Faculty workloads

Former New School chancellor David Levy took to the pages of the Washington Post this weekend to make an interesting argument: public support for higher education has led to rising tuition costs and faculty are generally overpaid for 'inefficient' teaching schedules.

Not changed, however, are the accommodations designed to compensate for low pay in earlier times. Though faculty salaries now mirror those of most upper-middle-class Americans working 40 hours for 50 weeks, they continue to pay for teaching time of nine to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks, making possible a month-long winter break, a week off in the spring and a summer vacation from mid-May until September.

Such a schedule may be appropriate in research universities where standards for faculty employment are exceptionally high — and are based on the premise that critically important work, along with research-driven teaching, can best be performed outside the classroom. The faculties of research universities are at the center of America’s progress in intellectual, technological and scientific pursuits, and there should be no quarrel with their financial rewards or schedules. In fact, they often work hours well beyond those of average non-academic professionals.

Unfortunately, the salaries and the workloads applied to the highest echelons of faculty have been grafted onto colleges whose primary mission is teaching, not research. These include many state colleges, virtually all community colleges and hundreds of private institutions. For example, Maryland’s Montgomery College (an excellent two-year community college) reports its average full professor’s salary as $88,000, based on a workload of 15 hours of teaching for 30 weeks. Faculty members are also expected to keep office hours for three hours a week. The faculty handbook states: “Teaching and closely related activities are the primary responsibilities of instructional faculty.” While the handbook suggests other responsibilities such as curriculum development, service on committees and community outreach, notably absent from this list are research and scholarship.

This is quite a specific set of charges to make, and the responses came fast and indignant, if not furious, from prominent bloggers who are also faculty members.

As I understand it, my contract is fairly common for my field; 40% teaching, 40% research, 20% service. Do the math; this means that 60% of my job performance is evaluated on terms other than teaching. I’m at an R-1 university, but I’ve seen a lot of contracts at other schools that are similar, and at schools where the research load is less the teaching load is heavier. Indeed, at UK it’s not uncommon for non-tenure track Lecturer positions to include service and research requirements, above and beyond a much heavier teaching load.

I had no idea how much faculty members worked when I was a student and never gave it much thought. Now with so many as colleagues, the whole idea that the amount of time one is expected to put in - by students, administrators, colleagues - to fulfill the role of a college professor almost has no private sector analogue, in my perception. As outlined above and in my experience, the expectations for non-teaching productivity, especially in the very important yet amorphous realm of service, take up as much time as is available. Beyond those three duties, faculty are expected to travel to and be active in professional organizations, initiate international collaborations, create centers, invite colleagues to campus - generally impact their field with some kind of 'other' visibility than standing in front of three classrooms of people 3-5 times per week. If anything, the mission has crept up and out, into places and ideas of productivity that were never part of the expectations for academics.

Anecdotally, at least, there is a wide disconnect here between this editorial and reality, especially in the context of shrinking public expenditures toward higher education. I thought of the furlough days that state employees were given in recent years, to make up for budget shortfalls. While many staff members likely welcomed a day off even if they grumbled about the loss of pay, many faculty members used the opportunity to go into the public schools and teach, emphasizing, I think, the dedication so many of them feel.