Weekend Reading: Academic Workload Edition

The reliably contentious topic of academic workload popped up again thanks to a Twitter debate that began last week and resurfaced many old studies and debates regarding the labor of faculty. Last summer, Natalie Houston recommended a tool for estimating course workload hours for students based on readings and assignments. As far as I know, no similar tool exists to understand the position of faculty balancing some combination of new preps, course updates, class meetings, mentoring, grading, meetings, writing, revising, research, etc, etc: however, the annual report we complete at my institution attempts at least to function as a public record of the same. Perhaps the biggest challenge of that type of reporting and measure is that it focuses on outcomes: the efforts and projects required but not producing something tangible are rarely a visible part of my year-end accounting, and similarly what fills my schedule is not particularly aligned with what filled my tenure dossier.

• Laura McKenna summarizes the latest iteration of the "How Hard Do Professors Actually Work?" debate for The Atlantic, noting: "While professors themselves cannot agree on whether they work too damn hard or just hard-ish (minus the ones who mostly spend their days drinking tea), this Twitter debate has certainly exposed the need for additional research. Future studies could compare the work experiences of tenured, tenure track, and adjunct faculty, for example, or see how the loads of liberal-arts faculty stack up against those for academics in the sciences, among other comparative analyses."

• Aimee Morrison has a great post up at Hook & Eye about the search for lost academic time: "All we have is right now. Right now does not care if you wish you had published a book five years ago: you can’t work 12 hours a day to make up for that regret. Worse, even trying to do so will ensure that you get nothing done in the right now, because you burn out. Regrets about the past, and the self-loathing that often accompanies these regrets, are heavy to carry and useless in the battle of today. Trying to ‘make up’ for lost time just loses more time, and is exhausting. Maybe shame is not really a good productivity tool."

• The apparent inciting study for this latest rise in attention dates back to a 2014 article in Inside Higher Ed, as reported by Colleen Flaherty: "Ziker says the most surprising finding so far is that faculty participants spent 17 percent of their work week in meetings – including those with students – and 13 percent of the day on email (both for research and with students). So combined, he says, 30 percent of faculty time ‘was spent on activities that are not traditionally thought of as part of the life of an academic.’ About one-third of work-week days – 35 percent – was spent on teaching, including 12 percent for instruction and 11 percent on course administration, such as grading and updating course webpages. Just 3 percent of the work-week day was spent on primary research and 2 percent was spent on manuscript writing."

• A look back at ProfHacker coverage of faculty workload suggests that this is something we’ve had on our minds since the beginning. Writing in 2009, Jeffrey McClurken observed: "One of the biggest issues that we faculty (new and seasoned, adjunct and long tenured) face is the question of managing our workload. If we care about what we’re doing (and if you’re on this site you must), then we can take on too much. Overloading can affect our ability to teach effectively, to publish, to make academic and institutional deadlines, and to have a (gasp) extra-academic life."

I can’t speak for my fellow ProfHack-ers, but the problem of caring and taking on too much is definitely something I haven’t solved yet. In 2012, I wrote about the trend towards the quantified self as a way for each of us to better understand my own work habits and timesinks:

Time tracking can provide the ultimate quantification of a workload, with all those numbers detailed for evaluation in accord with determined “percentages” of commitment to each type of work…apps like RescueTime, on the other hand, can be all too revealing about how much an addiction to Entanglement or Words with Friends is cutting in to research hours. A tool can also set a daily progress bar: Billie Hara noted the potential of tracking word goals for increasing daily productivity using sites like 750words.com.

So what happened to my own quantified self ambitions? I ran out of time. My workload often escapes even my to-do lists now: between my "work-facing" Outlook calendar, my own Google calendar, and page after page of annotated and crossed out tasks, I can barely retrace what I’ve done in the last week. It’s easier to do that type of quantification and self monitoring (for me at least) in short bursts, like those fellow ProfHacker Lee Bessette called for back in 2012 with a proposal for #DayOfHigherEd:

We need a Day of HigherEd (hashtag #dayofhighered). While many of us have written posts broadly outlining what we do in a day (and how disgusted we all are by the at best misleading and at worst dishonest portrayal of our work), few of us have ever taken the time to actually record, in minutia, what we do as professors from the moment we wake up to the minute we fall asleep. All the work we do that contributes to our job as educators.

Pushback against the discussion then (as now) noted the potential for the erasure of adjuncts, grad students, and many other contingent and part-time instructors from a narrative of labor that focuses on "professors": other criticism continues to highlight the idea of academic labor as a comfortable, privileged position in itself, and also as one strongly associated with "labor of love" that makes it difficult to discuss some things as work. Miya Tokumitsu has written beautifully in Slate about the problem of the "do what you love" message in conversations surrounding workload:

There are many factors that keep Ph.D.s providing such high-skilled labor for such low wages, including path dependency and the sunk costs of earning a Ph.D., but one of the strongest is how pervasively the DWYL doctrine is embedded in academia. Few other professions fuse the personal identity of their workers so intimately with the work output. Because academic research should be done out of pure love, the actual conditions of and compensation for this labor become afterthoughts, if they are considered at all.

Where does that leave us? Perhaps only with a reminder that discussions of faculty workload (and, indeed, the Twitter and Facebook-powered snark that accompany the invocation of faculty life and work) are as necessary now as they’ve ever been. So I at least intend to enjoy the weekend–and yes, maybe get that paper drafted.

[Limatola flickr photo by gianfranco.vitolo shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license]