Paul A. Trout
English
Montana State University
Whenever my dad would catch me reading, he'd say, "If you don't have anything better to do, you could always cut the lawn" (or paint the garage, or caulk the driveway, etc.).
My dad grew up on an Indiana farm during the Depression, and "work" to him meant baling hay, milking cows, running the combine, and doing other hard chores that needed doing. He didn't seem to understand that "work" to me meant writing papers, reading books, studying for exams. These activities were worthy enough to him but they just weren't "work." The funny thing is, my hard-working dad supported ten kids by "playing" professional baseball for the Detroit Tigers (1937-52). I wonder if an Indiana farmer ever said to him, "Dizzy, if you don't have anything better to do, you could always...."
I've been thinking about the "work" I do because recently faculty workloads have been coming under increasing scrutiny and criticism. This issue is fast becoming, according to Allan Winkler, chair of the History department at Miami University (Ohio), "the most pressing concern in higher education today" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 July 1992). Bluntly put, there's a growing national feeling that professors aren't teaching enough--that there's too much tra-la-la-ing in the groves of academe.
Since this feeling is taking on the dimensions of a national crusade, and since most faculty members I know haven't seemed to notice it (one administrator says that professors are in "denial"), it's time to call attention to the topic and examine it with more care and precision than is usually found in press releases and polemical statements. Let's start by listening to what's being said about the issue by prominent people inside and outside the groves of academe.
During 1992, just about every issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article warning that faculty "productivity"--code for teaching load--is under attack. One article begins, "Professors at research universities are fighting for their reputations and their autonomy" (28 Oct. 1992). Another leads with, "higher education is under mounting pressure to monitor-and increase--the time that professors spend in the classroom" (15 April 1992). As the executive director for finance and planning for the Arizona Board of Regents puts it, "there are perceptions out there that the faculty doesn't teach enough, that the faculty spends too much time doing research, that the faculty is overpaid." A faculty union spokesperson says that given political and economic realities, faculty members will simply have to spend "more of their time teaching" (CHE, 15 April 1992).
Although a few campus leaders are trying to respond to these charges, most administrators seem to be throwing in the towel, perhaps because the issue of course loads doesn't affect them--most administrators don't teach a lick. The president of the governing board of the University of Wyoming warned faculty members that if they didn't increase teaching loads, legislators would. James R. Mingle, executive director of the state higher Education Executive Officers association, says institutions need to "inch faculty teaching loads back up, because they've dropped." A number of prominent educators are suggesting that course loads be increased to a "minimum" of four course assignments per semester (CHE, 13 May 1992).
Some universities, hoping to prevent externally mandated workloads, are already increasing them, sometimes with faculty cooperation, sometimes without. Temple University, for example, has reduced ("unilaterally" according to the faculty union) the release time from teaching that faculty members get for externally-financed research and other non-instructional responsibilities. Temple's provost flatly asserts, "one of the things we may have to understand collectively is we may have to teach more" (CHE, 5 April 1992). The California State University system, with the compliance of the faculty union, has delayed a negotiated plan to reduce a 12-unit teaching load to 9 units over several years. A union spokesperson says that given political realities, "the faculty has to spend more of their time teaching."
Despite these concessions, the debate is still being framed by nonacademics, and it's clear that federal and state agencies are getting ready to act. Richard B. Heydinger, head of a new national group called the Alliance for Higher Education, views all this with great alarm: "They're really going to go after us," he warns (CHE, 28 Oct. 1992).
At the federal level, a House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families report ("College Education: Paying More and Getting Less") recently charged that faculty members have abandoned the classroom in favor of research, and that this desertion has led to high cost and low quality.
Agencies in at least a dozen states are seeking information about the academic "work week," including the number of "contact hours" that faculty members spend with students--with an eye toward increasing the amount of time faculty spend teaching. Some states already require that a given number of courses be taught by an individual faculty member; others want to insure that faculty--especially senior faculty--teach more undergraduate courses.
South Carolina's public colleges and universities, for example, are required to report annually on the balance of graduate students and faculty members teaching lower-division courses. New Mexico and Kentucky also require state public colleges and universities to report on the percentage of lower-division courses taught by full professors, and the number of hours, per student, that faculty spend advising. Florida now has a statute that requires full-time, state-university faculty to teach a minimum of 12 "classroom contact" hours a week. A bill introduced last year in the Ohio legislature would have tied salaries directly to the number of credit-hours taught. And Arizona has concluded that it can save $30 million a year by increasing annual full-time teaching loads at three universities from an average of five classes to an average of eight. About ten other states are considering legislating minimum faculty workloads.
Obviously, there is ample reason to fear (as one pessimistic professor puts it), that "in this battle over teaching loads," "the faculty will ultimately lose" (CHE, 7 Aug. 1991). No wonder most professors are in "denial."
But this is no time for faculty to slink around the groves of academe trying to hide their heads or their workloads in the humus. This problem exists in the first place because professors--and administrators--haven't explained the nature and complexity of academic "work" clearly enough to those who pay for it. Henry Roskovsky, a former dean at Harvard, says, "higher education has done a very poor job in explaining itself. I think that we need to explain ourselves to the public, to the political sector--which we have really not tried to do." Allan Winkler says that "we have been notoriously lax in articulating to students, alumni groups, and especially legislators the various activities that are part of academic life.... We need to do a better job explaining to our various constituencies what we do with our time" (CHE, 15 July 1992).
But as I shall show, this is easier said than done.
When looked at closely and carefully, the issue of faculty "workload" is more complex than most professors and administrators want to admit. But arguing that the issue is "complex," warns the president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education "will not make much headway with politicians" (CHE, 11 Nov. 1992). I suspect he's right, but there's no getting around the fact anyone who wants to understand what goes on in the groves of academe is going to have to slog through a marshy quagmire of slippery terms, spongy categories, and speculative data.
Here's the problem in a nutshell. Nobody knows for sure what we're talking about when we talk about "course loads" and "workloads," and so no one knows for sure what is really going on with "course loads" and "workloads." There are no standard definitions of these terms and no standard ways of measuring or quantifying them. The "experts," politicians, and campus leaders now debating the issue may think they're talking the same language, but they're not.
As a result of this semantic muddle, no one has been able to collect any reliable data showing whether faculty workloads are going up, coming down, or staying approximately the same.
"Nationally,...no solid data appear to exist on trends in workloads." The widely held perception that the "average" teaching load has declined in recent years is "largely undocumented" (CHE, 15 April 1992). Robert Zemsky, director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania and head of the Pew Higher Education Research Program, admits that it is "simply impossible to document" that "teaching loads have declined."
In other words, we're not sure there is a problem.
Although no figures on this issue can he trusted, data supplied by the prestigious Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching does not support the claim that faculty members are spending significantly less time in teaching than they used to (CHE, 11 Nov. 1992). But as I've already said, there is no common standard for defining or determining what "time in teaching" means.
Because there are no agreed upon definitions of key terms and no standardized methods for assembling data on workloads, the current hullabaloo over them is largely vacuous.
But arguing that the debate is "vacuous" isn't going to go over any better with politicians than arguing that the issue is "complex." Difficult as it is to discuss this issue cogently, professors do have to explain not only how they spend their time, but why it's hard to talk clearly about the work they do.
That means we're going to have to traipse right into the semantic quagmire of academe. Let's see what two fundamental terms-"course load" and "workload"--could mean.
Obviously, the term "course load" means the number of courses a professor teaches during a given time. This would seem a pretty simple calculation, but it isn't. One professor could be teaching six courses worth 1 credit each, another could be teaching three courses worth 2 each, and a third could be teaching two courses worth 3 credits each. In the case of two professors with the same course load, one could be teaching 500 students, while the other could be teaching 50. What complicates such calculations even more is the fact that a course size of 50 might actually occupy more "instructional time" than a course of 500.
Calculating credit hours doesn't reveal all that much either. A course load of 3/3/3 can total 27 credit hours, while a course load of 2/2/2 (a third less) can total from 24 to 30 credits (depending on whether the courses are 4 or 5 credits).
Calculating contact hours is no surer guide to course load. Some labs entail several hours of contact time with students but are worth only one credit-hour. To make sense of all this, administrators use a number of variables (number of courses, number of contact hours, number of students, the level of the courses, etc.) to calculate course load and workload, but they recognize that these terms and figures are still open to interpretation.
So the claim that faculty "course loads" are declining is an exceedingly unclear claim. Does it mean that each professor is teaching fewer courses? That a majority of professors are teaching fewer courses? That some, but not a majority, are teaching fewer courses? Has the number of courses taught declined a little for a lot of professors or a lot for a few professors? And where is this happening? Everywhere, or only at some universities? How many?
To show that course-counts can be misleading even if accurate, let's assume reliable data prove that most professors are teaching one course less than they did ten years ago. Most outsiders would quickly assume that professors must also be teaching fewer students. But not necessarily.
As I explained in "Propping Up the Ivory Tower" (The Montana Professor, Fall 1992), the teaching load in my department has declined significantly during my years there (it has declined in other departments across campus as well). For fourteen years, we taught three courses each quarter, or 3/3/3. By redesigning some courses, however, we managed to reduce our load to 2/2/2--without reducing the total number of students we taught. When MSU went to semesters, we reduced our course load a little more, to 2/2, 2/3, or nine courses over a two-year span. But we did so without reducing our student-credit-hour productivity.
How did we manage this? Simple. We increased the number of students taught in each course. This means that although I am teaching fewer courses, I'm teaching just as many students. Obviously, merely counting courses leads to the erroneous conclusion that. I am teaching less when, by the most important criterion, I am not.
At this point an outsider might raise another objection. "You may be teaching as many students as in the past, Professor Trout, but you certainly can't be teaching them as well, since larger classes aren't as good as smaller classes." But this isn't necessarily so. A good lecturer is unfazed by having a few more students in class. And those of us who don't lecture have learned to use innovative teaching techniques (small-group collaborative learning, microthemes, writing-across-the-curriculum, special tutorials, norm grading, a writing center, etc.) to make sure that we teach our students well.
The claim that course loads have declined is essentially a vacuous one, certainly not cogent enough to warrant the assumption that professors "are teaching less."
What if it could be proven (which, at this stage of the debate, it can't) that a majority of professors are teaching fewer courses per year than they used to? Would this mean that their workload is less? Good question. The answer: not necessarily, and probably not.
What almost no one has pointed out is that the current debate about "workload" is seriously compromised at the outset by the fact that there is no standard measure for, or agreed upon definition of, the term "workload." What are we talking about? What are we trying to measure?
Although "course load" and "workload" are often confused, even by professionals, they are clearly not the same. "Workload" is the more comprehensive term, encompassing not only the time spent in the classroom (contact time), but the time that a professor devotes to all the duties and activities that arise from his or her course assignments, as well as time spent on other job-related activities, such as research, publication, and service.
This would seem simple enough but it's not. It is difficult, at times, to determine what activities logically arise from one's course assignments and what activities don't. What about "preparation" time? What activities are, in fact, "preparation"? What about conferences with students outside of class? What about chats with students who aren't enrolled in any of one's classes? What about the time spent writing recommendations for students enrolled in past classes? What about the time spent with students in quasi-social/academic activities, such as literary clubs and societies? What about time spent taking students to a play? What about time spent reading short stories over the student radio stations? What about the time spent supervising projects, theses, tutors, TAs, discussion-group leaders? There is simply no common agreement for determining what activities are related to "teaching."
The same problem arises when talking about research, publication, and service. Is all research necessarily "job-related"? Is all publication? All service? In other words, what activities does the term "workload" refer to? To my work on the board of the Bozeman Film Festival? To my work on the board of the Bozeman Tennis Association? For reasons I'll explain shortly, professors are inclined to view a lot of things they do as job-related when people outside the groves of academe might think these activities are "extracurricular." The State Auditor for North Carolina, who did a survey on faculty workloads, complained that "most respondents included activities many non-university employees would not consider as part of a normal "job-related" function, especially when conducted outside the usual workplace. Examples include reading professional magazines; consulting with colleagues; attending university-sponsored social, cultural, or athletic events; traveling (including commuting); "thinking"; and engaging in secondary employment" (CHE, 15 April 1992). But why should the time a professor spends "thinking" not be admissible?
There's another problem here, too. Even if it were possible to determine which activities are "job-related," it is not always clear what category they should fall under. Is this article you're reading an example of teaching, research, or service?
Questions like these are crucial to the national debate about faculty workloads. It is claimed that professors are not spending enough time "teaching." It is not clear, of course, whether this means that they are not spending enough time in class, or not enough time in teaching-related activities. The whole claim hinges on how professors, departments, and universities define "teaching time." Obviously, the more activities that are said to be "teaching" or "instruction," the stronger the evidence that professors are spending a lot of time teaching. Similarly, the more activities that are said to be "work related," the stronger the case that faculty members are working hard for their paychecks.
Although the whole debate hinges on such definitions, they don't exist. Each faculty member, each department, each college, each campus, and each state system uses different methods for determining and parsing "job-related" workload activities. Until we have uniform standards, concern about faculty "workloads" is moot and misguided.
And so, I would say, are auditors' reports on them. In 1990, the Office of the Legislative Auditor submitted to the Montana's State Legislature a report entitled "Survey of University Staffing and Workloads." To their credit, the writers of the report recognized how difficult it was to chunk activities and come up with tight definitions of what they were trying to study. Not the least of their problems was that "the various units have different criteria for defining part-time and full-time faculty appointments," different criteria for determining classified, administrative, or professional employees, and different methods for determining workloads. Yet, they industriously if somewhat purposelessly plugged on.
For what it's worth, a questionnaire sent to professors led to the conclusion that 43 percent of time at MSU is spent on instruction, but only 23 percent is spent on research. "Actual instruction hours [I'm sorry, but what does this mean?] ranged from approximately 16 hours to 23 hours per week" (p. 37). Various states and national reports indicate that faculty spend at least two to three hours preparing for each hour of lecture in the classroom (p. 37). This means that "for each hour spent in the classroom, a faculty member spends an average of 12.5 hours preparing lectures, experiments, and other learning-related activities." Obviously, these figures would have been higher if staffers had included "course development" (of future courses) under the rubric of instruction. Everything depends on how terms are defined.
Although professors are required to divide their "workload" into such categories as "instruction," "research," and "service," the many different activities that make up a professor's life can't be neatly chunked as this or that. Ideally, a professor wants to efficiently integrate his or her intellectual and professional life, and when this occurs, one's various duties and projects interweave to form a rich and almost seamless fabric. Every activity is relevant to and reinforces every other activity.
Perhaps the only really meaningful way of assessing a professor's workload is to measure the amount of time the professor devotes to weaving together the many strands of his or her professional life.
Surveys asking professors to estimate the number of hours they spend each week doing the many things related to their careers provide remarkably similar results. In one survey after another, professors report spending fifty to sixty hours each week on "job-related" activities. Montana's "Survey of University Staffing and Workloads" found that "overall average weekly hours reported by the schools varied between 45 and 53 hours." One professors writes, "the professors with whom I'm acquainted spend 60-plus hours weekly on the average, every month of the year. We're not clock punchers, and we don't (like attorneys) keep time diaries divided into 10-minute intervals because we're not worried about "billable hours" (CHE, 13 May 1992).
Yet some critics of higher education argue that these findings are actually extravagant overestimations. The State Auditor of North Carolina, for example, dismisses as "exaggerated" the findings of his own study that professors work from 50 to 60 hours a week. He charges that they include too many activities that aren't "job-related" (there we are again, sinking into the semantic quagmire).
If someone had asked me to estimate the hours I devote to "job-related" activities, I too would have said 50 to 60 hours, as a "guesstimate." Was I too exaggerating? I decided to find out. While working on this article, I did what almost no professor does--I kept a daily time log documenting the hours I devoted to professional activities (pretty conservatively defined). I did not count my time jogging, eating, sleeping, watching TV, playing tennis, going to sporting events, or even thinking. But I did include a few hours spent taking some of my students to a campus play.
I would urge all professors to keep such a time log, not just as a weapon in the growing battle over "workloads" but because the results may be startling. I know they were to me.
For the week of November 11 to November 16, I spent thirty-seven hours on "instruction-related" activities, thirty-one hours on "research and publication," and another eleven hours on "service," for a total of seventy-nine (79) hours of "work." For the week of November 17 to November 20, I spent forty-eight hours on teaching-related activities, thirty-one on publishing and research (the same as the week before) and six on service, for a total of eighty-five (85) hours of "work." I think even my dad might grudgingly use that word to describe these hours on the job.
According to the state auditor's survey) my colleagues in English spend only 54.3 hours working each week (a figure that agrees with national surveys). Was I working that much harder than they were? I don't think so. I would say that my colleagues "guesstimated" their weekly work hours way too low when responding to the auditor's survey. I think most professors do. It's time we kept reliable logs of the time we devote to weaving together the many strands of our professional lives.
Perhaps the one thing that's clear in this whole muddled debate about "workloads" is that professors work longer hours than most others and even they think they do. They work late into the night, early in the morning, on weekends, on holidays, and yes, even during "summers off," when most finally have time to read new texts, prepare courses for the next year, study at research libraries, spend long stretches of time at the word processor, etc. Maybe professors should be teaching more courses (I'll come to this in a moment), but to argue that they aren't spending enough time at professional activities is absurd.
Okay, so professors work long hours. The question still remains, are we working at the right thing? I want to examine the claim that professors should be teaching more courses.
As I've shown, "course load" is a tricky concept. Courses come in all sizes and shapes. So when critics demand that professors should "get back into the classroom and teach more courses," one should ask, why do you think so? Should everyone be teaching more or only some? Which "some"? And how many more? I may be teaching fewer courses but I'm teaching the same number of students. Should I be teaching more courses and the same number of students? Or should I simply be teaching more students? If that's what's being claimed, how many more? And why isn't the claim ever put this way?
Critics often say that if professors "teach more courses" the quality of undergraduate instruction will improve (assuming that there's a problem with it in the first place). But is this so? How will my teaching more courses and/or more students improve how well I teach them? Wouldn't it be more logical to assume that it would harm the quality of instruction? If I teach more courses and students, I would have less time to prepare lectures, read assigned books (a big part of being an English teacher), grade exams and quizzes, assess and comment on student papers, etc.
If one really wants to improve the quality of undergraduate education, it would seem logical to reduce course loads, not increase them. Take, for example, what happened in my department. Under the old system, we often had to teach three separate preparations. Given finite time and other commitments, sometimes one had to assign fewer books and papers for each course. I would contend that teaching two courses allows us to assign more books and papers in each course, thus giving students more for their money. Better to have two groups of students (39 and 39 for a total of 78) each read nine books, than to have three groups (26, 26, and 26 for the same total of 78) each read only six books. Notice that in either case the instructional workload is the same--eighteen books assigned.
Critics often contend that making professors teach more courses will improve undergraduate education by eliminating the need for TAs. I don't find this argument persuasive because it assumes that most TAs are poor teachers without evidence. No doubt some TAs are bad teachers, but there is no evidence that most, or a majority, or even many, are. Those who are bad teachers can be helped or fired. No system is infallible, which is why tenured professors can be terminated with cause, lawyers disbarred, priests defrocked, and doctors de-certified. Moreover, eliminating graduate teachers and adjunct professors would likely have in the long-run disastrous effects on the quality of undergraduate instruction. Right now these people provide good-to-excellent instruction at a very low cost, helping administrators stretch their instructional dollars. Without them, universities would have to hire more tenure-track staff at greater cost. Moreover, if future tenured professors aren't given a chance to be TAs, where will they acquire teaching skills?
I suspect that many of those who demand that professors get back in the classroom don't really think that this will improve instruction. That's not their real agenda. They really want to limit the research being done in the universities, which they claim is either trivial or dangerously radical. In either case, it's the decadent fruit of having too little to do in the groves of academe. "So let's keep those rascals busy by loading them with as many courses as their backs will bear!" This is why the treasurer of the National Association of Scholars remembers fondly a time that most academics not paid by political organizations remember with dismay, when professors were "very busy, indeed" in the classroom, "probably teaching five undergraduate courses, three composition courses among them," and "esoteric research" was done on their own time, "not on students' time" (CHE, 11 Nov. 1992).
I am the first to admit that the research that goes on in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities should be scrutinized and critiqued. But the quality of university research is a different issue from the workload issue. If there is a problem with university research, it needs to be addressed and remedied in far more subtle and cogent ways than the silly and misdirected expedient of trying to make sure that professors don't have any time to do it! Increasing workloads will not likely improve either teaching or research.
Another group of critics--politicians and taxpayers--contend that course loads should be raised not to improve instruction but to save money. The state of Arizona, for example, believes it can save $30 million annually by raising the course load of full-time faculty from five courses per year (my load) to eight.
I suspect that in the long run, this cost-saving strategy will hurt both teaching and research and will cost Arizona more than it saves. It is, after all, hard to nearly double the number of courses (and students?) professors are forced to teach without seriously injuring professional morale and damaging in other ways the quality of undergraduate instruction. If the quality of instruction is harmed, more students will go out-of-state to get a better education. And if active researchers don't have the time to pursue their projects, the quality of research will suffer. If the quality of research declines, the money the university receives from lucrative research contracts will decline. At this point even tenured professors will leave, forcing the penny-pinching universities to conduct expensive searches and to hire new faculty at escalating market rates. So-called "solutions" often create more problems than they solve.
What people outside the groves of academe must realize is that a university is a "well-intentioned if incoherent balance of interests" (Gerald Graff), countless compromises, numerous understandings, sundry accommodations and innumerable personal equations that have evolved and been negotiated over many decades to respond to thousands of local, state, and national needs. As people have learned from trying to micromanage natural eco-systems, we can never do just one thing. Well-intentioned intrusions often disturb the precious equanimity of systems in untoward, often disastrous ways.
Take, for example, the possible effects of raising course/workloads. An increase in course loads could unfairly disadvantage faculty in the social sciences and humanities, who do not have the same opportunity to secure government-funded release time as scientists do. Scientists can buy their way out of teaching, but most other faculty can't. As a result, faculty in the humanities and social sciences will have relatively fewer publications than scientists when they come up for tenure and promotion. A state legislature that raises teaching loads can address this problem by also mandating new tenure and promotion guidelines to insure that those doing the lion's share of teaching are not penalized. However, few legislatures, or even university administrations, have the stomach to drastically overhaul higher-education's evolved reward system, despite recent criticism of it. That system, though flawed, has its own evolved, internalized wisdom, and tampering with it could have more unforeseen and unwanted effects.
My thesis, then, is that the cogency of current discussions of faculty "workloads" is disastrously compromised by vague terms, shifting standards, unreliable data, and the ineluctable and staggering complexity of educational systems. The whole debate, as it is now, is muddled and vacuous. We don't precisely know what we're talking about, what we're trying to measure, what we're trying to do, and even if there's anything to be concerned about!
Although administrators rarely have the courage to lean into windstorms even when they're blowing hot air, I don't think that anyone inside or outside the academy has made--or could make--a cogent case that faculty "workload" is a problem that needs to be remedied. Administrators certainly ought not to cave in to pressures to increase them. Course loads have evolved to their present level to accommodate a wide number of various educational and social needs and demands. To raise them without being sure there's a good reason to, and without cogent understanding of the short- and long-term effects this act would have, would be nonsensical.
Yet, I would be the last to argue that the groves of academe always smell like roses. There's a lot that stinks there, too. But the ham-fisted device of making professors teach more courses/students is not likely to improve what we all would like to improve--the quality of undergraduate education at productive, research-oriented universities. This is not to concede that the present quality is bad or in need of improvement. But it is to admit that oven good instruction can be racheted up even more.
A number of educational leaders have listed things that campuses can do to improve undergraduate teaching.
*Universities should have more rigorous, standardized, and comprehensive methods for assessing teaching across departments and colleges. A comprehensive program for evaluating teaching will help universities credibly identify and reward its best teachers.
*Universities should provide more grants, stipends, and honors to faculty who are outstanding teachers. Right now money goes to researchers, not teachers. At MSU, for example, all of the fine, accomplished, and energetic teachers in the College of Letters and Sciences compete for a token award that amounts to a slap on the back. The University, however, reassures taxpayers that it is rewarding outstanding teachers. Summer support money rarely, if ever, goes to professors seeking to improve instruction. This is no way to improve the quality of undergraduate instruction.
*Universities should fund curriculum and instructional development programs and services that help teachers improve their instruction.
*Universities should establish an office of Vice-President for Instruction. Though I am reluctant to add to administrative bloat, I can justify creating another vice-president if his or her duties are specifically to improve instruction across campus. I realize that instruction is supposedly the concern of the Vice-President for Academic Affairs, but the focus of this office is rather broad and other concerns seem to claim the most attention, which will happen in a university ambitious to be a vibrant research-oriented institution.
*Universities should establish Teaching Resource Centers where professors can find support, information, aid, assistance, and advice about the many aspects of instruction.
*Departments should establish their own teaching awards. One of the best ways to improve the quality of instruction is to reward people who do it well, and to demonstrate to others that it is a prestigious activity deserving public honor. I don't know of one department at MSU that gives a teaching award (or publicizes it). Indeed, in my department all information about the quality of teaching of my colleagues is kept highly confidential, although teaching-evaluation scores could be made known without revealing anyone's identity.
*Departments should give more merit pay to their best teachers. Every department will say that it already does reward good teaching through merit pay. The question, however, is "how much?" And "how many?" In a year where I "exceeded" expectations as an "outstanding" teacher (within, I boast, a very strong teaching department), my merit-pay bonanza was $65.00. My department did the best it could, within its budget, but a merit raise of $6.50 a month, or a $1.62 a week, or $0.02 an hour (computed on my 80-hour week) is no way to encourage quality undergraduate instruction. Professors are just like administrators--we, too, respond to financial incentives, and we want to get paid well when we do a really good job at what administrators say is the most important task of the university--teaching undergraduates.
These recommendations address teaching. What about the issue of workloads? Let's say that the state legislature requires state universities to teach more courses, "by whatever means necessary." Here are some ways to do that without raising workloads across the board.
*Universities should provide extra pay to professors who volunteer to teach an extra course. I'm sure a lot of underpaid professors at MSU would jump at the opportunity. Being that after twenty years at MSU I make only $29,300, I'd certainly think about it.
*University administrators should teach at least one course each semester in their field of expertise. Most administrators, who are usually paid quite well in comparison to those who actually teach, have no teaching duties. What a sad loss of talent and squandering of resources! There would be a number of benefits from having every administrator from the president to the assistant deans teach one course each semester. It would save the university money, it would keep administrators pedagogically current, it would give students access to some of the most productive scholars on the staff, and it would probably alleviate the load of paperwork generated by bored and under-worked administrators wanting to occupy themselves and justify their high salaries (see Barbara H. Bergmann, "Bloated Administration, Blighted Campuses," Academe, November-December 1991). If there is a problem with current faculty workloads, administrators certainly played a significant part in creating it, and thus should play a practical role in solving it.
Should not everyone who works in the groves of academe help cultivate the tender shoots ripening there?