Two questions for FAUW members today: how do you/your department interpret “one month of vacation,” and (approximately) how much vacation did you take last year?
This poll is now closed; the topic is on the agenda for the February 16, 2023 Board meeting.
The FAUW Blog 
I set aside one week in the fall, and one week in the spring as vacation (not necessarily going anywhere, just not working). But some years I also take a week off at Christmas too. And I usually take a day or two off here and there often if I have just worked through a weekend though…so it isn’t really a vacation day.
I interpret as 4 weeks (20 work days). But I’ve never been sure if Christmas break is included in that. I don’t usually even use up the 20 work days of vacation, so it has never been an issue.
Ideally we would be taking more consecutive holidays (for mental health). But I even find it difficult to take holidays during my research term because of service commitments (advance planning might help here, but so much happens on the spur it makes it difficult).
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Christmas break does not count toward your vacation time! The full list of paid holidays is here: https://uwaterloo.ca/human-resources/support-employees/payroll/paid-holidays
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1 week
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In my large department, the prevailing culture is “profs don’t take vacations.” The chair says he “does not want to know” the dates or durations of faculty vacations but we are expected to be here whenever anyone happens to need us. This has been the case consistently over many years with many different chairs. Whether a month is 20 days or 22 days makes no difference when everyone only ever takes the odd day or afternoon.
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This is totally unacceptable and something that needs to be taken up with your Dean, perhaps with FAUW support. This could easily affect your FAR scores if you (for example) were the only one in your Department taking your allowable vacation. Vacation days are there for a reason, and should be used.
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My department in engineering informed me that my appointment is 365 days a year. Any of my committee appointments must be fulfilled even while on vacation. So whats the point? I have never bothered taking a vacation in 22 years.
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I interpret a month as 30 work days. I usually take between 10 and 15 days off per year.
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Until now, I’ve never heard anyone think that 30 work days is a month — that’s about a month and a third! There are about 20 working days in a month, but this doesn’t matter much since we’re not punching the clock with 9-to-5 workdays.
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I wouldn’t even know how to properly take a vacation. I’ve sent emails just about every day of the year (including Christmas, New Years etc.). If I go ‘on vacation’ it doesn’t mean I’m not working – it usually means I’m working somewhere not at work/home. Many time that I’m not at work, I try to pick up some extra employment to make ends meet. Such is life.
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Nothing organized.. I just take off when I can given duties and extend conference trips by a few days on both sides for touring
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Vacation is entirely up to us to decide, both when and how much. Two weeks or two months, no one would know (or care) as long as the work is getting done.
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There is no mechanism to have someone else step in to teach my classes for me if I go on vacation, so a “real vacation”, like 2 weeks on a beach, is only possible in non-teaching terms. Even sick days require that I cancel class and schedule a make-up lecture. I am lucky to have a non-teaching term every year, but I don’t know how lecturers survive.
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Actually, there is at least 2 weeks at the end of August (it used to be about 3 weeks, but that seems to be shrinking to closer to 1.5 weeks with the later winter/spring term starts), and usually at least a week between other terms, plus reading weeks. It’s easy to find a total of a month, but it’s not that flexible, which is why it’s good that we’re guaranteed at least one non-teaching term every 2 years if we want it.
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It would have been really interested to see this poll done with a further division by rank. I suspect (with no proof) that faculty in precarious employment situations (i.e. pre-tenure or pre-continuing) are very reluctant to take any meaningful vacation because they fear it might hurt their future employment situation.
I have no idea how my department interprets it. I view it as 20 days, with the caveat that I don’t actually keep track of my vacation carefully enough to ensure I don’t take too many or too few.
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One month vacation sounds like on average 30 days for me, but I was told it’s only 20 days. Because of that, I took 20 days of vacation in 2022.
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For me, I don’t have flexibility on most of my days, therefore I do have to take vacation to not be assigned.
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Lecturer teaching year-round. I took 13 days of holiday in 1, 2, or 3-day allotments.
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I sincerely hope you formally carried over the two weeks of unused vacation (available only to lecturers teaching all 3 terms) …
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We don’t track faculty vacation time. As a Chair I just trust my folks to be honest and get their work done. I’m pretty positive that no one is taking advantage of that, and that most are likely not taking the time they’re fully entitled to.
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I don’t actually know how my dept counts vacation days; I always figured “about 4 weeks” though never have officially declared vacation.
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These comments are extremely depressing and speak to the toxic productivity culture rampant in academia. I recognize my own culpability, as I have never taken an actual vacation in 10 years except during my second maternity leave where I tacked a month of vacation onto the end of my leave to essentially extend it by a month to reach 8 months away. I opted to take a shorter mat leave despite having twins the second time because I resented how much I had to work during my maternity leave (supporting grad students, etc.) when I was only topped up for 6 months. What was the point? I have even continued to teach and while on research leave. Realistically, who can step in and provide guidance to my students, complete necessary reporting and accounting duties for my grants, maintain relationships with my research partners and generally keep the boat pointed in the right direction if I step away? Still, we really need to start modelling a better work life balance for our trainees and junior colleagues. If no one takes vacation, then no one CAN take vacation because of the consequences for merit and T&P evaluations where we are compared to our colleagues? The culture of overwork and always being available to students and colleagues is something we need to change if we want to make any progress on EDI goals.
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I’m posting a response here because I have similarly been strategic about whether I take vacation due to family planning. It was not until my family plans weren’t working as anticipated that I actually started taking vacation — because I was burning out after NOT taking vacation for > 2 years just in case I would need to carry forward the time for mat leave. So: There is also a mat leave issue (where 6 months did not feel like enough time when I first became a parent). My partner is disabled, so my income is our sole income, and we were concerned whether our household could afford a significant pay cut if I stayed home > 6 months without having vacation to extend the time.
Re: toxic work culture, I admired when our last dean tried hard to model taking breaks. I’m not sure how successful she was at getting people to change their behaviour. Something that I have found is that it’s scary to trust other people to step in when I need a break from teaching/service (like during sabbatical), but people managed. I own that at times, I may be my own enemy when it comes to taking breaks. Perhaps this happens with other academics as well (especially females; I have not yet read the book Burnout by Nagoski & Nagoski (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/592377/burnout-by-emily-nagoski-phd-and-amelia-nagoski-dma/), but my partner has and highly recommends that I read it! So I’m passing along someone else’s recommendation).
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I managed 16 days of vacation in 2022, with a concerted effort to take those days. I have not taken any lieu time for the weekend and evening events that I support, the evening exams, the conference travel that falls on the weekend, working while sick, etc. If I were to do a true accounting, I would have taken negative days of vacation in 2022, which was by all accounts a “good” vacation year relative to the past 10 years. And being a lecturer, with a heavy service load and pre-continuing for much of that time, absolutely fed into this situation.
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I put “something else” because I don’t really know if it’s 20, 21, 22. It doesn’t matter. I take about a month in total, and I was told that it does not include the time that campus is closed between Christmas day and New Years day, so really, I get a bit more than a month. (Many “normal” white-collar jobs require you to use a few vacation days to be off between Christmas / New Years.) And yes, I always make sure that I take my allotted vacation each year, and that includes not checking any university email / communications at all during those stretches, usually 1 week here, 2.5 weeks there, and several shorter breaks.
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I should also add that I’m a continuing lecturer teaching year-round, and don’t have any research component to my job. It’s pretty easy to manage my time so that I get enough vacation, which brings me back rested and enthusiastic. Since I still enjoy my job after all of these (almost 20) years, I work with energy and efficiency, and stay ahead of the game so that when the next break comes, I can take some true time off. This truly is a dream job compared to many jobs, at least for me.
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I’ve honestly never thought about what “one month” (or in my case since I’ve been here more than 10 years, “one month plus one week”) of vacation means. No one I know has been asked to keep track of it so it’s never come up.
As for how much I take, excluding paid holidays I try to take both Fall and Winter Reading Weeks off as well as a couple of weeks in August and a few days here and there, but I’m not always successful. Since I’ve never kept track, I have no idea what the average year looks like but I would guess around 4 weeks.
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I am glad to see that others reply: “profs do not take vacations”. Even when away from campus, I have internet and work with colleagues and graduate students. This is similar to ‘weekends’.
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Let’s change this culture. Just take the time off. Turn on the autoreply and resist the temptation to log in. It will work wonders. And the consequences of disappearing for 1-week or better 2-week periods (with appropriate planning of course) will be far, far less than you had feared, and the benefits will be immense.
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Agreed!
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+1 to “Let’s change this culture” on this thread
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I have no idea what one month of vacation actually means and I don’t keep track. As someone earlier has mentioned I think if you added up all my time it would be negative vacation. There are a few days here and there where I do no work but not very many of them. I did try to take a real vacation in 2022 but it didn’t work out very well as I had to attend ‘urgent’ committee meetings, review thesis, answer emails etc etc. Our ability to have remote meetings has probably made this worse. Part of the problem with taking vacation is that the work does not go away and so life is worse before you leave and after you get back if you don’t do anything in between. Therefore you work. It is self preservation
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I had the same experience with trying to take a one-week vacation between two teaching terms: I had to review a thesis (the second round, after trying to finish the first round quickly to avoid exactly this) which involved meeting with the student, had a meeting related to service, and a planning meeting for a course in the next term that was scheduled on short notice. All this despite planning to take time off for while! This really needs to change, it is terrible for my mental health.
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The question about numbers of days is most likely moot. While faculty may exempt from some or all of the provisions of the Employment Standards Act (ESA), the notion of vacation time in the ESA is likely what is meant by “1 month” as well as “one month plus one week” for those working more than 10 years. The basic idea in the ESA is that vacation is supposed to be taken in week blocks. Thus, “one month plus one week” means 5 weeks, and that vacation should actually be taken in units of weeks and not a day here or a day there. The idea being that it is too hard to be more specific given the variety of how work is scheduled for people. If the MOA meant “work days” of vacation, then it would have specified it as such, but instead, it follows the ESA convention of weeks, and a month is going to be viewed as 4 weeks.
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I’ve always interpreted it as five weeks (so 25 days). Last year I took two full weeks of vacation (in addition to the holiday break) and I’m not entirely sure about the rest. It was the year my tenure package was due and at a certain point in the fall I stopped tracking how many days I took off to care for my two little kids when they were home sick.
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I have never heard about the number of vacation days. I usually get one week vacation in which I am unplugged entirely.
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I do not know of any official interpretation of “vacation” for faculty members. Nor do I recall anyone mentioning that they were officially taking any.
Personally, I take a time I consider reasonable — but only when my schedule permits.
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I interpreted it as 30 days where you can disconnect from everything work related.
I took zero weeks vacation last year. There were lots of commitments that I couldn’t take days off.
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I think I’ve formally taken vacation time maybe twice in the last twenty-three years, and not at all in the last ten. My department isn’t very busy during the summer months, and I’ve never been able to afford to go anywhere. Even when I did take vacation, I spent the time doing home repairs.
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My ‘vacation’ has invariably been a research trip to the UK. Recently delivering the opening lecture of an Academic conference in Lebanon. The several Sr. Visiting Research post-docs have much enlarged my research and international friendships. Teaching young people the greatest literature of the UK and immersing myself in the 19th-century British press are joys surpassed only by collegiality at UW and with UK academics connections with children and grandchildren. UW’s policy of encouraging us to commercialise our research and support it with our own salary has been a major building block. Recent WOKE attacks along with ‘Colonialist’ and ‘Racist’ accusations, and the self-contradictory ‘no such thing as truth’ ideology are a play of academic freedom of speech. The self-contradictory ‘No such thing as freedom of speech’ ideology
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I take vacation when I’m not teaching. I’ve never taken “formal” vacation time. Yes, I teach all three semesters but that still leaves a significant break in-between, not to mention reading weeks. I will also go to conferences as possible. Finally, my schedule even allows for occasional other vacation breaks. Overall, I have quite a bit of flexibility and much more vacation than when I was in the corporate world.
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As a lecturer, I find it hard to take any vacation during a year in which I teach all 3 terms, and I definitely don’t ever do so in a week-long “block” of time that doesn’t also include holidays, etc.
In the year in which I have a 1-in-6 term off, our department’s practice is to require only service during that non-teaching term. However, I find myself working on course preparation and revisions throughout that term. In addition, it’s my only time to attend conferences and to accomplish much uninterrupted research or writing time. All of this speaks to the flaw of not having a work-load agreement with the employer and not respecting the research and academic independence of teaching-focused faculty.
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I usually take about 4 – 5 weeks of vacation – <1 week during Reading Week, <1 week in fall, 3-4 weeks in summer. I do not count the exact number of days. But I regularly work outside of normal workdays (early mornings before 8am, evenings after 5pm, during the weekend) and consider my overtime work as offsetting any potential days above the "one month of vacation". I have a wife and a young family, and I want the stay sane. I want to keep all of this and having time off is important for this.
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I’m not sure how my department interprets one month vacation, and I took less than 1 week of vacation time. I end up teaching in all three terms, which means there never seems to be an opportunity to actually step away from this job for very long. Even over the holiday closure in December/January, I’m at home marking final exams, preparing to teach the next term, and trying to catch up on work.
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While we’re at it, can we clarify what a year means when it comes to vacation policy? Does it run from January to December, July to June, May to April, or does it depend on when a faculty member first started? I once asked my chair, FAUW, and HR, and nobody knew. HR had some rule that applied only to staff, not faculty.
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The MoA specifies “contract year,” which depends on when you started. For most faculty, this will be July 1. It does certainly make things more complicated!
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Thank you. Does promotion to Associate and Full start a new “contract”? Or does it always go back to the date one first started as Assistant, even for someone who’s been here 20 or 30 years?
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My recollection is that the second probationary term starts a new contract. I think that one is always July 1. I remember signing that contract. Then tenure is *not* a new contract; the university can unilaterally offer better terms (you applied for them) and you don’t have to sign anything to agree them.
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In Europe, just about everyone takes a month in August. They seem just as productive as those of us who take two weeks or less. This is helped by the fact that everyone is off. Most universities even in North America do not have committee meetings May-August. It would encourage faculty to take vacations if the administration declared a policy of no meetings in July and August, and stated vacation ( as well as conferences) as part of the reason.
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Here’s the dilemma.
On one hand, nobody wants the hassle of micromanaging vacation. Faculty don’t want to be required to declare which days we’re on vacation and which days we’re not. Chairs don’t want the administrative burden of enforcing that when the reality is that almost nobody takes anywhere close to their formal entitlement.
On the other hand, when an urgent or important issue or task comes up, you have nothing to point to if there’s no way to declare that you’re on vacation. The nature of our jobs is that for many tasks and issues, there’s no obvious substitute person to deal with it. Our tasks come from many different people (chairs, students, colleagues, grant administrators, researchers external to Waterloo, etc.) and there’s no clear boss or secretary who could redirect those tasks to an appropriate substitute.
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I usually tack a vacation on to a conference trip. With no travelling during the pandemic I basically took no vacation other than a couple of long weekends at a friend’s cottage. However, I have stopped working on weekends. I don’t read UW email on weekends. I purposely did not install the Outlook app on my phone.
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