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SOME of the most important administrative concerns affecting faculty members are hiring, promotion and tenure, salary, and workload (office space, travel support, committee assignments, curriculum, and advising are among those that make up the second tier). Questions regarding standards and practices of hiring, promotion and tenure, and salary distribution are all addressed elsewhere in this issue. In this essay I would like to consider the issue of faculty workload. Though faculty members often speak about their teaching loads, I believe it is counterproductive to limit the discourse in this way. Teaching is just one of the three major areas on which faculty members spend their time, and focusing on it while ignoring the others—research and service—both misrepresents the realities of contemporary academia and trivializes our profession. Therefore, I refer throughout this essay to workload in general and teaching, research, and service in particular. Surprisingly, in this day of close scrutiny of virtually all our activities from sex to politics there has been very little study of workload theory and practice. A monograph by Harold E. Yucker entitled Faculty Workload: Research, Theory, and Interpretation is the only substantial inquiry into the topic.
What faculty members actually do, how their activities are perceived, and how these activities are rewarded with tenure, promotions, and salary increases are issues as central as can exist in the academic world. There are few professions as diverse in their activities as that of the professor. Consequently, few professions are as poorly understood by the general public. Because the public largely equates being a professor with classroom teaching, it is imperative both that we strive constantly to make the rest of the world aware of what the academic life is really like and that we not allow ourselves to employ misleading terms like teaching load.
Critics of the academic profession become justifiably angry when they see professors who leave home after 9:00 a.m. three days a week, teach a class or two, return home in time for lunch, publish nothing, and complain about low salaries. Similarly, they grow resentful when they learn about a professor who is on paid sabbatical leave and uses his or her time to paint the house, especially if that professor has been known to speak of sabbaticals as “the leisure of the theory class.” The same critics, however, never seem to notice other professors who spend countless hours working at home or in the library preparing lectures and discussion materials, devote great amounts of time and energy to scholarship or research, and work long and hard on administration and committee business, student advising, and other types of academic service. As Howard R. Bowen and Jack H. Schuster observe, since professors are not held to specific work hours or required to perform their tasks at a specific location, “they are peculiarly vulnerable to the charge of loafing” (74).
Let us review briefly the wide range of academic activities. Traditionally, every faculty function falls into one of three general areas: teaching, research, and service.
Classroom teaching, of course, is the first thing that comes to mind when one considers faculty activities. But teaching consists of far more than what takes place during the few hours a week that professors and students actually spend in their classrooms; many other tasks, such as class design, preparation, grading, and meeting with students, make teaching a complex process. Individual instruction, especially the direction of MA theses and PhD dissertations, requires particular patience, devotion, time, and skill.
Like other professionals, professors should devote a considerable amount of time to maintaining their skills. Following the most recent scholarship, theory, and methodology is growing harder as the knowledge base expands more rapidly and in more directions than at any time in the past. Foreign language and literature professors have the additional requirement—and expense—of frequent and extended travel and residence abroad in order to develop and maintain linguistic skills and cultural familiarity.
Research activities can be divided into three broad categories: scientific research, humanistic scholarship, and artistic creativity. Humanistic scholarship—the sort of study that most language and literature faculty members engage in—usually involves library research and writing, rather than, for example, observation of the natural world. It is important to distinguish process from product in research. Professors who read to keep apprised of recent developments in their fields but do not add to existing knowledge in ways that are useful to others (generally through papers read at professional meetings and published articles and books) are not doing research but merely maintaining their professional competence. Research is not a process but a product, which is why publication is crucial (Bowen and Schuster 16). The products of original research, published books and articles, become teaching tools and extend an institution's mission beyond the campus. Teaching and research can be considered, in effect, two aspects of the same activity. Research is, in a sense, a subcategory of teaching in which the students are one's professional colleagues—perhaps the most demanding of all student audiences. We all have been taught much by the great scholarly books and articles we have read. The best scholars—the best teachers—teach not only their students on campus but also their peers in the profession.
Together, the research scientist, the humanist scholar, and the creative artist form an intellectual community of the highest magnitude, and their joint efforts distinguish colleges and universities from all other organizations. These disparate groups are able to work as a community through their embrace of the traditional academic concept of collegiality, defined by Bowen and Schuster as “the ideal that knowledge within any one field is worth as much as knowledge in any other field, and therefore that no faculty member should receive preferment over any other simply on the basis of academic field” (54). This ideal still prevails at most institutions of higher education in the United States.
Service activities fall into two categories: institutional and professional. Institutional service includes administrative duties, committee work, and student advising. Professional service usually refers to work done in support of one's academic discipline and involves such activities as serving on committees and boards of professional organizations, organizing or chairing sessions at national or international meetings, editing or reading manuscripts for professional journals, or participating in on-site program evaluations.
The relation among teaching, research, and service can be complex and demanding. Often a faculty member's day consists of a series of loosely related and extremely different activities, the balancing of which requires frequent and substantial mental shifts. For humanities professors, who require uninterrupted periods of time for concentration and reflection, such a hurried and varied schedule 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. In academia, as Bowen and Schuster state, “the distinction between work and leisure is inevitably fuzzy” (72). In addition, most faculty members—especially those in the humanities—have nine-month appointments but maintain year-round academic activities; that is, even though, during the summer months, they are technically free of responsibilities and receive no salary (unlike most workers outside academia), most faculty members continue their professional reading, research, and class preparation all year long.
Virtually every college and university in the United States defines its mission in terms of teaching, research, and service. My own institution, Purdue University, 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. Since Purdue is a land grant university, much of the service component takes place within the extension division; therefore, teaching and research are the university's primary concerns. But other institutions do not claim an equal commitment to teaching and research. Many profess to be primarily teaching institutions and neither encourage nor recognize accomplishments in research to the degree that research-oriented universities do.
Faculty workload should be defined as a mix of the three basic areas of faculty activity, the proportion of which can differ just as the relative weight institutions accord these categories does. For this reason, the term workload is preferable to the more limited teaching load: it explicitly recognizes the wide and complicated range of faculty activity. Teaching load, by contrast, recognizes only one area of performance, and thus masks the complexity of our profession.
It is common to use a 40-40-20 formula to describe faculty activities; that is, 40% of time devoted to teaching, 40% to research, and 20% to service. Many people accept these figures as the norm, even though the percentages are entirely incompatible with the missions of many institutions. Such a distribution of effort might very well be appropriate at a large university that explicitly claims teaching and research as equal first priorities, followed by service. In fact, Albert Rees and Sharon P. Smith cite studies showing that faculty members in research universities, on average, allot 41% of their time to research, 41% to teaching, and 18% to service (54–59). But such a workload distribution would not be proper at other types of colleges and universities. Many institutions do not have a mandate to participate in research, nor do they assert a commitment to research. Indeed, many community colleges, small four-year colleges, and regional universities proclaim as a virtue the fact that their faculty members do not engage in “self-aggrandizing research.” Faculty members at such institutions, then, should logically devote very little of their effort to research and, since these institutions are generally smaller and less complex, somewhat less than 20% of their effort to service. Perhaps a reasonable distribution for such institutions would be something like 75% teaching, 10% research, and 15% service. The data provided by Rees and Smith indicate that the average distribution at liberal arts colleges is about 63% teaching, 21% research, and 16% service (54–59). (Such colleges, particularly the more prestigious among them, often claim more of a commitment to research than do most community colleges and some regional universities.) Faculty members at these colleges are primarily classroom teachers, and their workload policies should recognize this fact by allowing them to teach approximately twice as much as faculty members at research-oriented universities.
The greatest administrative hypocrisy of many colleges and universities involves attitudes toward teaching. In theory, many universities accord teaching a role comparable to that of research, but in practice they give it secondary consideration at best when deciding on matters such as promotion, tenure, and salary. Many colleges declare teaching to be their primary mission but give publication substantial weight in promotion, tenure, and salary deliberations. Faculty members at both types of institution should demand that the institutional mission, faculty activities, and the reward system conform with one another; specifically, they should insist that merit in teaching be substantively rewarded to the extent that it figures in the institution's rhetoric.
Nearly all published commentary on faculty workload recognizes the need to relate total faculty effort (rather than simply classroom teaching) and institutional mission to workload practices and policies (Yucker xiii). As practiced within the profession, however, this recognition is often more rhetorical than substantial. The American Association of University Professors, in its “Statement on Faculty Workload,” recommends maximum classroom teaching loads of twelve hours a week for undergraduate instruction and nine hours a week for graduate instruction. The statement continues:
It should be stressed that these represent maximum workloads, 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 implied affirmation that institutional quality and lower teaching requirements go together (Yucker 34). It is no small irony that the AAUP should consider time not spent teaching to be a measure of faculty and institutional quality. But we should not merely reduce the issue to a dichotomy of teaching faculty and research faculty. All faculty members teach: how much and how well they teach and how much time they devote to other activities are the questions. Yucker's data show that faculty members who work less overall tend to devote a higher percentage of their time to teaching, while those who work more overall spend a smaller percentage of their time (but not necessarily less actual time) in teaching (42). I have seen no evidence that reducing teaching loads results automatically in better teaching; rather, institutions with reduced teaching expectations are more likely to attract the ideal model of a professor: a good teacher who is also a good scholar. It is proper for universities that expect a substantial amount of research or service of faculty members to ask their professors to teach fewer than nine class hours per week, as suggested in the AAUP statement. But at institutions where no major research mission is claimed, there is less reason to consider a reduction of the twelve-hour recommendation.
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 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.
Then, in a separate but related statement, the ADFL recommends the following:
Departments of foreign languages and literatures, to make the best use of their faculty members' interests and abilities, should adopt flexible workload policies.
A few samples of committee reports and school and departmental models that discuss workload policies (each taken from the appendixes of the University of Missouri's Faculty Council 1983 Report ) illustrate a variety of approaches to this question. One report by a system vice president speaks in only the vaguest generalities about the difficulty of assessing faculty teaching loads and concludes with the bland recommendation that department chairs be responsible for seeing that all faculty members 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 members are overworked. (As Yucker suggests, credit-hour counts and other types of institutional data are generally not valid measures of faculty workload [9].) These reports provide evidence that, as faculty members often feel, professional academic administrators are rarely capable of describing their institutions or communicating either with faculties or the general public in meaningful terms.
The school and departmental workload policies display markedly more useful approaches to the issue. A policy from a school of business presents various faculty models, each stressing teaching, research, service, or administration. Faculty members and department chairs determine to which model each professor's work should conform. In another policy report, from a school of library science, various specific teaching, research, and service activities are assigned point values. Each faculty member must put together a series of activities that add up to a prescribed total number of points. One foreign language department model begins with a standard teaching load, which is reduced in exchange for the performance of administrative duties and for the maintenance of a certain level of scholarly activity; ad hoc reductions for research may be granted by application to a departmental committee. Although I see problems in each of these policies, it is clear that their formulators gave thought to the relative importance and nature of the various duties expected of faculty members. Each policy in its own way is superior to the standard nonpolicy of having some sort of ill-articulated “teaching load” that may or may not resemble actual faculty activities, the institutional mission, or the administrative reward structure.
The determination and articulation of faculty workloads should be an integral part of institutional planning, personnel decisions (such as those involving hiring, promotion, and tenure), faculty evaluation, and salary deliberations. Workload negotiations should involve an accord between what the professor wants and can do and what the department needs done. For example, if a professor who is unwilling or unable to do research works in a department with a need for research productivity, this conflict must be reconciled. Ideally, intelligent recruiting and hiring practices and high promotion and tenure standards will have reduced the number and extent of such problems. Careful and fair peer and administrative evaluations of teaching, research, and service and reward for merit in these categories are also important.
Faculty workload policies should hold a central position in ongoing personnel decision making. Professors should negotiate with their departmental chairs the division of their labors among the tasks of teaching, research, and service, as well as review past performance and accomplishments in these areas.
Faculty members must perform adequately and in accord with institutional goals and priorities, and the administration must recognize and reward real achievement in all three areas. There should be a clear and direct relation between the effort that professors devote to teaching, research, and service and the allocation of rewards by the administration based on supervisory and peer evaluation of merit in these tasks.
I would like now to propose a model for defining a faculty workload policy, which I believe is applicable not only in foreign language and literature departments but also in departments throughout academia. Its basic assumptions include the following:
With these assumptions in mind, let us look at table 1, which shows a sample distribution of faculty effort in a hypothetical department at a research-oriented university that accepts the traditional workload model of 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% service. There are fifteen full-time faculty members in the department.
Professors 1, 2, and 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 has been exempted from administrative, committee, or advising responsibilities to launch a serious research career, and professors 2 and 3 may be senior scholars who are completing long-term projects and who have less extensive involvement in teaching and service. 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 close to or exactly at the standard distribution of effort among the three areas. Professors 12–15 tend to be more involved in teaching and service than in research; professor 12, for example, might serve as an elementary course supervisor.
Although only two members of the department (8 and 9) match the 40-40-20 ideal exactly, the department as a whole does conform 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 be assigned a light teaching load in order to finish an important book. Others, such as those with ongoing administrative obligations, will retain the same distributions, as with professor 4, the department chair, and professor 12, the elementary course supervisor.
While table 1 displays a wide range of distribution of effort, it would be very easy to introduce still other variations to allow these faculty members to take further advantage of their talents, interests, and circumstances. For example, professors 7 and 8, with the explicit approval and support of the department chair, might schedule their eight classes on a complementary basis. Professor 7 might teach three classes in the fall and only one (perhaps a graduate seminar that meets in a single three-hour session one evening a week) in the spring, thus concentrating on teaching in the first semester and research in the second. Meanwhile, professor 8 could enjoy the same convenience by teaching one class in the fall and three in the spring. Three or more colleagues might work out even more complex arrangements. Someone might even negotiate a two-year cycle that would allow a 3-3-2-0 teaching schedule. The flexibility made possible by the size of the department and the nature of the workload policy should encourage creative scheduling.
The table would look quite different for a different sort of department. Let us look at table 2, which offers a sample distribution of workload in a very small foreign language department at a liberal arts college. This institution's mission emphasizes teaching. Faculty members are not asked to research or publish a great deal, nor is such activity rewarded as richly as is good classroom teaching. There are six faculty members in the department, and the departmental workload distribution is 75-10-15.
Clearly, there is much less room for variation here. Professor 1, the department chair, is the only person with a service role that is much larger than average. No one has an assignment that is heavy in research. Everyone contributes heavily in teaching, the area on which tenure, promotion, and salary are primarily based. This departmental distribution of effort, consistent with institutional priorities and administrative practices, is as valid as the one in table 1.
Admittedly, these examples represent a gross quantification of the matter. Chairs should consider the following adjustments and principles, which reflect the realities of specific academic departments:
Calculation of the departmental average workload should take into account the contributions of part-time and adjunct faculty members, faculty members who have external grants that account for a certain portion of their time, and faculty members on sabbatical or research leave. A half-time instructor, for example, should be considered to carry a 50% workload for the purpose of calculating department averages, perhaps 40% teaching (four classes), 0% research, and 10% service. If a member of the department has a grant that pays for 40% of his or her time, that individual's workload should be calculated at a .6 FTE; the remaining 60% might be divided into yearly equivalents of 30% teaching (three classes), 20% research, and 10% service. A professor on one-semester, full-salary sabbatical leave might be assigned 70% research (including the semester on leave, which would account for 50% of the total year's workload), 20% teaching (two classes the semester not on leave), and 10% service. A professor on full-year, half-salary sabbatical leave should be assigned a workload equivalent to 50% of the average, perhaps distributed 45% research, 0% teaching, and 5% service (assuming that the faculty member still conducts some professional service while on leave). Note that when you calculate your department averages you will have to treat these colleagues as fractions of faculty members for the purpose of determining the number of department staff by which to divide your totals in the various categories.
Not all teaching is classroom-related. A department might modify the model in order to recognize faculty members' roles in the direction of theses, dissertations, and individual studies. Certainly a professor who is directing the independent readings of two students, serving on three thesis committees, and actively supervising the final stages of a doctoral dissertation should receive some recognition of these important and demanding teaching activities in his or her workload assignment. Where appropriate, other adjustments should be made for laboratory, studio, and clinical teaching, which require many contact hours but relatively little outside preparation.
Not all classes are equally difficult to teach. Some classes, such as those being taught for the first time, certain large classes (especially those taught without teaching assistants), and those with many long writing assignments, may be more difficult and time-consuming to teach than others and may therefore deserve more than a 10% consideration. By the same token some classes, such as those being taught for the tenth time, certain small classes, and those with few or no writing assignments, may be easier and less time-consuming to teach than others and may therefore deserve less than a 10% consideration. The department may choose to adjust the 10% workload credit proportionally upward or downward for such courses. Or—and this is clearly easier and probably just as logical—it could choose to leave the credit at 10% for all classes and assume that the differences will average out in the long run. As Yucker points out, studies show that temperament, experience, and preference tend to affect the amount of time professors devote to courses more than does class size, course level, type of class, or the number of preparations a professor may have to make for a given course (29–43).
This model is equally applicable to all departments and disciplines. The claim that some disciplines are by definition more difficult to teach than others is not legitimate. Mathematics, psychology, chemistry, and economics are no harder to teach than elementary foreign language, linguistics, literature, or literary theory. If adjustments for class difficulty are to be made, they should be made within rather than across departmental or disciplinary divisions. This point is particularly important for chairs of foreign language departments. Traditionally, our colleagues in natural and social sciences have claimed that “disciplinary norms” justify requiring lighter teaching loads in their departments than in the liberal arts. In fact, these norms are usually no more than traditions in which, through historical accident, institutional inertia, administrative favoritism, or academic politics, certain departments have received favored treatment. Burton R. Clark makes the point that “richer” disciplines, such as biology, have traditionally placed more value on research and have considered lighter teaching loads a “mark of first-class practice,” while in the relatively “poor” humanities departments faculty members have virtually always taught more than their colleagues in the sciences and some other disciplines (93–103). Foreign language department chairs should be prepared to argue with chairs of other departments, deans, and other administrators that there is no intellectually or academically valid reason to distribute workload unequally within a single college or school. They may also wish to argue for adjustments in faculty size in order to achieve parity among departments in the teaching aspect of workload.
My primary aim in this essay has been to clarify some of the issues involved in the concept of faculty workload. I would encourage chairs of foreign language departments in all types of institutions to rethink their workload policies in the light of the alternatives presented here and to consider, together with their deans, the practicality of this model. Each of us should be aware of the relations among teaching, research, and service. Any viable workload policy should be conceived and administered in accord with the mission of the institution and with the recognition that it is no more than a part (albeit a very important part) of a coherent set of faculty personnel policies. Recruiting and hiring practices, as well as promotion, tenure, and salary deliberations, should be closely related to institutional mission and to faculty workload priorities. Faculty workload policies can be a major factor in creating an atmosphere of mutual accountability that unites faculty and administration.
An earlier version of this essay, entitled “Teaching, Research, Service: The Concept of Faculty Workload,” was published in the ADFL Bulletin 22.3 (1991): 44–50.
American Association 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]
Bowen, Howard R., and Jack H. Schuster. American Professors: A National Resource Imperiled. New York: Oxford UP, 1981.
Clark, Burton R. The Academic Life: Small Worlds, Different Worlds. Princeton: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1987.
Rees, Albert, and Sharon P. Smith. Faculty Retirement in the Arts and Sciences. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.
University of Missouri Faculty Council. UMC Faculty Council 1983 Report on Faculty Workload Policies. Columbia: U of Missouri, 1983.
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.
| Professor | Classes | Percentage of Time Spent on | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Teaching | Research | Service | ||
| 1 | 1 | 10 | 90 | 0 |
| 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 | 10 | 20 |
| 15 | 8 | 80 | 10 | 10 |
| Average | 4 | 40 | 40 | 20 |
| Professor | Classes | Percentage of Time Spent on | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Teaching | Research | Service | ||
| 1 | 6 | 60 | 10 | 30 |
| 2 | 7 | 70 | 10 | 20 |
| 3 | 8 | 80 | 10 | 10 |
| 4 | 8 | 80 | 10 | 10 |
| 5 | 8 | 80 | 5 | 15 |
| 6 | 8 | 80 | 15 | 5 |
| Average | 7.5 | 75 | 10 | 15 |
© 1994 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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