Wednesday, December 9, 2009

UCSD's "Hard" Furlough Closure

Over the past several years, UCSD has had a "soft" closure between
Christmas and New Year's Day. Staff were required to take vacation on
non-holidays and faculty were not required to be "in residence". I think
the idea was to save on energy costs.

This year, UCSD will have a "hard" closure over the longer interval
between December 19 and January 3. Staff and faculty will be required to
take six of their furlough days at this time in addition to the four
regular holidays. There will extremely minimal staffing for safety,
health, and physical plant issues. Faculty and staff will not be
authorized to be on campus during the hard closure, and the administration
has taken an very hard line on exceptions -- none have been given out in
my unit aside for those people out in the field.

I suppose this "hard" closure seems like a great idea to the UCSD
administration because it consolidates furlough days during a time when
many people will be away from campus, but I fear that it may cost more
than it saves. We are a science-oriented campus, and many lab and
computing facilities are time constrained, so it is a tremendous loss of
resources to simply shut them down for two and a half weeks. Moreover,
how will those faculty and staff paid by extramural funds on furlough days
(a large fraction of us) be able to work if they can't come into the lab?

It is tacitly admitted that many faculty will nonetheless come to work on
campus during the closure without authorization because they can't afford
not to. The declaration of UCSD that there will be furloughs and a hard
closure doesn't absolve people from meeting their obligations to funding
agencies and outside collaborators. The danger is, if something goes
wrong, there will be a slow emergency response due to the very minimal
staffing of the health, safety, and the physical plant.

7 comments:

Kevin said...

UCSC has a longer than usual closure this year, but recognized that not everyone could be gone:

"Due to the diverse responsibilities of academic appointees and the
flexibility in performing their obligations, it is anticipated that some
academic appointees will continue working during campus closure."

People were asked (as usual) to send email to facilities if they planned to be present, and warned about lack of services:

"
If you intend to use offices and labs during this time, please be aware
that:

1. heating will be reduced to buildings.
Should you wish heating to be kept on, please tell us in the body of the
email. That said, personnel should dress warmly in layers as locations
will likely be cold as heating only portions of buildings rarely
achieves good results.

2. custodial operations are halted
(e.g. no bathroom cleaning or resupply, trash pickups, sweeping, cleaning)

3. receiving and other operations are also halted.
Please make orders and have deliveries done well in advance of closure.
Understand that facilities responses to requests during closure will not
be met.

4. Hazardous lab work should be avoided
If intending to do wet lab work, realize there may be far lesser
infrastructure support in place to assist. Hazardous lab work should be
conducted with at least another research team member to provide
assistance or help should something go wrong."

Anonymous said...

[url=http://zarkyjstraus.ru/go/go.php?sid=5][img]http://golubojsajt.org.ua/tnxr/13a000001.jpg[/img][/url]
[url=http://zarkyjstraus.ru/go/go.php?sid=5][img]http://golubojsajt.org.ua/tnxr/30a000001.jpg[/img][/url]
[url=http://zarkyjstraus.ru/go/go.php?sid=5][img]http://golubojsajt.org.ua/tnxr/1a0000001.jpg[/img][/url]
[url=http://zarkyjstraus.ru/go/go.php?sid=5][img]http://golubojsajt.org.ua/tnxr/2a0000002.jpg[/img][/url]
[url=http://zarkyjstraus.ru/go/go.php?sid=5][img]http://golubojsajt.org.ua/tnxr/24a000002.jpg[/img][/url]

Anonymous said...

Nice post you got here. It would be great to read something more about this topic. Thank you for sharing that info.

Anonymous said...

Hello admin, I just wanted to give you a brief
heads up that your Website address: http://www.blogger.
com/comment.g?blogID=465874062213929610&postID=911333604587875865 is being flagged as a potentially malicious site in my web browser firefox.
I would highly recommend having somebody look into it.

You could possibly lose a lot of site visitors due to this kind of issue.
Best of Luck.

My webpage data recovery tools

Anonymous said...

Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it
seems as though you relied on the video to make your point.
You definitely know what youre talking about, why waste your intelligence
on just posting videos to your site when you could be giving us something enlightening to read?


Check out my web-site ... parentsinschools.com

Anonymous said...

Hey there! Would you mind if I share your blog with my zynga
group? There's a lot of folks that I think would really appreciate your content. Please let me know. Cheers

Stop by my site ... recuva data recovery

Unknown said...

here are the findings replica bags read replica bags from china see this replica gucci handbags