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- Quantifying Faculty Workload: A
Proposal
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- Lee A. Ellingson, AIA, Ph.D.
- Indiana State University
- Terre Haute, Indiana
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Faculty workload has become an important issue
to many stakeholders in higher education. This includes faculty,
administrators, students, parents, and legislators. Workload policies can vary
dramatically between programs, departments, and colleges, and are often little
understood. This paper presents a case study of a workload assessment created
by a faculty affairs committee. The workload assessment addresses important
components of a faculty workload such as mode and level of courses, advising,
committee work, curriculum development, publications, and extra-curricular
activities.
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Key Words:
Faculty Workload, Course Credit Hours, Student Credit Hours, Contact Hours
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- Interest in Faculty Workload
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- Higher education is being forced to adapt
to rapid change driven by economics, politics, and technology. This rapid
change is forcing a variety of stakeholders to examine the roles and
responsibilities of college faculty. What are faculty expected to do, and how
are they compensated for what they do? These questions create an interest in
faculty workload that is both internally and externally driven. Although
faculty workload has been continuously studied (Meyer, 1998), recent changes
such as a new emphasis on independent studies, distance learning,
interdisciplinary activities, and tighter budgets are prompting the need to
re-examine workload issues.
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- Internal factors are driven by faculty and
administrators. Some of the most pressing issues are clarity of duties, merit
pay, promotion and tenure, post-tenure review, and a desire for equity. Some
faculty members may have difficulty discerning which activities receive the
highest reward. In many institutions, this is not explicit. This is especially
relevant to merit pay. How should faculty members direct and document their
efforts to receive compensation for exceptional performance, promotion, and
tenure? Fairness is another important issue. A sense of inequity can erode the
morale of faculty and deteriorate the quality of an institution. Should not
faculty be rewarded in proportion to their contribution to the institution?
Finally, administrators want to know how to do all of the above and allocate
available resources to create and maintain a first-class institution.
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- A number of external factors are
increasing the pressure on institutions of higher learning to account for
expenditures, particularly faculty payroll (Baldwin,
1997). A debate at the national level has focused on instructional
productivity and fiscal responsibility. Politicians, parents, and students
have questioned whether the educational results are worth the rising costs. At
the state level, faltering economies and high unemployment have forced many
legislatures to cut back on educational funding. Because personnel costs
dominate university budgets, state legislatures became increasingly interested
in ways to increase the productivity of personnel (Meyer, 1998).
Arizona,
Colorado,
Florida, Hawaii,
Maryland, Mississippi,
Ohio,
South Carolina,
and Wisconsin have initiated faculty
workload studies, and Florida,
Mississippi, and
South Carolina have even mandated minimum
faculty teaching workloads (New York, 1998).
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- What Some of the Studies Show
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- The majority of the studies indicate that
faculty work long hours (40 to 50 typical). Teaching-related activities
require the most time; however, the actual time spent in the classroom has
declined. Time in the classroom varies with type of institution—faculty
average a low of 6.6 hours per week at research institutions, 8.0 hours at
doctoral institutions, and 10.5 hours at comprehensive institutions (Denzine,
2000). It is noteworthy that rarely is instructor productivity measured by the
quality of student learning.
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- A study at Bradley University in Illinois
found that faculty worked an average of 54.5 hours per week (Hinrichsen, et.al.,
2002). 37.2 hours were devoted to teaching related activities (68.3% of total
time); 10.3 hours were devoted to scholarship (18.9% of total time); and 7.0
hours were devoted to other activities (12.8% of total time). The average
course credit hours taught was nine; however, contact hours may have exceeded
that number because of lab courses. Office hours were in the 4 to 6 hour
range.
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- The Comptroller of the State of New York
conducted a study at 16 selected SUNY campuses which led to the elimination of
56 academic programs because of low enrollments, costly administration, or
duplication (New York, 1998). Two of the campuses had established formal
courseload policies. New York faculty had an average of 9.9 course credit
hours, 10.8 contact hours, and an average class size of 27.3.
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- The University of Wisconsin History
Department adopted a faculty workload policy which requires a full load to be
24 student contact hours with no more than 6 separate course preparations per
year (Ehrlich, 2003). The City University of New York requires professors at
four-year colleges to have 21 contact hours per year, and professors at
community colleges to have 27 contact hours per year (Ehrlich).
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- A Select Committee on Higher Education
examined faculty activities in the State of Pennsylvania in 1995 (Clausen,
1996). These activities included teaching loads, research, public service, and
institutional service. In four-year institutions, teaching loads were
typically nine to twelve hours per week. Faculty averaged 45 to 55 hours
worked per week with the major emphasis on teaching.
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- A report by the American Association of
University Professors (AAUP, 2000) titled “Interpretive Comments on the
Statement of Faculty Workload”, recommended that undergraduate instructional
load be twelve hours per week with no more than six separate course
preparations per year. This number should be reduced to nine hours for partial
or total graduate instruction. However, the report went on to state the
preferred teaching loads for undergraduate instruction is nine hours per week
and six hours for graduate instruction.
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- The Value of an Integrative Model
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- Faculty work is traditionally divided into
three categories: teaching, scholarship, and service. How much time a faculty
member devotes to each is usually negotiated with the department chairperson.
Distribution of work between these categories may vary according to academic
discipline, home institution, tradition, type of institution, and personal
preference. For example, community colleges typically require more time
teaching than research-intensive institutions. Faculty at four-year
institutions are typically expected to participate in all three categories.
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- Many faculty activities are not easily
categorized. In other words, an activity may contribute to two or more of the
traditional categories. A study of humanities, social science, and science
faculty indicated that they integrated teaching and research 18 percent,
research and service 8.2 percent, service and teaching 8.6 percent, and all of
their roles 14 percent of the time, respectively (Krahenbuhl, 1998). In fact,
these activities may be the most productive. A fair and equitable workload
policy should account for all activities that are relevant to the traditional
categories. Unfortunately, many formal workload policies address only teaching
activities. For instance, a workload policy may require an instructor to teach
twelve course credit hours per semester (with possible release time) without
any guidance in terms of scholarship and service except for what is
“traditional” for that institution. The most equitable workload policies
should recognize and reward all expected activities and adjust to different
workload profiles. A workload profile may be 40% teaching, 40% scholarship,
and 20% service; or 60% teaching, 20% scholarship, and 20% service. Moreover,
workload policies should encourage “multivalent” activities by faculty.
(In this context, multivalent means applying to more than one category or
outcome.) If faculty are not rewarded for engaging in multivalent activities,
they may be discouraged from doing so. According to Carol Colbeck (2002), “ It
is likely that the more institutional evaluations and rewards separate faculty
activities and products into mutually exclusive categories, the less faculty
will enrich their teaching with their research, inform their research with
lessons learned from their professional service, or engage in public
scholarship that integrates teaching, research, and service.”
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- Arizona State University has created a
model that displays multiple effects of integrating faculty work (http://is.asu.edu/workload).
The model suggests that all faculty activities be knowledge related. Teaching
can be thought of as knowledge transmission; scholarship can be thought of as
knowledge creation; and service can be thought of as knowledge application. A
Venn diagram makes these relationships very clear (see Figure 1). The “sweet
spot” is overlap of all these activities and can be defined as fully
integrated work. This would indicate a high state of productivity. According
to Krahenbuhl (1998), “A climate that encourages integration of teaching,
research, and service is fundamental to the soundness of universities, and it
provides for the best use of faculty resources, and the effectiveness of the
profession, and full benefits to students and other beneficiaries of college
and university work.”
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