When he retired last year from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln after 32 years as a professor, Allen Blezek had accrued 4,392 hours of vacation time that he didn’t use.

According to a report in the Lincoln Journal Star, Mr. Blezek is now suing the University of Nebraska Board of Regents to get $276,480 — the amount he says the university owes him for his unused vacation time.

His calculations are based on his hourly pay of $69.12 at his retirement. Mr. Blezek said that, when he retired from the Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communication, the university gave him a vacation-time payout that covered only 392 of the hours he had stacked up, the paper reported.

Before the fall of 2006, the university had a “use it or lose it” policy, the paper reported. The university changed that policy when the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that employers had to pay workers for vacation time they had earned but didn’t use when they left a job. University workers can now earn 16 vacation hours a month as long as they do not accrue more than 280 hours of unused vacation, the paper said.

Mr. Blezek’s lawsuit, however, says that, under his retirement contract, the university promised to pay him for all of his unused time. —Audrey Williams June