OU's pilot parental leave policy could help recruit faculty and assure students are getting the education they're paying for if the policy is made permanent, but the cost of the program may outweigh the benefits.
Thanks to Ohio University’s pilot parental leave policy, the first weeks of baby Elise’s life were much less stressful for her parents than they could have been.
Elise was born last August to Talinn Phillips, professor of English, and her husband, Daniel Phillips, professor of physics and astronomy. They were both able to take time off during the Fall Semester after Elise’s birth, but the policy was not in effect when they had their son, Jack, who is 4 and a half.
One of the Phillips’ concerns after having their own children is the ability of professors who are new parents to teach their classes when they may be dealing with sleep deprivation and higher levels of stress.
“Students are not well-served by faculty members that are struggling to scrape together the shattered scraps of their brains to come into class,” Talinn said. “No matter how talented and dedicated a professor is, you have to have something to dedicate, and as a new parent, that can be difficult.”
The pilot parental leave policy allows OU full-time faculty and administrators who have just had a baby or adopted a child 12 weeks of parental leave. The university pays for six of those weeks at the employee’s current salary rate and the other six come out of the employee’s accrued vacation time or sick leave, according to OU's Human Resources website.
Full-time contract employees at OU get 15 days of sick leave per academic year, but if they don't use all of those days one year they transfer over to the next, according to the OU faculty handbook.
Since the policy has been in effect, there have been a total of 128 enrollees, costing the university a total of $833,564 for the 752 weeks of parental leave, Chief Human Resource Officer Colleen Bendl said in an email.
The cost is a major factor in whether or not the university will make the policy permanent, but if it does become permanent, it could help ensure the quality of university professors’ lesson plans, Chair of Faculty Senate and Professor of English Beth Quitslund said.
“It is really hard to be productive the first couple of months after a kid is born and quite a while after that, but the first months are brutal,” Quitslund said. “My husband is also a professor at OU and I know that he wasn’t making any more sense in his classes than I was making in mine.”
The policy is in place for fathers and parents who are adopting children as well as pregnant mothers because it gives them the ability to bond with their new children, Quitslund said.
“One of the basic things you can do to promote equality in terms of child rearing is to make sure the spouses also take time off so that they’re not gendering the division of child labor,” Daniel said.
Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requires employers to allow for 12 workweeks of leave for cases of birth or adoption for employees who work 30 hours or more, but the act does not require the institutions to pay for the leave, according to the act's website.
At Kent State University, for example, only professors who are mothers are able to take off time for their pregnancy or childbirth and that time has to come out of their accumulated sick leave credit or they go unpaid, according to its faculty handbook.
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The policy has been extended two times since it started on Jan. 1, 2013, and now the Benefits Advisory Council is looking at whether the policy will be permanent after it is scheduled to end on June 30.
“I’m quite disappointed that the pilot program hasn’t been made a permanent already,” Talinn said. “Whether we have parental leave or not comes into play when we’re recruiting and retaining faculty and staff. I recently had a conversation with a candidate who was very pleased to know parental leave was available for fathers, as well as mothers.”
@KyraCobbie
kc036114@ohio.edu
