When a tenure-track faculty member requests a medical leave, HR teams need to calculate FMLA eligibility, offer a tenure clock extension, and determine which internal leave policies apply. It’s a time-consuming process with plenty of opportunity for errors, especially for large universities with thousands of faculty members at multiple campuses.
This post looks at common sticking points in faculty leave management and best practices for improving the process.
The academic calendar and nature of faculty work don’t align cleanly with leave rules designed for hourly and year-round full-time employees.
It can take up to seven years for faculty to earn tenure, so tenured faculty automatically pass the 1,250-hour test for FMLA eligibility, with few exceptions. For non-tenure-track instructors and adjunct professors, calculating FMLA eligibility is a little more complicated.
Class time is just one part of being an instructor, and that’s simple enough to track. But instructors spend time on work outside the classroom — on lecture plans, reviewing student work, and developing tests, for example. That non-class time counts toward eligibility for FMLA, but universities don’t require instructors to track their time. Instead, HR teams might estimate total instructor hours based on an IRS rule for establishing healthcare benefits eligibility: For every hour of weekly teaching time, instructors “earn” 2.25 hours of non-teaching time. That baseline is helpful for HR teams, but it may also require them to run calculations over the previous 12 months of an instructor’s employment.
Nine-month appointments raise questions about whether summer counts toward leave entitlement, how benefits continue when faculty aren't technically working, and whether pay spread over 12 months impacts unpaid leave. On top of these issues, HR teams may be working with constraints on repeatability — that is, how often a faculty member can take a certain type of leave. Calculating leave balances requires a look-back period that can be complicated by gaps in the academic calendar.
Faculty sabbaticals, research leave, and modified duties may occur in tandem with FMLA, ADA accommodations, and state leave laws. Each type of leave has a distinct approval path, often through academic affairs or the provost's office instead of HR. Coordination of overlapping leave can be cumbersome if HR and academic departments are involved in approvals, yet using different systems and forms to manage the process.
Department chairs frequently handle faculty absences informally, arranging coverage among colleagues without looping in HR. That's a compliance risk if the absence qualifies for FMLA and the designation notice never goes out.
Unionized faculty and those at public universities often have leave provisions in contracts or state statutes that exceed federal minimums, which means administrators always have to review contracts when making leave decisions.
When a faculty member’s salary is partially or fully paid via a grant, the university may have additional reporting requirements, and the organization issuing the grant may have a say in leave decisions. For example, if a faculty member is a principal investigator (PI) or key researcher for a funded National Science Foundation project, the NSF usually requires that it formally approve any leave of 90 days or more. The formal approval also applies if a PI or key researcher experiences a 25% reduction in project research time, which can occur with intermittent FMLA and other types of leave.
Accommodation requests from faculty require careful coordination between HR and academic departments. If, for example, a faculty member requests a decrease in course load due to a covered reason, administrators have to find an instructor with similar qualifications and availability to fill in.
Leave administration in higher education is overdue for an upgrade. Fragmented communication, disconnected systems, and overlapping leave types create hours of administrative work. Leave management software eliminates tedious admin tasks by automating most of the process.
With a customizable leave management platform, universities can:
Fewer admin tasks amount to dollars saved. Find out exactly how much universities can save by using software to manage leave requests.