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A common complaint about teachers is that they have too much vacation time. Such complaints are even louder for university faculty, as the academic calendar specifies even shorter teaching times, and on top of this the weekly class room hours are ridiculously low. These complaints emerge because teaching is the only face time university faculty have with the paying public. We do a lot of other things that the tax payer does not see and in particular does not realize how much time it takes. But how much do university faculty actually work?
Manuel Crespo and Denis Bertrand have analyzed surveys distributed to faculty of a "Quebec research-intensive university." Using results from 130 tenured faculty who agreed to spend significant time thinking about there use of time, the average workweek is 57 hours. That takes into account that there are parts of the year where workload is lighter (summers) and other times where there more to do. Only about a third of the time is dedicated to research, which I find surprising as this is supposed to be a research university. 44% of the time, or 25 hours, are dedicated to teaching, a surprisingly low 3 hours a week to administration and 9 hours a week to "public service" (would my blogging count?). The report goes through more details, some of which I want to highlight: only 10% of time related to teaching is actually in the classroom. The rest is mostly preparing for classes, face time with individual students, and grading. Time spend on teaching has increased over a decade, attributed foremost to increasing class size (I do not think there is much value to this result, as faculty also got older and in some cases tenured). And there are very few gender differences in time allocation.
Manuel Crespo and Denis Bertrand have analyzed surveys distributed to faculty of a "Quebec research-intensive university." Using results from 130 tenured faculty who agreed to spend significant time thinking about there use of time, the average workweek is 57 hours. That takes into account that there are parts of the year where workload is lighter (summers) and other times where there more to do. Only about a third of the time is dedicated to research, which I find surprising as this is supposed to be a research university. 44% of the time, or 25 hours, are dedicated to teaching, a surprisingly low 3 hours a week to administration and 9 hours a week to "public service" (would my blogging count?). The report goes through more details, some of which I want to highlight: only 10% of time related to teaching is actually in the classroom. The rest is mostly preparing for classes, face time with individual students, and grading. Time spend on teaching has increased over a decade, attributed foremost to increasing class size (I do not think there is much value to this result, as faculty also got older and in some cases tenured). And there are very few gender differences in time allocation.
4 comments:
I am wondering about selection bias among those who responded: only those who wanted to demonstrate that they had high workloads cared to answer, and may have exaggerated their claims. Those with markedly lighter loads did not want that to be known (and they tend to care less about university matters, and especially answering surveys for their colleagues' research).
One author is from the University of Montreal, the other from the University of Quebec at Montreal. If it is the latter, I would not qualify it as a research university, even though people at UQAM may disagree. If it is UQAM, I am actually surprised their faculty spend that much time on research.
It cannot be UQAM. There is no time slot for going on strike.
Any idea about the variance? The paper's distinction between busy and low months is not useful or credible, as in a busy month all functions have more hours. And this does not say anything about differences across people.
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