Faculty Workload

Faculty Work Load at The College of St. Scholastica

Academic Council in consultation with Faculty Welfare Committee April 2016

What follows are the assumptions and expectations about faculty work and how it is defined and quantified at the College of St. Scholastica.

FACULTY WORK ASSUMPTIONS

The task of quantifying faculty work is complex. The activities in which faculty engage can be diffuse and decentralized. Similar activities may take different faculty members vastly different amounts of time to accomplish and even seemingly similar activities may require different levels of engagement and effort from the same faculty member depending on student characteristics or technical resources.

Because of the diffuse nature of faculty work, any system for quantifying it will have significant shortcomings. However, quantifying faculty work is important to promote equity across faculty members and to ensure good stewardship of scarce faculty resources. The assumptions that guide thinking on faculty work are as follows:

Assumption 1. Faculty members work hard on behalf of their students, the College, their colleagues, and their disciplines.

Assumption 2. Faculty members are career professionals who work as needed to get the job done, recognizing that the traditional 40-hour work week isn’t the norm. Faculty work comes in cycles, with very heavy time demands at certain points in the year and lesser demands at others. In fact, a 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty found that faculty members who work at private not-for-profit master’s institutions reported working an average of 52 hours per week. (Cataldi, Bradburn, & Fahimi, 2005).

Assumption 3. The faculty load prescribed in the Faculty Handbook is 24 teaching load credits (12 per semester) for a faculty member on a 9-month contract. As a general rule, it is assumed that for a traditional class that a faculty member spends two hours of out-of-class time for every hour of in-class time, meaning that a 4-credit course of 4 contact hours should require about 12 hours of work per week, and that teaching a semester load of 12 credits should require about 36 hours of work per week.

Assumption 4. The Faculty Handbook does not differentiate between undergraduate and graduate credits. They are considered to have equal load value. The context for this assumption is the AAUP workload recommendations, which were first published in 1969 and modified with interpretive comments in 2000. Although the original recommendations indicated that graduate faculty should have lower workloads than undergraduate faculty, the later comments indicate that other factors, such as research expectations, are more important as load factors than whether teaching is at the undergraduate or graduate level (American Association of University Professors, 2006). At St. Scholastica the Faculty Handbook scholarship expectations are the same for faculty teaching undergraduate and graduate courses, which plays into the assumption that undergraduate and graduate teaching credits have the same load value at the College. Faculty in selected programs with higher scholarship demands from external agencies may receive load credit for supervising student scholarship or released time for specific scholarly activities.

Assumption 5. Faculty work requires faculty to engage in activities other than teaching, typically under the headings of scholarship and service. A baseline level of these activities is expected before the activities “count” toward the 24 hours of load credit. If the faculty work week is at least 40 hours, and if 36 of those hours are typically devoted to teaching, this means that 4+ hours per week are available for baseline scholarship and service activities.

Assumption 6. Load hours are an imprecise way of quantifying faculty work; therefore minor deviations—one credit in either direction—in load credit are to be expected and shouldn’t result in adjustments to make up a small amount of load or for a call for overload pay. Department chairs should be able to demonstrate that faculty members on 9-month contracts have been assigned anywhere from 23 – 25 load hours for the year. Faculty on part-time contracts should be assigned proportional loads.

ASSIGNING LOAD FOR TEACHING ACTIVITIES

Although the typical assignment of load for teaching activities seems straightforward—one load credit for each course credit taught—there are variables that need to be taken into account when assigning load.

The following is intended to be a flexible, yet rational and defensible method of assigning load credits to teaching activities:

• Start with the basics: one hour of load credit for each course credit. Understand that most teaching loads will be assigned on this basis, and that the variables that make one course harder to teach than another will usually balance out across a faculty member’s load.
• Consider whether, for a particular activity, there are factors that can support more load credit than course credit—considering both the time demands of the activity and the revenue base to support additional load credit.
• Consider whether, for a particular activity, there are factors that suggest that it should be assigned fewer load credits than course credits—considering both the time demands of the activity and the revenue base for the load assignment. The assignment of fewer load credits than course credits should be rare and should be negotiated in consultation with the faculty member, the program director or department chair, and the dean. A single course with low enrollment should not ordinarily result in a call for fewer load credits than course credits.
• Look across a faculty member’s load for the year and determine whether there are factors that would support modification of the loads for individual courses. By going through this process a department can usually establish some general principles to guide the assignment of loads for its various teaching activities. Deans should work with department chairs to ensure equity across departments while recognizing the unique work characteristics of each discipline.
• If a faculty member believes they have been treated unfairly in the assignment of loads, they should discuss the matter, in order, with their program director or department chair, their dean, and the Vice President for Academic Affairs. If they remain dissatisfied with their load assignment after taking it through the academic hierarchy, they should consult the Faculty Handbook for possible relief through consultation with the Faculty Welfare Committee or through the grievance process.

RELEASED TIME

Non-teaching work will be quantified in terms of “released time” load credits, as in Assumption 3 above. A 1-credit release should represent approximately 3 hours of work per week during one semester or 1.5 hours of work per week across a full academic year. A 4-credit release should represent approximately 12 hours of work per week during one semester or 6 hours of work per week across a full academic year.

CONTRACT LENGTHS

Nine-month contracts carry a load expectation of 24 credits. Faculty who are on contracts longer than 9 months have a correspondingly higher expectation for load hours. Because 24 load credits over 9 months rounds to 3 credits per month, faculty on 10-month contracts have a load expectation of 27 load hours, those on 11-month contracts 30 hours, and those on 12-month contracts 33 load hours. Extending Assumption 5 to these longer contracts, individuals on 10- month contracts should be assigned 26-28 load credits; those on 11-month contracts, 29-31 load credits; those on 12-month contracts 32-34 load hours.

Faculty on 9-month contracts are generally expected to work until the end of May. Faculty on 10-month contracts are expected to work the equivalent of one month during June, July, and August, but will not necessarily have two full months of continuous time off contract. Faculty on 11-month contracts are expected to work the equivalent of two months during June, July, and August, but will not necessarily have one full month of continuous time off contract. Faculty on 12-month contracts will fulfill the higher load requirements noted above; the timing of their work will be based on the needs of their programs as negotiated with their supervisors.

OVERLOAD

Overloads should be rare. Many faculty members at the College receive overload pay for a variety of activities. In addition, several teach extended study or online—courses that are in their discipline but have not been traditionally thought of as “departmental” offerings. Some of this overload appears to be voluntary, in other cases it appears to be imposed because there seem to be no other staffing alternatives. Overload teaching should not displace out-of-class teaching time or baseline scholarship and service activities expected of the faculty member.

The following guidelines should be followed when considering overloads:

• Faculty should rarely undertake overloads and teaching overloads is not an entitlement.
• Although the presence of full-time faculty teaching within extended and online programs is a positive, it is not in the best interest of most faculty members to undertake routine overloads in any of our program formats.
• When faculty do undertake overload, it should be limited to 6 credits in an academic year and should ordinarily not occur in consecutive years.
• Overloads from outside the department must be approved by the department chair in advance of the faculty member committing to the overload.
• Faculty members who are not meeting expectations with respect to their basic teaching, scholarship, and service responsibilities should not expect to be approved for overloads.

INTERDISCIPLINARY WORK

A vibrant faculty work environment should include work across disciplines, departments, and schools. Doing such interdisciplinary work, however, requires good communication among departments and across schools to ensure that all involved parties are kept “in the loop.” Department chairs and deans need to know when faculty members are contemplating activities outside the department (for example, international study programs, Honors courses, Dignitas teaching, and interdisciplinary team-taught courses) so that they can work collaboratively with faculty to determine whether the faculty interest, the needs of the College, and the needs of the department can all be met. Program directors who are requesting faculty from outside the area, as well as faculty contemplating work outside their department, need to communicate with those department chairs and schools deans who would be affected by the reassignment. OUTSIDE WORK Faculty members frequently have expertise that is marketable and one of the benefits of faculty life should be the flexibility to embark on outside work activities. In some practice disciplines, outside work activities are necessary to remain current in teaching areas or to maintain licensure needed to supervise students during clinical activities. Outside work activities should not typically exceed 8 hours per week while the faculty member is on contract, should not create a conflict of interest with the activities of the College (for example, teaching at another institution would typically constitute a conflict of interest), must not have a negative effect on the faculty member’s work, and must be scheduled around responsibilities for the College. The current faculty handbook indicates that written approval for outside work must come from the VPAA, who has delegated responsibility for this approval to the dean of each school.

*Revisions made in August 2015 incorporate faculty on 12-month contracts, consistent with changes to Faculty Handbook policy E-1 approved by Faculty Assembly in April 2015. The remainder of the document is as modified in November 2013.

*Revisions in April 2016 based on discussions between VPAA and Faculty Welfare Committee and reflecting feedback from faculty at school meetings.

References Cited

Cataldi, E.F., Bradburn, E.M., & Fahimi, M. (2005). 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF:04): Background characteristics, work activities, and compensation of instructional faculty and staff: Fall 2003 (NCES 2006-176). U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved April 7, 2016 from http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch.

American Association of University Professors. (2006). AAUP Policy documents and reports (10th edition). Washington, DC: American Association of University Professors.