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[boundaryspanner]

Dear All,

I have been reading your posts and comments for several years now and currently have a situation I could use some advise. We are a dual academic couple with a primary school aged child. Spouse is working as a senior professor at a university on the European Continent, I am a lecturer at a UK research university. This is my first post after my PhD, which I undertook in the US. Before I accepted the position in the UK, I advised that I needed flexibility, so that I could work away from the uni if need be. We had a UK residency for the past two years but now my spouse needs to be at spouse's university, which means as a family we would move our residency to Continental Europe. I would like to continue my work for UK uni. On idea is to reduce to 40 percent of workload. While I have been open with our situation, the director of the program which I have build up to 50 percent has rather silently applied for a sabbatical this fall. It is end of May, and I was just informed a couple of days ago that I was thought to be the program leader in his absence since they needed someone to be here for the term full time. Does anyone on this list have experience/and or thoughts on this?

Many thanks,
BoundarySpanner

[expatinuk]

The way that I read this is that you're annoyed that your Program Director is taking a sabbatical just when you want to reduce your contact. Jeez maybe s/he was due for a sabbatical. You've only been there two years and you want a reduced load (increasing his/her load) for family reasons. May s/he took the sabbatical because of research needs. My suggestion is that you concentrate your search for new employment where you want to live.

[drspouse]

Under UK employment law, they have to consider your request for flexible working (and this now applies to more categories of people - e.g. those with adults they care for as well as children).  They don't have to grant it, but they have to give a good business reason for not granting it.

If everyone in your department works on tiny little courses with just two members of staff, you are probably not unusual in taking over someone else's workload while they are on sabbatical. If, however, you are the only person who is having to take over a full other person's workload (this does seem a bit much, as it would basically double your teaching load) then you might have some grounds for complaining not on the grounds of wanting to work flexibly but on the grounds that this is rather a heavy load for a full-time person.

If someone else in your department already works flexibly because of caring responsibilities, it would be very hard for them to refuse you, they should really be juggling responsibilities around instead. If you left they'd have to do this.  If however there isn't anyone who does this, or if they do it's a rather different pattern (e.g. school hours but every day) it might be harder for you to ask for a week off/week on pattern or whatever you want to do.

[boundaryspanner]

Dear Expatinuk,

Ouch:( that  hurt.
I can see how I created this impression. The situation is complex and I hesitated to write a whole essay. This left a lot hanging. Let it suffice that I am both committed to the program I have helped set up and that I am pulling my weight (and have all intentions to do so in the future). My only issue with my colleague's sabbatical is that it effects me greatly, reduced workload or not (move or not) and that I was never officially informed about this. While colleague is program director, I am convening 50 percent of the modules and in colleague's absence would be responsible for the whole program (I have been told a few days ago). This is an opportunity I welcome but it influences my thinking and planning as well. So it would have been nice to be involved in any such conversations and be able to develop a plan and prepare for the upcoming term.

The key question I had for the list was anyone's experience with workload reduction in the UK. It might well be something that is frowned upon, which would be useful information as well. As a dual academic couple with parenting responsibilities, there are work/life balance issues that I imagine others may face as well. Is it worthwhile doing? What are the drawbacks? There are precedences on campus where staff is living four hours away by train and working full time, i.e., coming in for teaching but conducting a lot of work of campus. Does anyone here have such a situation?

Warm greetings
BoundarySpanner

[boundaryspanner]

Dear DrSpouse,

Many thanks for your response. Indeed, I had the highest teaching load in the department last year (about 100 hours, which includes three new MA modules that I developed and taught as well as a one day elective for another department, also new). This was not unreasonable as I was joining specifically to build up a new program. But it also meant that as a junior staff, I had very little time to do research or grant writing. At the same time, several of my colleagues had very little teaching if at all. I am working on an edited book which will consume a lot of time in the fall. In addition, I worry about my book manuscript that awaits revision. There is no precedence in our department for reduced workload (there is on faculty level). However, may of my colleagues do not live in uni town but at least an hour away and few of them are in their office more than three days a week. I do live in uni town and (when not traveling) are in at least four days a week.

Again, thanks for your feedback.

BoundarySpanner

[scotia]

I am unclear. Are you asking to reduce to part-time with a 40% contract? Or simply asking for a reduced teaching load? The two are very different situations.

[boundaryspanner]

Hi Scotia,

My preference is a reduction of my full time contract to a 40 percent work load which would bring me to campus for roughly one week each month.

[sandgrounder]

I have colleagues who have reduced their contracts to 80% i.e. working 4 rather than 5 days a week without causing many problems. But they are on campus 3-4 days a week. I think that your proposal to spend only 1 week a month on campus would not be accepted where I work, unless you happened to be the biggest research star of all time. Other 'euro-commuters' I know, do show willingness to spend at least 3 days a week on campus during term.
With your suggestion I can see how one could block teaching into intensive sessions although you would run into problems immediately with the issue of discrimination against students who either are officially part-time or who work to fund their studies. That is most of our MA cohort - unless yours is radically different then I think the student inconvenience would be so great as to make your request unviable. Equally, presumably you are assuming your colleagues would pick up all your pastoral responsibilities if you are going to be off campus 75% of the time - they may reasonably feel that this is unfair. Similarly, you would rule yourself out of being ever able to take your fair share of administrative duties as they invariably demand presence on campus. So really unless you  are single-handedly holding up your dept's claim to research superstardom then I think it would disadvantage your dept. and your colleagues so badly that they are unlikely to agree. Particularly, as in the current financial climate I'd bet they'll be told to absorb the 60% of your work amongst themselves rather than appoint a replacement. If your partner is senior at his university, can he not wangle you something there? Even if it's a step down in the short term it would be much less disruptive to your family life in the long term.

[sciencephd]

Hi Scotia,

My preference is a reduction of my full time contract to a 40 percent work load which would bring me to campus for roughly one week each month.

Surely that would be a 25% work load.

[scotia]

You may want to check the regulations: some universities have requirements that staff are expected to live within a certain distance of the university. Having said that, we have one person just returning from maternity leave into an 80% appointment. The deal is that she has to be available to attend meetings 4 days per week (which she has negotiated as three days and two half days; the same days every week so we know when she is not available to teach/for meetings). Changing that appointment to working three weeks in four would not be something we would permit because of lecture timetabling constraints and because it would dump the service work onto a colleague who would be around for meetings. Therefore, for a 40% appointment we would expect you to be here two days per week. If someone suggested being available for one week a month in a 40% appointment I cannot think of anyone who would support it unless that person was an established research superstar who might teach one class in a summer school to fulfill his/her teaching requirement.

I would normally advise that there is no harm in asking, but if you are still a probationer there may be. Signaling that you are less than fully committed/look like being high maintenance early in your career is not a good move.

[drspouse]

In my department teaching is blocked so most people have most of their teaching in one term, with the odd lecture in another term; and most teaching is team teaching, so generally people will be teaching for half the weeks one term, and two-three weeks the other term, even if they are teaching on Masters' courses. However, in addition to that there is UG and PG supervision, which at some points during the year, really does need to take place every week (or at least every other week - perhaps M and F one week, not the next week).  I've not been supervising UG projects while on sabbatical though I've been having weekly or fortnightly telephone PhD supervisions, which has been hard given the time difference, especially while one of them was doing some fieldwork in an even more easterly time zone than the UK, but worth it.

Under our model, alternate weeks on campus might be possible, but not one in four, unless you had no student project supervision.  We don't have as many pastoral responsibilities as some places, as two or three members of staff deal with most of that aspect of things. But if you are running an MA I assume you have students doing a dissertation under your supervision.

We also have a current Euro-commuter who generally spends one to two weekends a month over there, hu's partner is here for a similar number, and about once every two months hu or partner spends a week in the other country. 

And we have have a single parent working 50%, who generally works set days each week but, for example, is taking the half-term week as holiday (normally not acceptable for academics as it's in uni term).  If you were in the UK with a primary-aged child and had an arrangement that you were able, for example, to spend 2-3 weeks a term not on campus (to include the half-term week), could your teaching be blocked round that?  If PG supervisions were roughly weekly, in person in term time (and UG supervisions cannot be expected to be more than that), then you could spend the rest of the year on the continent (or, at least, all the school holidays) and your partner could perhaps spend the school term dates that are not hu's term dates, in the UK?

You'd be a single parent in the UK for about 7-8 weeks per university term (unless you had weeks of the UK university terms that were not continental terms), with school holidays at your continental base, and would be a two-parent family in the UK for all school weeks that weren't continental term weeks. If you spent the majority of UK university terms at the university, it would probably work better for the UK university than if you spent only about 25% of that time here.

[boundaryspanner]

Thanks for all your responses. They are exactly what I needed to advance my own thoughts on the situation. And they are exactly the kind of critical and reflective feedback I was hoping to get. What makes this list great is that all of you offer a variety of valuable perspectives from different backgrounds and with that, create a safe space for frank discussion.

I am especially grateful to DrSpouse's different scenarios. The single parenting scenario is part of a dual career couple with children (academic or not). The question is merely how to minimize this time. Seven or even eight weeks would be significantly less than the fourteen weeks we did over the past two years. At the core is of course the question how to keep two academic careers alive and well under the circumstances. I love what I do and I can see steady progress in my work. The same is true for spouse. This makes it the harder to just throw in the towel. I must admit, I am a bit surprised to receive advise to let my senior spouse arrange something for me. I know this is well meant but it goes counter to anything I learned from this list about spousal hiring. I certainly hope that my own work will remain good enough (and get better) so I can continue to stand on my own. I don't mean to make this comment bigger than it was but I thought it was worth mentioning. I have checked the regulations at the university and, yes, I can submit a request for workload reduction. From your feedback, I don't think 40 percent is a good way forward.

Now, all this needs to be taken in and rethought. The broader global picture figures into this as well. I just had some bad news about another US university. Nonetheless, I have much more clarity now from all your comments. Again many thanks for all your time responding to my question/situation.

[sandgrounder]

I'm sorry you took offence at my suggestion that you should try to get something at your partner's university with his/her help. I actually have always thought that the one and only advantage of the lack of transparency in hiring in most continental European countries was precisely that it tended to make solutions to your sort of problem much easier to manage than in the UK, where spousal/partner hires are next to impossible. Most European academic couples I know have seemed to manage that sort of deal but then lead independent careers.
You can definitely ask for reduced working but I don't think there's any guarantee they have to agree, just to consider your request - if you've been open with your colleagues as you say, why don't you simply have a chat with your HoD to ask what he/she thinks might be acceptable to whoever signs off on such requests. If you haven't already, I'd definitely do that before you put any request in writing particularly if as scotia warned, you are still in the probationary period. If your HoD seems unsupportive, it's probably a good indicator of what answer you'd get higher up the chain.