Top Alaskan administrators to take unpaid leave

The University of Alaska announced recently that scores of top university administrators will take five to 10 days of mandatory unpaid leave as part of a larger plan to pare spending, writes Jeannette Lee Falsey for Alaska Dispatch News.

The furloughs for 167 employees in leadership positions throughout the university system are a response to the state budget crisis, said University of Alaska President Pat Gamble. Gamble called the furloughs “appropriate” in light of the 5% tuition increase approved by the University of Alaska Board of Regents in February and said he “hasn’t received any hate mail” over the decision.

He said he’s most concerned about retaining the professors and researchers who are the core of the university system. “If those people get driven away because the ‘Lower 48’ is hiring and we lose them, it will take a decade or more to get all those people back into Alaska and rebuild the university’s reputation,” Gamble said in a phone interview.
Full report on the Alaska Dispatch News site