Janet is currently exploring the implications of the California university furloughs. If you haven’t been paying attention, California is so grossly dysfunctional that the state government has had to order all employees– including university faculty– to take 9% of their work time off as unpaid “furlough” days, in order to cut costs enough to have an approximately balanced budget.
Janet’s comments, and the stories about the impact on scientists reminded me of the Great Government Shutdown of 1995, when I was a grad student working at NIST.
That shutdown was the result of a game of “chicken” between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich over the Federal budget. Clinton refused to agree to the budget measures being put forward by the “Contract With America” class in Congress, and as a result, no budget was passed, and the government officially shut down.
Of course, you can’t really shut down an entity like the Federal government– too many of the services they provide are critical to the day-to-day operation of our society. As a result, there was a provision that allowed employees who were categorized as “essential” to continue to work even through the shutdown. At NIST, this meant that “essential” employees were put on a list and approved to enter the facility even when it was closed down.
The designation of “essential” personnel was left to the individual laboratory directors at NIST. The director of the Physics laboratory, Katherine Gebbie (a really terrific person who did right by her lab), delegated this to the individual group leaders, with the end result being that just about everybody in an experimental group like ours was designated “essential.”
The shutdown lasted about three weeks, and by the end of that time, the parking lot at the Physics building was basically full. There were a few people who didn’t come in at all, but pretty much all of the physicists kept working more or less as usual. There were some things you couldn’t do, of course– no equipment purchases, and the like– but I spent most of the shutdown as an “essential” graduate student, playing around with lasers just like I did the rest of the year.
Other lab directors were less accommodating. The Chemistry lab parking lot was basically empty the whole time, making a stark contrast. I don’t think there was ever any official response to the whole thing, though. Katherine was still in charge the last I knew.
I hope that the California situation manages to resolve itself with as little fuss. I suspect, though, that the California polity is comprehensively broken enough that things won’t get better for a while yet.