of the workforce at academic institutions, according to a 2012 report from the University of Iowa Center on Aging and the TIAA-CREF Institute.
It’s important for the University to remain competitive when aiming to attract outstanding junior faculty, Bridwell-Bowles said.
“We’re in a terrible time economically, but that’s all the more reason to try to keep the University strong so that we can build toward the future,” Bridwell-Bowles said. “Having decent faculty benefits at a time when people have had no pay raises, poor retirement benefits and declining health benefits just seems like a small thing to do to … add to the attractiveness of this institution.”
Bridwell-Bowles said instituting a paid parental leave policy is more fiscally reasonable than issuing across-the-board pay raises to faculty members.
The University’s tenuous financial state is likely the reason a paid parental leave policy has not been put in place sooner, Bridwell-Bowles said. Faculty members rarely receive improved benefits during times of financial stress, and it’s important for faculty members to outline their needs to the University, she said.
While negotiations on the policy are pending, Aghazadeh said he hopes the University will take steps in the meantime to assist expecting faculty members. The current faculty leave policy includes a provision whereby faculty members can donate accrued sick leave hours to other faculty members in special circumstances.
However, the process is tedious, and it is difficult to receive approval to donate hours, Aghazadeh said. Relaxing the policy could be an important first step to making employment and family planning more manageable, he said.