UNC School System President Erskine Bowles plans to discuss using unpaid furloughs for University employees as a tool to help balance the budget with the UNC Board of Governors Feb. 13.

Greg Dawes, professor of foreign languages and literatures, said a lot of people don’t like the idea.

“[Bowles] just floated that idea without a whole lot of explanation,” Dawes said. “That may be part of the problem. But I know that a lot of people are upset about it.”

Despite the proposal, Jim Martin, chemistry professor and Faculty Senate chair, said the University is a long way from actually being able to impose furloughs on faculty and staff, and there is not yet any understanding of how the furloughs would be implemented.

“There are a lot of questions that need to be resolved before one could apply this tool,” Martin said.  “It needs to be looked at extremely carefully and it should really be a last resort.”

Martin said between a quarter and a third of the opinions he has heard from faculty and staff members were in support of using furloughs as a component of the budgeting process, but the remainder were opposed.

“There are very, very strong opinions on both sides of the furlough issue,” he said.

Among faculty and staff members who support the idea of furloughs, some think it will temporarily buy time in order to examine the budget more strategically, while others say they would rather take a pay cut than have some employees lose their jobs entirely, Martin said.

Helena Price, a senior in communication, said the proposal could function if implemented properly.

“It could be a workable alternative to laying off employees,” she said.

So far, however, the proposals have not been specific, and could be implemented in a couple different ways.

For example, a furlough in the private sector means shutting down operations entirely, Martin said.

“They are really talking about a pay reduction, not a furlough,” he said. “Because if we were going to have a furlough what we would do? Shut down the University for a week and have all the students go home and shut down all the research labs?”

Roughly a third of faculty members are on nine month contracts, Martin said, and nine month employees who run year-round research projects are in many respects furloughed for three months of the year already.

“Research does not stop just because the academic year stops,” he said.

Price said she thought it was unfortunate that employees have been left to speculate on what furloughs would mean to the University and how they would be implemented.

Dawes said he was “surprised and taken aback” when the issue of furloughs came up.

“It would be devastating if furloughs went through in terms of morale,” Dawes said. “It would be another way of undermining our position as tenure-track and tenured faculty members, and of course [lecturers] are in a much more tenuous position than we are.”

There is “no magic bullet or least painful way” to deal with permanent budget cuts, Martin said, which could be as high as seven percent for the next academic year.

“It would suck for the teachers,” Andrew Dooly, a senior in agricultural business management, said. “At least they wouldn’t lose their jobs though.”