summertime sadness: academia $ edition

Post date: 2018-04-27 03:14:34

I am a tenured professor at a large, R1 state flagship university, a huge place with many multi-million dollar renovations and innovations constantly going on. This is one of the major state universities in the nation. We faculty do not get a summer salary. (Staff does, not faculty.)

Because it is a state university, trustees are responsible to the taxpayers who pay our salaries. (As they should be). However, an outcome of this is that faculty do not get paid in the summer. Because according to the taxpayers we supposedly don't work in the summer.
Now, in the early days of my career I was able to save and put money away for the summer. I no longer can do this as my cost of living has risen and my salary has not kept up. This year, sudden costs have depleted my savings and I have no summer funds. I go into debt to live. I am constantly worried about paying my mortgage by August. I can't travel or do anything for pleasure to take a break after a hard year without going into insanely more debt. I used to teach in the summer but those classes now are harder to come by as more grad students need to teach them.
I am bitter because in recent years the University is encouraging PhD students to defend their dissertations in the summer. They get a tuition break to do so. I have five graduate students this year who begged to defend in June or July.
This means I spend days reading and preparing for their defense, which in itself lasts two hours (so with going in for it realistically is half a day.) This is time I don't spend on my own (unpaid) research. But if I say no I am the only one on the committee who says no and I mess up the PhD trajectory.
The U is counting on our professionalism and our strong caring for my grad students. But I am doing this without pay. I am livid and feel exploited. And I am not an adjunct or a grad student employee, I have tenure. And I am the absolutely only one of my colleages who is upset about this.
What I do now: 1. Tell the grad student I don't do summer defenses 2. Listen to them panic 3. Say yes because I care about them, and want them to finish so they can go on to jobs etc in the fall because i am invested in them. 4. Work for free for at least 3 days.

I would like to know how other academics feel about this, how you deal with it at your own institution and whether it's even an issue at other state universities.
As this is anonymous and I can't comment: Please answer this NOT from norms of private corporate work culture but only from academic work culture which is its own medieval strange world. Thank you.

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