Robert Hawkins, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, often meets with prospective colleagues and graduate students.
He said he is embarrassed to say the university has no paid family or medical leave policy.
“It's a very awkward, embarrassing conversation to have with job candidates when you're out for dinner and it comes up that they've been thinking about starting a family,” Hawkins said. “I want to recruit the best people here as my colleagues and my students, and it definitely creates a barrier.”
Hawkins and other members of the United Faculty and Academic Staff (UFAS), in collaboration with the Teaching Assistants’ Association, coordinated a letter from department chairs advocating for 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave starting next academic year. As of Tuesday evening, about 40 department chairs signed the letter, including half of the UW-Madison College of Letters & Science department chairs.
When qualified candidates receive job offers from institutions with family leave policy and UW-Madison, paid family leave benefits can be a deciding factor, Hawkins said.
“It's really helpful for the chancellor to hear that this is not just a radical student demand,” Hawkins added. “Paid family and medical leave policy is integral to the functioning of the university and it's a very, very popular policy.”
In response to the letter, UW-Madison spokesperson John Lucus told The Daily Cardinal in an email Tuesday that Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin is committed to offering paid parental leave.
UW-Madison “continues to work with partners at the state and Universities of Wisconsin” on plans to move paid parental leave forward, Lucas added.
The letter references UW-Madison’s new RISE Initiative, a targeted recruitment campaign that will initially focus on faculty hiring related to artificial intelligence.
“We are writing to you today as department chairs and directors who are tremendously excited about UW-Madison’s continuing growth, and the visionary strategic expansion articulated by the RISE Initiative. At the same time, we are concerned that the lack of a consistent paid family leave policy poses significant challenges for implementing this vision,” the letter read.
The letter said a lack of paid family and medical leave creates barriers beyond recruitment.
“The financial burdens of caregiving without paid leave disproportionately affect women and people of color, who are more likely to face career setbacks after taking unpaid leave, creating a structural barrier to achieving our equity and inclusion goals,” the letter read.
The letter also referenced other peer universities with paid leave policies. Nine out of ten Association of American Universities Data Exchange peer institutions offer university-wide paid family leave, according to a UW-Madison report on family leave from June 2022.
Workarounds in place of policy
Hawkins said the lack of paid medical and family leave impacted him personally last fall. After he was hit by a car, he first needed to use sick days as he recovered. He was not teaching that semester and only returned virtually through accommodations from his department after several months of treatment.
“It would have been less messy with a clear policy spelled out for what you do in such situations,” Hawkins said.
This is similar to how many faculty and academic staff handle medical and family leave without university policy in place, Hawkins said.
“There are all kinds of workarounds,” he added. “I've talked to chairs in some departments where you can teach an eight week course and kind of concentrate your teaching in half of the semester, and take the other half off. Or you can combine your sabbatical with family leave — there's all these little solutions. But it’s a patchwork of ways of compensating for the lack of a real policy.”
Noe Goldhaber is the college news editor and former copy chief for the Daily Cardinal. She is a statistics major and has reported on a wide range of campus issues. Follow her on Twitter at @noegoldhaber.
