Furloughs unappreciated.

• Author: Luttmann, Rick
• Position: Letter to the editor

I was astonished to read in John de Graaf's article that Suzy Ross's coworkers at San Jose State University "appreciate" the furloughs in the 2009-10 academic year and "few want to give them up."

I, too, am a California state university system faculty member, and I don't know anybody who liked the furloughs--before, during, or after. In fact, the experiment was such a dismal failure that nobody even asked us to do it again this year. It is rare when the chancellor, the permanent faculty, the temporary faculty, and the students all agree on something--but we sure did on this!

Ironically, the furloughs did not save us any work. They just reduced our pay 10 percent. Students still got the same credit for their courses and still had to do just as much work for it. Faculty, therefore, still had the same responsibilities to see the students through the material. We just had to cram our work into a schedule over which we had less than the usual choice--work longer on certain weekdays, take more work home on weekends.

We were promised that there would be fewer layoffs of adjunct faculty if we agreed to furloughs, but in the end there were massive layoffs anyway. This resulted in fewer classes for students to choose from, more classmates in each class to...