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IN THE six years that I have been head of the department of foreign languages and literatures at Purdue University, my colleagues and I have conducted a large-scale recruiting program, hiring more than twenty new faculty members. The variety of people with whom we have dealt has been enormous: we have conducted searches in Spanish, French, German, Russian, classics, Chinese, and Japanese; we have interviewed candidates who ranged from graduate students with nearly complete PhDs to established full professors; we have dealt with specialists in literature, literary theory, theoretical linguistics, applied linguistics, and some things in between. Virtually every candidate has asked some variant of a single question. This question does not have to do with salary, benefits, or even what it is like to live and work in the cornfields of Indiana. No, the single universal query has been, What will my teaching load be? Sometimes the candidates frame the question around “course reductions” or “released time” for research or administrative service, but they are all concerned with how much teaching will be required. As I explain below, I believe that to talk of “teaching load” (as opposed to “workload”) is misleading. But it is significant that this is the most consistent and pressing interest of prospective new faculty members, regardless of language, scholarly interest, or rank. Surprisingly, in this day of close scrutiny of virtually all academic activities from sex to politics, there has been very little study of workload theory and practice. A monograph by Harold E. Yucker entitled Faculty Work-load Research, Theory, and Interpretation is the only sustained inquiry into the topic.
What faculty members do and how their activities are perceived and related to the reward structures of tenure, promotion, and salary increases is as central an issue as can exist in the academic world. There are few professions so diverse in their activities as the university professor's. As a direct result, and as Yucker (5–6) and others have discussed, few other professions are so little understood among the general public. Faculty members have traditionally disdained public relations, have failed at it, or have turned it over to administrator and bureaucrats who (often because they themselves do not understand the realities of daily faculty activities and concerns) have served the faculty poorly in this function.
Critics of the university become justifiably angry if they see professors leaving home three days a week after nine in the morning to teach one or two classes, returning home in time for lunch, publishing nothing, and complaining about low salaries. The same critics, however, never seem to see other professors working long days at home or in the library to prepare class lectures and discussion materials, devoting great amounts of time and energy to original scholarship or research, and toiling on university administration, committee business, student advising, and other types of academic service. It may be true that ignorance and a general anti-intellectual bias have prompted some critics to express outrage at what they see as the easy life led by university faculty members. But it is even more common that an honest misunderstanding of the multiple functions performed by academicians causes them to try to dispel the superficial impressions by appealing for greater understanding.
Let us consider what it is that faculty members do. Traditionally, faculty activities fall into three general areas: teaching, research, and service.
Teaching, of course, is the first thing that comes to the mind of anyone considering faculty activities. I do not need to explain in detail how conducting large-scale lectures, smaller-scale discussions, laboratory experiments, individual tutorial sessions, personal and small-group conversations, and the many other forms of university instruction requires vastly different types of training, modes of thought and articulation, communication skills, and personal relationships.
But teaching consists of far more than what takes place during the few hours a week that university professors and students spend in their classrooms: there is reading and writing to prepare for lectures and discussions; conceiving and organizing classes; preparing materials for use during the semester; and designing and revising courses; reading and grading essays, compositions, and research papers; preparing and grading daily assignments, quizzes, and examinations; and meeting individually with students. A great deal of teaching, of course, takes place outside the traditional classroom. Very often students, especially graduate and professional students, require difficult and time-consuming individualized instruction, which in its ultimate form—the direction of MA theses and PhD dissertations—requires particular patience, devotion, time, and skill.
Like other professionals, university professors should devote a considerable amount of time to maintaining their professional skills. Reading new books and studies in professional journals is the only way to maintain a minimum level of competence. Keeping current with the most recent scholarship, theory, and methodologies is harder now than ever, as the knowledge base expands more rapidly and in more directions than at any time in the past. But it should be stressed that maintaining disciplinary skills is a part of teaching and not of research, a claim often made by professors who do not publish.
Research activities can be subdivided into three broad categories: scientific research (both basic and applied), humanistic scholarship, and artistic creativity. Though it has become customary in academic circles to use the general term research to cover all three of these very different tasks, it is important to distinguish among them.
Scientific research often requires teams of investigators and enormous sums of external grant money; it is what much of the public and too many university administrators think of when they use the term research. Humanistic scholarship—the research engaged in by most professors of foreign languages and literatures—tends to be carried out by individuals whose major resources are time and books. Compared with scientists' work, the papers presented by scholars, together with the articles, essays, and books they publish, are usually less apparent and of less immediate interest to the general public but are often more directly relevant to students' overall educational concerns. Artistic creativity, of course, includes the literary, visual, musical, and theatrical works that are conceived, executed, and performed for or presented to the public. This work is more visible than humanistic scholarship but generally less expensive than scientific research. It is undoubtedly poets, sculptors, or actors who feel most uncomfortable when their work is described as research.
It is important to distinguish process from product in research. Professors who read to keep current with developments in their fields but do not add to existing knowledge in ways that are useful to others (generally by reading papers at scholarly meetings and publishing articles and books) are not doing research but merely maintaining their professional competence. Similarly, professors who generate grant or contract money for their universities and do not publish the results of work carried out with the support are not engaged in reseach. Research is not a process or an activity but a finished product. That is why publication (or, for, artists, performance or showing) is crucial. The products of original reseach—the published books, articles, or short stories, the concerts or exhibitions—become, in turn, teaching tools, and they extend an institution's teaching mission beyond the campus. Teaching and research are, in effect, the same thing. Research can be considered a sort of teaching; the students are one's professional colleagues, perhaps the most demanding of all student audiences.
Together, the research scientist, the humanist scholar, and the creative artist form an intellectual community of the highest magnitude that distinguishes universities from all other types of organization.
Service activities can be grouped into two categories: institutional service and professional service. Institutional service includes all the activities that are not directly to teaching and research but that indirectly contribute to these missions. University administration is one of the primary areas of institutional service. In addition to the duties performed by full-time administrators and staff members, there are many administrative jobs done part-time by professors. Titles like associate dean, department chair, director of graduate studies, or course coordinator are held by professors who sacrifice part of their teaching and research responsibilities to help make the institution or some segment of it function better, thus allowing teaching and research to take place. Committee work is another form of institutional service. Whether it is a departmental curriculum committee, a college personnel committee, a campus governance committee, or an intercampus research-review committee, the work is often difficult and time-consuming but important to the well-being of the entire intellectual community. Student advising (often considered a teaching activity, especially at the graduate level) is—particularly with undergraduates—basically an academic service, and an important one.
Professional service is usually done in support of the various academic disciplines at large. Professors who hold offices or serve on committees and boards in professional organizations, organize and chair sessions at national and international scholarly meetings, serve as editors or manuscript readers for professional journals, or participate in on-site program evaluations are contributing services to their professions rather than specifically to their home campuses. Such discipline-oriented (rather than institution-oriented) professional service usually falls to those who have distinguished themselves in research.
The relation among teaching, research, and service can be complex and demanding. Very often a professor's day is fragmented into a series of loosely related and extremely varied activities. Frequent and substantial mental shifts are involved in the movement from classroom to library to student consultation to committee meeting to research activities to another class to grading papers to reading to curriculum planning to scholarly lecture. All this, along with finding parking spaces, writing letters of recommendation, answering correspondence, returning phone calls, and typing course syllabi and examinations, can be exacting, both physically and intellectually. Especially in disciplines like ours where long periods of time for concentration and reflection are essential, the pace and variety of daily academic tasks can produce frustration and inefficiency.
Many important academic activities are pursued outside the “normal” eight-to-five working hours and away from the departmental office. Tasks such as reading, writing, and correcting examinations are often done late at night or early in the morning in a quiet study at home. Professors may practice lectures, compose memos, and perfect scholarly writing while in the shower, driving to work, or jogging along the streets. It should also be recalled that most faculty members—especially in the humanities—have nine-month appointments but maintain year-round academic activities; that is, many of them do not enjoy the year-long employment held by most people outside academia. Yet, even though faculty members are technically “free” of institutional responsibilities during the summer months, when they receive no salary, most of them continue their professional reading, research, and class preparation all year long.
Virtually every college and university in the United States defines its mission as a combination of teaching, research, and service. My own institution, Purdue University, for example, does so in a most graphic way. On the official seal of the university there is a tripartite shield whose sections stand for teaching, research, and service. Much of the service component at Purdue is considered to be within the purview of the extension division, and teaching and research are, in fact, the primary concerns of the university. But other institutions do not claim for themselves an equal commitment to teaching and research. Some profess to be primarily dedicated to teaching and neither encourage nor recognize accomplishments in research to the degree that the research-oriented university does.
Just as institutions differ in the relative importance they accord the three basic areas of faculty activity, so should faculty workloads be defined as some mix of all three of these activities. (To recognize the complexity of faculty activities, I prefer to use the term workload rather than the more common teaching load , which only identifies one area of performance and, implicitly, reduces a college professor to nothing but a teacher.) Almost everyone is familiar with the 40-40-20 formula, describing an allocation of academics' working time: 40% devoted to teaching, 40% to research, and 20% to service. This breakdown is frequently an accepted norm, even though very often there is absolutely no significance in the use of these figures. In fact, such a distribution of effort might very well be appropriate to an institution like mine, where teaching and research are equal first priorities and service is secondary. But such a workload formula would not be proper for other types of colleges and universities. Many institutions do not have a mandate to participate in research or have not claimed a commitment to research. Indeed, many community colleges, regional universities, and small four-year colleges proclaim it a virtue that their faculty members do not engage in self-aggrandizing research. Such institutions then should logically devote very little of their faculty effort to research and, since they are generally smaller and less complex than research institutions, somewhat less than 20% to service. Perhaps a reasonable distribution for them would be something like 80% teaching, 5% research, 15% service. Faculty members at these colleges are primarily teachers, and the workload policies there presumably allow them to teach approximately twice as much as their colleagues at research-oriented universities.
Traditional professional standards and virtually all published research on faculty workloads (e.g., Yucker) have recognized the need to relate total faculty effort (rather than simply classroom teaching) and institutional mission to workload practices and policies. Often, however, this recognition is rhetorical rather than substantial. The American Association of University Professors, in the important “Statement on Faculty Workload,” published in 1968, recommends maximum classroom teaching loads of 12 hours a week for undergraduate instruction and 9 hours a week when graduate instruction is involved.
It should be stressed that these represent maximum work-loads, not optimum workloads. Institutions aspiring to distinction should seriously consider further reduction of these classroom-hour limits. Moreover, these maxima presume no unusual additional expectations in terms of research, administration, counseling, or other institutional responsibilities. (256)
Noteworthy here is the affirmation that institutional quality and lower teaching expectations go together; Yucker makes the same point (34). Perhaps it is ironic that absence of teaching is considered a measure of faculty and institutional quality. But let us not simplistically reduce the faculty to those who teach and those who do other things: all faculty members teach; how much and how well, and how much time is left for other activities, are the issues. Yucker's data show that academicians who work less overall spend a higher percentage of their time teaching than do those who work more overall (42). I have seen no evidence that reducing teaching loads results automatically in better teaching; rather, institutions with reduced teaching expectations attract good teachers who are also scholars. Quite clearly, since research and, to a lesser extent, service are expected of faculty members at research-oriented universities, it is the AAUP statement suggests—proper to ask these professors to teach fewer than 9 class hours per week. On the other hand, there is less reason to consider a reduction of the 12-hour recommendation at institutions where no major research mission is claimed, since no comparable research effort is expected there.
More recently, and more directly related to our concerns, the ADFL published a series of policy statements relating to faculty members in foreign languages and literatures; the similarity to the classic AAUP statement is noteworthy:
Foreign language faculty members should spend no more than 12 hours per week per semester in the classroom. If there is an expectation of ongoing research, they should not be required to teach more than 9 hours per week (three courses). Institutions that require faculty members to publish for tenure and promotion should lower teaching loads, especially for junior faculty members.
Then, in a separate but related statement, to ADFL recommends the following:
Departments of foreign language and literatures, to make the best use of their faculty members' interests and abilities, should adopt flexible workload policies.
To help me formulate my thoughts on the subject, over the years I have collected copies of committee reports and school and departmental models that outline workload policies. One report, by the vice president of a multicampus system, speaks only in the vaguest generalities about the difficulty of assessing faculty teaching loads and concludes with the bland recommendation that department chairs be responsible for seeing to it that all their colleagues work. Another vice presidential report to a university governing board is laden with statistics about student credit hours and student-faculty ratios and with other largely irrelevant data, and it strives to convince the board members that the institution's faculty is overworked. With Yucker (9), I agree that credit-hour counts and other institutional data are not valid measures of faculty workload. It should not pass without notice that the administrators who serve faculty members have never proved themselves capable of describing their institutions or dealing either with the faculties or with the general public in terms that are meaningful and generally understood. A similar charge can be made against professors of education (specialists in theory, higher education, administration, etc.); none of them has ever written as cogently as Yucker (a distinguished professor of psychology at Hofstra University): only faculty members can really talk about what they do.
Following are three radically different workload policies in effect at some universities. One is from a school of business; it presents various faculty models, each stressing teaching, research, service, or administration. Colleagues and department chairs determine to which model each professor's work should conform. Another, from a school of library science, is based on a point system in which various specific teaching, research, and service activities are assigned values. Each member of the faculty must put together a series of activities that add up to a prescribed total number of points. One humanities-department model begins by assuming a standard teaching responsibility for all faculty members. Reductions in teaching load are automatically granted for some departmental administrative duties and for the maintenance of a certain level of scholarly activity, while further ad hoc reductions for research may be obtained by applying to a departmental committee. Although I perceive problems with each of these approaches, it is clear that the policy-making included some thought about the various faculty duties and their relative importance. These policies are all, in their own ways, superior to the standard nonpolicy of having some sort of ill-articulated “teaching load” that may or may not resemble faculty activities or the institutional reward structure.
The determination and articulation of faculty workloads should, I would insist, be an integral part of institutional planning, regular personnel decisions (particularly involving hiring, promotion, and tenure), periodic faculty evaluation, and annual salary deliberations. An accord should be reached between what each professor wants and is able to do and what the department needs done. A professor who may not want or be able to do research, for example, must be reconciled with a departmental or institutional need for research productivity. Ideally, intelligent recruiting and hiring practices and high promotion and tenure standards will have produced harmony rather than tension between faculty aspirations and departmental needs. Careful and fair peer and administrative evaluation of actual teaching, research, and service and recognition of and salary increments for merit in these categories are also important.
Faculty-workload policies should hold a central position in ongoing personnel decision making. In meetings with department chairs, individual professors should negotiate the division of their own labors among the tasks of teaching, research, and service, as well as reviewing their past performance and accomplishments in these areas. Accountability is essential, both of faculty members, so that they perform adequately and in accord with institutional goals and priorities, and of the administration, so that it recognizes and rewards real achievement in all three areas. There should be a clear and direct ratio between the effort that professors devote to teaching, research, and service and the rewards that the administration allocates through supervisory and peer evaluation of merit in these specific tasks.
Let me now propose a model that might be useful in defining a faculty-workload policy. Some basic assumptions underlie the model:
With the preceding assumptions in mind, let us look as table 1, which shows a representative distribution of faculty effort in a hypothetical foreign language and literature department. The department will be at a research-oriented university where teaching and research are equal first priorities and service is secondary; the 40-40-20 ratio will be considered legitimate here. It is assumed that there are fifteen full-time faculty members in the department.
Professors 1–3 are all heavily involved in research this year; professor 1 may be a new assistant professor just out of graduate school who teaches a single course and who was freed of administrative, committee, or advising responsibilities to launch a serious research career, while professors 2 and 3 may be senior scholars, artists, or researchers with less extensive involvement in teaching and service because they are completing major, long-term projects. Professor 4 may be the department chair, fully half of whose time goes to administration but who remains active in both teaching and research. Professors 5–11 are all at or near the standard distribution of effort among the three areas. Professors 12–15 tend to be more involved in teaching and service and have decreased research responsibilities.
Although only two members of the department (8 and 9) match the 40-40-20 ideal exactly, the department as a whole conforms to that standard. Next year, some individuals' workload distributions might be quite different from what they are this year; for example, young professor 1 would presumably become much more involved in teaching and begin to assume some service responsibilities, and professor 8 might take on a very light teaching load so as to finish that important book. Other workloads will logically remain unchanged, like those of professor 4, the department chair, and professor 15, the instructor who never does research.
It should be obvious that this is a gross quantification of the matter. The following are some of the adjustments that should be considered in order to take into account the realities of any specific academic department:
My primary aim in this essay is to clarify some of the issues involved in the concept of faculty workloads. I would also hope to encourage department chairs to rethink current practices in the light of several of the alternatives presented here. I invite them to consider whether the model I discuss is practical for institutions. Each of us should be fully cognizant of the relations among teaching, research, and service on our campuses in general and in our departments in particular. Let me insist that any coherent workload policy should be conceived and administered in accord with the mission of the institution. And finally, it bears repeating that workload should be no more than a part (albeit an important part) of a coherent package of faculty personnel policies. Recruiting and hiring, as well as promotion and tenure decision and salary deliberations, should be closely related to institutional mission and to faculty workload. Faculty-workload policies can be a major factor in the mutual accountability that unites faculty and administration. 1
The author is Professor of Spanish and Head of the Department of Foreign Language and Literatures at Purdue University, West Lafayette.
1 Much of the substance of this essay is taken directly, often verbatim, from a task-force report prepared for the Faculty Council of the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1983. I was chair of the task force and the primarily author of the various drafts of the report. Other members of the group and of the faculty council made any valuable contributions to the report; the result is truly a collaborative effort. I would like to thank my task-force colleagues J. Malcolm Asplund, Robert Callis, Al Corley, Margaret Flynn, Robert Tsutakawa, and Richard Warder for their active participation in the report. This essay, while prepared without the direct collaboration or knowledge of these individuals, is in many ways substantially indebted to them.
American Associated of University Professors. “Statement on Faculty Workload.” AAUP Journal 54 (1968): 256–57.
Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. “ADFL Policy Statements.” ADFL Bulletin 19.1 (1987): 2. [Show Article]
Yucker, Harold E. Faculty Workload: Research, Theory, and Interpretation. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Research Report 10. Washington. Assn. for the Study of Higher Educ., 1984.
| Percentage of Work Time Spent in Each Activity | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Professor |
Number of
Courses Taught |
Teaching | Research | Service |
| 1 | 1 | 10 | 90 | – |
| 2 | 1 | 10 | 75 | 15 |
| 3 | 2 | 20 | 70 | 10 |
| 4 | 2 | 20 | 30 | 50 |
| 5 | 3 | 30 | 45 | 25 |
| 6 | 4 | 40 | 45 | 15 |
| 7 | 4 | 40 | 50 | 10 |
| 8 | 4 | 40 | 40 | 20 |
| 9 | 4 | 40 | 40 | 20 |
| 10 | 4 | 40 | 30 | 30 |
| 11 | 5 | 50 | 30 | 20 |
| 12 | 5 | 50 | 10 | 40 |
| 13 | 6 | 60 | 25 | 15 |
| 14 | 7 | 70 | 20 | 10 |
| 15 | 8 | 80 | – | 20 |
| Average | 4 | 40 | 40 | 20 |
© 1991 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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