A long-awaited email landed in Nicole LaDue's inbox earlier this year. It was a survey sent by NIU's Presidential Commission on the Status Of Women. The group wanted to know how NIU employees felt about FMLA, or the Family Medical Leave Act. FMLA is a federal law that lets qualified people take leave for 12 non-consecutive weeks without threat of losing their job. FMLA applies to any eligible organization, including universities.
LaDue is an assistant professor in the Geology and Environmental Geosciences Department at NIU. She once took leave through FMLA to have her daughter, Theia, in 2016. She said she knew a lot of people were happy to see someone asking about leave.
"Because we were all very excited that this was happening," said LaDue.
FMLA is important to employees like LaDue because it's one of the only avenues to take job-secured time off from work. The law is used for everything from sick leave to military-related time off. Illinois has no mandated law specifically for parental leave, whether it's paid or not. It's up to the employer to make these policies.
"It just is mindboggling that we don't have a national strategy for this," said LaDue.
If employers don't offer any options for families then FMLA can be a safety net. LaDue is one of the more than 500 employees who gave their two cents about what leave looked like for them at NIU. The survey became a report, submitted to University President Lisa Freeman in August 2018.Andrea Radasanu is a member of the Commission and a professor at NIU.
"We had sort of heard rumblings from, anecdotally, from fellow faculty and fellow employees at NIU about possible inconsistencies in the application of the FMLA," she said.
These rumblings go back more than a decade, according to the report. It says employees found the application of FMLA inconsistent, unfair, and confusing. Radasanu said 80 percent of the people who took FMLA at NIU did it for childcare reasons. Almost all of these cases were women.
"One of the outcomes of doing the survey was to suggest that maybe we require more than the simple implementation of this federal law," Radasanu said. She added FMLA needs to strike a balance between customization to the person and fairness to the institution.
LaDue said mothers working in academia have an especially challenging time balancing family and career.
"One of the sort of secrets of academia that people don't really talk about is that many women time their pregnancies so that they have their babies in May so then they don't have to deal with FMLA and try to figure out leave." said LaDue.
LaDue said she worked with her department chair to draft what her leave and work plans would look like. She said she was intimidated to start the conversation at first because it's not standard practice in her department.
"I will be -- when tenured -- the fourth female tenured faculty member in the fifty years of my department and I'm the first person in the history in my department to take family leave for pregnancy," said LaDue.
LaDue and her partner are both educators. 2016 was a particularly hard year for teachers. The state's public universities were in the middle of a budget impasse. LaDue said the pair couldn't afford for both of them to take time off for their daughter. She was the primary caregiver during her time off. LaDue said she had help from family members at that time.
"Which is also unusual in academia. Most academic families have to move to where the job is because there's so few positions, and when they get there they don't have family there, so they don't have these networks," she said.
LaDue said she had one of the best case scenarios for her leave compared to some. She said it wasn't without its challenges, because she didn't know the rules of leave, and she felt Human Resource Services (HRS) wasn't clear on how to implement the policies.
"So a lot of the information I gained from my various options were really from my friends, who had been through it recently," said LaDue.
LaDue said the lack of clarity about how to balance work and personal obligations affects female professors especially hard.
"It just adds a lot of stress to a circumstance where females are underrepresented at the professoriate level," she said. "They don't tend to stay in the professoriate level. They're very highly underrepresented at full professor status. And part of it is this kind of feeling that you're creating more work for others, that you're taxing the system and the policies are just unclear and you don't want to step out there and make waves basically."
Radasanu said the Commission's report has elements that pertain to everyone.
"We don't only take on policies that help women. And we think this is an excellent example of how our research helps absolutely everybody," she said.
Since leave under FMLA is unpaid, sometimes employees at NIU can use vacation days or sick days to keep a source of income. Radasanu said these options for payment aren't available to everyone.
"Most of those sorts of paid leave [options] are not available for fathers -- new fathers -- and they're also not available for adoptive parents, and they're also not available for others who otherwise fit under FMLA," she said.
The Commission will research tenure clock-stopping policies in the months to come. Tenured educators can get a higher salary and access to voting or recommendation groups. Tenure can mean job security and research flexibility. Faculty on the tenure track are evaluated by their school after usually six years of probation. Faculty can ask to adjust the six years if they plan to take a leave. Tenure clock-stopping policies adjust this probation period.
LaDue said career advancement policies as they relate to taking leave is a complicated discussion in higher education.
"So this is something that a lot of institutions wrestle with and NIU is no different from any of these other institutions," she said.
LaDue took leave under FMLA in 2016. She chose not to stop her tenure clock or adjust her probation period during that time. She wondered how taking time to care for a baby would affect her career path.
"So I wasn't clear on when I had to notify the institution of whether I wanted to stop the tenure clock -- that's not written down," she said.
LaDue said written guidelines about tenure clocks and FMLA leave would be helpful.
The 2018 report about FMLA is at least the second time in eight years that dissatisfaction with work-life balance policies have been highlighted at NIU. The Commission's report builds on one from 2014 called Navigate, Balance and Retain.That report sampled a smaller pool of people and focused on STEM faculty. Data for that report highlights issues that women in STEM have faced since 2010. Some in the report say the culture at NIU did not support faculty facing unseen personal obligations. It also included policy recommendations.
The full 62-page study, Navigate, Balance and Retain (NFS 1015932) was not available online as of 11 a.m. Dec. 12.
Both the 2014 and 2018 reports highlight the need for additional training for relevant staff about worker's rights. Chris McCord was the principal investigator for the STEM report. He's currently the acting provost at NIU.
Records show select and modified recommendations related to FMLA and the tenure clock were endorsed by the Faculty Senate in February 2015. There is no online record of the February recommendations reaching the executive session of the University Council which has the power to enact those policies.
Richard Siegesmund was a member of the Faculty Senate at the time. He was also the chair of the Faculty Rights and Responsibilities Committee during the 2014-2015 academic year. In an email, he said he didn't know if the findings ever reached the Council. He said it wasn't the right time for the university to act on the findings of Navigate, Balance and Retain. He noted there was no capacity for HRS to respond at the time, and that NIU's program prioritization absorbed most of the university's time.
Both reports highlight employee frustrations with work-life balance. Lora Ebert Wallace is a sociology professor at Western Illinois University. WIU was mentioned in the 2018 report as a model for paid leave benefits. Wallace said she was drawn to WIU because their contract laid out family friendly career policies.
"I was really happy to see that there would be that amount of clarity," she said.
Wallace said universities can retain educators with clear policies and benefits.
"I think having work conditions that are clear, having work conditions that are supportive of a diverse faculty -- people with different life situations -- and knowing that you have the support, both, sort of in an abstract way but also very tatically in your contract, that that is something that is defintely a positive that we would have on our side," Wallace said.
Wallace said balanced work-life policies are a workers' rights issue that can apply to any sector.
"These types of policies recognize that a worker isn't just a worker," said Wallace.
The university responded publicly to the report in an NIU Today article. The statement says the Provost's Office will research tenure and leave-related policies and practices at comparable schools. The Provost’s Office includes HRS. Radasanu said the Commission was extremely encouraged by the university response so far.
"I think for the rest of it, developing family leave policies, paid or unpaid – changing the stop-the-clock policy and so forth, that is just going to take a little bit of time," said Radasanu.
An NIU spokesperson said a deadline has not been given to the Provost's Office for their research into tenure policy changes. They said that research pertains to FMLA "in general," and they weren't aware of a specific person or committee in the Provost's office or HRS tasked with looking into the Commission's recent report. NIU has been negotiating about tenure policies with the faculty union since its creation two years ago. Talks are still ongoing.