When Lou Gainey broke his leg the first week of the semester, he wasn’t the only one worried. The students in the biology professor’s General Physiology course were concerned about whether it would be cancelled.
“It meets three times a week. I thought ‘how on earth are they going to cover it?'” said junior Katherine Letourneau.
Before students could become too uneasy, the faculty in the Biology department quickly came up with a solution.
“Automatically people began e-mailing about what should be done and offering to volunteer in any way they could,” said biology professor Patricia O’Mahoney-Damon.
Dr. Gainey and Professor Terry Theodose, the department chair, spoke over the phone and decided that they would continue the course if possible.
While many volunteered, Professors O’Mahoney-Damon, Douglas Currie, and Jeffery Walker were chosen to pick up the course load.
The three professors were chosen because their specialties in biology match up most closely with the content of the course; each will cover the section of the course with which they are most familiar.
Although the professors have experience with the subject matter, the lab portion of the course had to be dropped.
“I definitely respect them and I’m glad they stepped up because a lot of us need it to graduate,” said Letourneau.
The course is a 400-level requirement for some biology majors, and the department says its importance played a significant role in the decision not to cancel it.
The lab portion of the course is being waived for students, so that seniors who intend to graduate this year will not be hurt.
While situations like this are not common at USM, they have come up before.
Mark Lapping, USM Provost, is personally familiar with these circumstances. In 2000, he had to cease his duties as provost to deal with his failing kidneys.
Lapping said his colleagues worked with him so that he could still teach on the days he didn’t have dialysis treatments, so that he only missed two courses in all that semester.
He says this is the tendency at USM. “I’d like to believe we are as responsible and as accommodating as we can be.”
USM does not have any formal policy dealing with professors having to take an abrupt leave of absence.
Lapping says that a solution is usually worked out informally within the specific department. If it’s a longer-term leave, then the university will act to hire someone in the larger community, assuming the existing faculty can’t take on the extra load.
When professors cannot fulfill their duties, they usually go on a medical leave that does not affect their pay. If they have not already earned tenure but are on the track to it, they can petition the UMaine system to ‘stop the clock’ so that their absence will not affect their advancement to tenure in the future.
“Depending on the gravity or nature of the medical condition, sometimes it’s granted and sometimes it’s not,” says Lapping.
If existing faculty take on the extra course load to make up for a professor’s absence, they are usually compensated through overload payment.
While this semester’s General Physiology course will not look the same with both Gainey and the lab missing, the overwhelming estimation is that the best is being made of a bad situation.
“The three professors involved in teaching the class are very well regarded faculty who will, in my opinion, do a good job in teaching the class”, said Devinder Malhotra, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
Still, the professor’s acknowledge they don’t intend to fill Gainey’s shoes by any means.
“Students are not going to get the same out of the course if he were teaching it,” said O’Mahoney-Damon. “He’s had 30 years input into it, and we had a week’s notice”.
Letourneau doesn’t seem too worried though. “Dr. Pat has been doing a great job teaching it so far,” said Letourneau. She thinks the other two professors will do just as well.