Pros
Health benefits are top-notch, PTO is much better than in corporate employment. Workers start with 3 weeks of vacation, 5 personal days, and 10 sick days per years, plus 13 national holidays. After 8 years of continuous employment, workers get a fourth week of vacation, and after 20 years a fifth week. Most workers put in an 8-hour days and are not expected to work after hours and on weekends, although some salaried workers must do so in order to get their work done. One nice aspect of employment here is that the faculty are among the smartest people in the world, including many Nobel laureates, and they will often engage employees in fascinating conversations not directly related to the employees’ work. The University tends to attract brainy overqualified non-traditional employees, so not a boring place to work.
Cons
While the University claims to uphold free speech and to welcome dissenting ideas, the reality is otherwise. The University harshly repressed the anti-genocide student protests that swept the campus in the spring of 2024. The President cynically equated opposition to Israel’s ongoing crimes against humanity in Gaza with the promotion of violence, and used this as a justification to call in the police to shut down the campus protests. Although the President’s opposition to dissent was directed at students, employees of the University understood the message that they had better toe the line as well. On more narrowly defined employment issues, the University falls short on providing career enhancement opportunities. If you take a job at the University and stay in it and become expert at it, you will be punished with a long-term decline in real wages, as the University year after year provides minimal raises that nearly always fall below the rate of inflation, resulting in a decrease in the employee’s standard of living the longer the employee stays in the job. Many positions have no upward career path. There is no plan to remedy this situation of career stagnation and declining real pay, which has the effect of driving the best employees to leave the University and leaving in place the most mediocre. Poor governance by the board of trustees and the last two Presidents have left the University in a precarious financial state, with a gaping structural budget deficit that requires increasing indebtedness and cyclically gets addressed with hiring freezes and staff layoffs, not at all good for employee morale.