Types of Leaves:
Sabbatical
Departments do not receive SalSav returns for faculty sabbaticals. Faculty are eligible for a sabbatical at the start of their 13th consecutive semester (TENURE?) and should be considered when the department is making their budget decisions.
Faculty are fully paid for their one semester sabbatical leave.
Faculty are paid 50% for their AY or Calendar Year (CY) sabbatical leave—these savings are returned fully to the Dean.
Faculty are required to return to active duty after a sabbatical leave for one year per BOT guidelines. In some cases, research leaves would apply as active duty.
Sabbatical dates are based on pay periods and not the Grad payroll dates like AY Effort and Course Buyouts are.
Fall Dates are from 8/23/24 to 2/22/25; Spring Dates are from 2/23/25 to 8/22/25; AY Dates 8/23/24 to 8/22/25; CY Dates are 2/23/25 to 2/22/26
Fellowship/Research Leaves
Fulbright (treated as research leaves on active duty)
Other Leaves
Voluntary Schedule Reduction Program
Medical
Unpaid Personal Leave
Faculty activities that generate Salary Saving returns*:
Unless otherwise noted, the split for salary savings for the activities listed below are 30% to the Dean and 70% to the department, the department may choose to split the 70% further between the faculty members.
Course Buyout
Course Buyouts – coded to a 5/6L grant or Foundation account (not the same as an internal buyout: i.e., adjunct rate)
No salary savings if the faculty supplement their salary from theirs/department’s salary savings account.
Course buyouts run from 8/23 to 1/5 for Fall and then 1/6 to 5/22 for Spring. 10-month employees are from 8/23 to 6/22
Minimum Buyout Rates:
Faculty with a course load of 4 courses (e.g., Social Sciences, Humanities, MATH, STAT, LING): 12.5% of their AY salary and fringe per course.
Faculty with a course load of 3 courses (e.g., Psychological Sciences): 17% of their AY salary and fringe per course.
Faculty with a course load of 2 courses (e.g., Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Marine, Earth Sciences, Physics): 25% of their AY salary and fringe per course.
NTT Buyouts are a minimum buyout rate is 14.3% of their AY salary per course (as of 10.16.19), based on the CLAS normal load of 7 courses regardless of department.
Academic Year Grant Effort
Academic Year (AY) Effort – still results in SalSav but they may be teaching all their courses and also dedicating time to their grant(s).
The distinction between a course buyout and AY effort is important as not all departments split the funds the same depending on the coding purpose.
For example, Public Policy gives all the SalSav returns directly to the faculty member for AY Effort, while a Course Buyout SalSav is returned to the department.
Fellowship/Research Leaves
Additional Information:
Salary Caps for Grants:
Certain Federal grants have a salary cap percentage that a faculty member cannot go over when buying out of a course or coding AY Effort.
DHHS/NIH/NEH/AHRQ/SAMHSA/CDC/HRSA/USDA
CLAS Policy currently is to allow cost sharing on the department’s instruction account, the faculty member is not required to cover the cost from other sources.
The SalSav return remains only the percentage coded to the grant.
Faculty members do not receive SalSav returns if they are coding themselves to a different 2L account (e.g., their personal SalSav account), the department will still receive the buyout funds
FAQs:
Question: If someone is on a research leave – can they can still earn their full three months in the summer? (Assuming they are not maxing their 12/12ths from somewhere else)
Answer: Yes, research leaves are considered active service/a workload adjustment of sorts, so are only applied to the contract period, so the employee would still be considered “off contract” in summer and have available effort to earn summer salary (assuming that the terms of the research leave don’t also include effort and pay in the summer, which I believe we’ve seen in rare instances in CLAS).
Question: Is this still the case if someone is on a voluntary or a personal leave?
Answer: Usually, when an employee is on a personal leave, they are not meant to have any active effort through the university as they’ve said that they need to take a fully unpaid leave of absence from their university role. It may be contradictory to then employ them on special payroll during the time period of a personal leave. If you have a specific case upcoming here, let me know if you have more details and I can vet further with Sarah Croucher, but typically, I wouldn’t expect an employee be hired on SPAR while on a full unpaid personal leave.