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Shop Talk: Whaddya Know? Nebraska State Fair Building Can Be Saved After All

January 9, 2012, 9:00 am

By Lawrence Biemiller

Lake Superior College Health and Science BuildingLake Superior College celebrated the opening of a $12.1-million Health and Science Building Friday. The 36,712-square-foot building, eight years in the planning, houses teaching labs and classrooms for a variety of biology, geology, and health-sciences programs. (Lake Superior College photo)

• In About-Face, U. of Nebraska at Lincoln Will Preserve State-Fair Building’s Exterior (See the building’s “11 Most Endangered Historic Places” listing here.)

• Donor of 50,000-Acre Ranch Says 2 Universities Haven’t Taken Advantage of It

• As It Cuts Teams to Save Money, U. of Maryland at College Park Starts Work on $7.2-Million President’s House

• Utah State U. Plans $6.2-Million Conditioning Facility for Athletes

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  • yellow1

    Rob,
    I am what most would call a mid level administrator at a two year college in GA. I work Monday-Friday, 6:30am-4:30pm from my office/campus (need that first 2 hours of the day when few are around). Those would be my on campus hours, about 45 hours a week, for a 1 hour lunch break. Realistically, I eat lunch from my desk 2 days a week on average, but we’re splitting hairs. I am available via work issued smartphone to receive and reply to emails and voicemails literally 24/7. Those hours I’m not in my office, daydreaming or otherwise while I am in the office, are difficult to count indeed. Does the email I sent Saturday morning at 5:23 (after researching the content for my VPAA for an hour on Friday night) count? Does my answering (after finding the issue) a student helpticket about our LMS at 8:00pm on Sunday night count? I was in my pajamas for the research and emails, sure, and I was in the clothes I had cut the grass in on Sunday afternoon when I answered that student’s question about the LMS. These things could have waited until Monday, but we all know that once we’re back on our campuses, to do lists go out the window and we spend our days moving from fire to fire to put out. To me, those 3 or so hours I worked last weekend are absolutely measurable, can be parceled out if someone wanted that, and should count. I typically work 50 hours a week that could easily be measured/seen, and I’d actually say that’s less than what I did as a full time English instructor/pre-admin days.

    As an undergrad, I worked in a machine shop during the Summer, breaks, and one 9 month stretch. Since we’d have various jobs from multiple clients, we had to be precise with every punched in minute. I’d leave my station after finishing Job A, punch out on my timecard under that client’s #, punch in under the next client’s, and start Job B. Every minute I worked, literally, was logged so billing of labor was accurate.

    Academics can’t work that way always, not always, but parts of it could. Even something simple like every hour of class instruction has 2 hours of prep/grading a week. Something to give faculty credit. Numbers of students advised. The biggest difference in that machine shop job and all the ones I’ve had in higher ed? I never once took work home. THAT is another way I’d say we in higher ed should/could use to measure our productivity vs. whatever folks outside of higher ed who question our salaries, effort, hours worked, and/or importance. Does your job shadow every minute, potentially, of your week?

  • intladmn

    Fair enough. But – I hope you do not think faculty are unique in thinking about work when they’re not actually working. I am a staff member at a university, and I certainly think about work when I’m not actually there (e.g. doing household chores). I develop ideas for new things to do and think of ways to solve problems. I also read journals and books that relate to my work after work.  I think anyone who is the least bit serious about his/her job does. Small business owners, professionals, etc. It means we care about our work! I answer e-mails from students and faculty out of hours. And since I plan events for students, I
    often have to work very unconventional hours and be at my professional
    best throughout.

    Some faculty do work a lot, but others can get away with doing less. (Some people spend hours preparing classes – others do not.) I have plenty of anecdotal evidence myself :-)

    Some people resent that the work that faculty do just seems so pleasant – reading on a couch (aka researching) for instance. And a lot of people wish they could do their work in the comfort of their homes too. (Again, I know this isn’t the case for every university, but it is the case for some.)

    I definitely do not want to criticize faculty – a lot of you are very impressive! But please do not assume that you are the only impressive people.

     

  • 22108469

    Humorous aside: the “Big Bang Theory” episode depicting two scientists hard at work, staring at equations on a whiteboard to the tune of “Eye of the Tiger.”

  • robjenkins

    Agreed, Intladmn. I didn’t mean to shortchange staff; I was just writing specifically to faculty.

  • newyorkyankees

    In a non-academic job, when people are at the office discussing the NCAA tournament, or making coffee, or calling home to check on a sick relative (which actually happens, believe it or not), would the people who are so quick to criticize academicians be just as quick to consider those office activities “slacking” also?

  • dlpike

    As Lee Schulman said, ‘The plural of anecdote is not data”. The fact is we have no really good data on measuring the time that deserves payment. Faculty is probably one of the easiest occupations in the world to do little work and have no one know, especially mid and late career. Many faculty work hard, but how many don’t– 30%???? is that too high?

  • historik

    I spent eight years in the business world before returning to academia for less pay and more hours.  I often thought of tracking my hours, “like a lawyer,” I always say, but I fear it would be depressing.  When I was in business, I was able to put aside my job, even when I owned a company, and spend time with my family that was unencumbered with the concerns of the work place.  As an academic, I am thinking about classes, research, or other work-related matters constantly: when driving, when running, or when doing house chores.  My “vacations” are work-related and involve visits to used bookstores, historic sites, museums, and archives (I am a historian), and I have no expense account.  Funding comes only on occasion.  I even sleep with a pad and pen on my night stand because every once in a while I awaken with a perfect analytical concept or other insight.

    I do not resent the work load, which actually is self-imposed.  It is clear, however, that the extra time I spend on the job enables me to be a better instructor and researcher.  Do I get paid for this?  Of course I do, but the hours I devote to my profession mean that I likely work at a rate that is well below that of other professionals.  Closing that financial gap would be helpful, but just as important would be finding a way to enlighten others, including politicians, who believe that professors work only two days a week.

  • Xabier Granja

    Good article. I find myself wondering how many hours I’m working each week many times as well. As a PhD student already doing thesis work, I find reflecting on this a good way of keeping track that I’m doing what I’m supposed to. 

    I work the moment I wake up at 9AM. I have much, much bibliography to read through, digest, process, then use in my thesis. I have breakfast reading about work – usually after I’m done with university emails. I keep reading on the bus on my way to university. I hold office hours, when no students come to see me, I keep working on my thesis materials. Then I teach for a couple hours. I hop on the bus – since I work better in the silence of my home office – and keep reading on the bus ride back home. I cook a meal, not doing any work of any kind – just focusing and enjoying the cooking process. Then I sit and eat my meal, again while reading thesis materials. It’s probably 5pm by now and my partner arrives home. I work at my home office until about 8pm, that’s when I decide to STOP no matter what, it’s a healthy limit to how much I work. Then I watch TV shows, have dinner, basically enjoy life. 11pm – bedtime. 

    If you count all those hours, I have worked the better part of 9 to 8pm. That’s 11 hours, if we take 1h out of the equation for “transitional” impediments (cooking food, getting dressed, etc) for the whole day, that leaves me with a 10h working average per day. Yet, most of my friends work 9 to 5 jobs, office jobs with a strict schedule – to them, it’s hard to understand that I’ve worked for 10h. To my friends, I’ve effectively worked 3h (1 for office hours, 2 for teaching) in the day, leading to the typical comment such as “You’re living the life!”. It’s hard to explain to them that, while they enjoyed breakfast, lunch, and many other moments of their day free of work related thoughts, working just within their schedule, for academics it’s very common to be able to work in most events/locations during a normal day.

    Explaining my 10h work day is quite hard to most people. I believe it’s the same for most academics.

  • jsibelius

     It would be nice if our work from home could actually BE counted as work.  I am also a staff member and sometimes I have to spend a couple of hours on the weekend putting out a fire, or check email on a vacation day to make sure we don’t have a staffing problem when I’m taking time off for personal things.  My university has a firm policy about not allowing telecommuting, so these hours – work though they may be – must be contributed on a “volunteer” basis, FLSA or not.

  • patbowne

    20 years ago I tracked my hours at the teaching college I work in. I adjusted my work habits to get my job done in 40 hours a week, and that is what I work to this day. I don’t see any reason that academics should buy into the idea that we only earn our salaries if we work more than full-time. Do we see other professionals protesting that ‘No, I really work 90 hours a week at my nursing/teaching/surgery’?

    The fact that we fall into this defensive posture so easily may indicate that some of us have drunk the kool-aid and accepted the accusation that we have cushy jobs, such that we have to be putting in more than full-time hours to justify our full-time salaries. Why on earth should we be so servile? We do the work we were hired to do for the salaries our institutions agreed to pay us. If we have jobs we like, that’s because we’ve put in the hours training so we will be qualified to do them – again, nothing to apologize for.

  • tuxthepenguin

    This is a serious answer, so don’t take it the wrong way. Who cares? What difference could it possibly make?

    What matters is how much we get done, not how many hours we work. “How much do you work?” isn’t even a well-defined question. What’s work? Doesn’t it matter how we go about doing our work? Doesn’t it matter if we’re spending three hours doing something that would take someone else ten minutes?

    If you’re into comparisons with the private sector, there’s a term for a company that cares only about employees punching in and punching out at the right time, with compensation depending only on how many hours they work: bankrupt.

    If you want to ask questions about the university, ask whether students who graduate from a particular college/university are getting a degree (AA, BA, MA, PhD, etc.) that increases their earnings and provides other, non-financial benefits.

    If faculty get into a ****ing contest with fast-food workers about who “works more”, they will lose. It’s not a good idea to let the opponent choose the terms of the debate.

    And for those who post about how hard private sector workers work, get real. I’ve worked in the private sector. There are a lot of lazy private sector workers. Some work hard. A lot don’t. Which doesn’t matter, I guess, if you’re only going to focus on hours worked.

  • yellow1

    Some of us take this “servile” position because our jobs depend on it. No tenure in my system. Budgets cuts every year. Furloughs. RIFs. Programs closed. Part time budgets slashed. I worked in the private arena where I worked only 40 hours a week and never took work home with me (not even emails). I’ll trade the overworked position of higher ed and the meaning behind the work I do for the reality that it’s more than 40 hours a week AND some think I don’t work hard/am overpaid.

  • 11325240

    Perhaps the issue (for critics) is less how many hours are spent working than how many hours are spent doing work that they value.  The taxpayers who own my institution are likely to feel like certain parts of my work are what they hire people like me to do, while other parts are what we (I) choose to do.  And then we want to be praised for working so hard at what we want to do. 

    I’m not supporting this argument but I’ve heard it made many times.  And I do understand the perspective, especially coming from people who feel like it’s a luxury and an indulgence to be paid for following one’s intellectual inclinations.  The scholarship we do (however essential to our job descriptions) often feels especially self-indulgent to outsiders — excepting the research which is clearly linked to economic and technological development.

    The bottom line, I think, is that we need to communicate why the work we do is worth paying for, perhaps more than communicating the time it takes.

  • newyorkyankees

    Whatever happened to the idea that if one enjoys his job, it really isn’t work? Yes, I put in a decent number of hours for teaching, grading, & research; the key is that I enjoy doing these things. I have attorney friends who put in 70-80 hour work weeks and they enjoy what they do. I have friends who are bus drivers, CPA’s, and house painters who enjoy what they do as well. No one should have to apologize for their career choices. I certainly do not apologize to any critics who have an axe to grind with academia.

    In the final analysis, it is about delivering a quality work product, irrespective of the number of hours or profession.

  • http://who-will-kiss-the-pig.blogspot.com Richard Grayson

    The amount of time seems irrelevant.  I’ve worked in offices where if you give two people the same “work,” it will take one three times as long to do it.  American workers’ productivity has increased tremendously over the past decade, in part thanks to technology.  Hey, in 1975, it used to take me a long time to crank out a class handout on a mimeograph machine.  I can do it in a fraction of the time now on a photocopy machine or even less time with a couple of clicks on Blackboard, making it instantly available. 

  • http://www.facebook.com/jstuntz Jean Stuntz

    To answer the original question, I work at a four-year regional university with several Masters programs and one PhD program. I have a 4/4 load plus I teach in summers for the extra money. I spend forty hours a week (8-4:30 M-F) teaching, grading, prepping, and other “teaching” work plus the writing portion of my scholarship and service on committees. I spend the evenings and weekends (2 hours an evening M-F and about 4 hours each Saturday and Sunday) doing research activities and whatever teaching work I was not able to do during the week, so add another 18 hours. I attend 3-8 conferences a year to present scholarship, network, learn more about my fields, and talk to my publishers. During semester breaks I travel to archives to do research there. Averaged out, that is about 60 hours a week of “work.”

  • sherbygirl

    This is not the exception. Please check out the #dayofhighered archives. On April 2, higher education professionals recorded their day.

    http://storify.com/readywriting/april-2-2012-dayofhighered

  • http://jdeveland.com/ JD Eveland

    For the most part, comments thus far have avoided addressing one of the main problems here — that is, that “time spent” is often uncorrelated with “value added”.  I can read two student papers at, say, 15 minutes each, and spend 5-10 minutes commenting on each. One is adequate but plodding – no inspiration or real engagement with the material. My comments try to be encouraging, but can’t say much about the actual material. The other paper is excellent, really insightful; my comments can then engage the material, suggest new thoughts and directions, really stimulate the student. Same time involved; very different value delivered. I can spend hours putting together a routine class; then during five minutes in the shower I have an incredible inspiration that changes everything and rewrites my teaching of the subject. You get the point (and this applies to every worker, not just faculty) – spending time doing something is a pretty useless measure of actual accomplishment. We assess student performance by looking at the quality of the papers they write, not how many hours it takes them to write it (often the worst ones take the most time.) Measuring accomplishment as time spent, as many organizations do, is a flat admission that you can’t measure accomplishment at all. And that’s sad.

  • charrua

    I use to do road cycling in a pack, 40-45 miles rides, 2-3 times a week. Probably my most productive hours every week. Quite, nobody bothered me while thinking about papers, teaching, etc… Short breaks here or there when somebody shouts “car up!” or when negotiating an intersection.  That’s one of the reasons I did it. It allowed me to keep working while exercising, something you can’t do if you engage in most competitive sports. Of course, everybody astonished my accumulated annual milage. Slightly below those who worked 9 to 5 and took 4 weeks per year just to do multi-stages rides. Thing that I was never able to do. 

    Actually, I cannot imagine to keep my productivity if I am not thinking about research and teaching 24/7. We don’t think about it as work because we loved it. I heard about people joining academia and leaving short after because the monetary reward/work load is not enough for them. Would love to know outside academia, how many people has that type of engagement with their job?

    BTW, how many people stand in front of an audience to be judged every single time? How many jobs force you to expose your weaknesses every single day? (one that come to mind are professional athlets) How are those paid? We stand in front of students, we submit our paper for publication to be rejected, we present our work on conference to be criticized, etc. And we are expect to do that. No place to “hide.” All those things have strong impact on our performance evaluation and future, and basically we don’t have do-overs, any mistake will have permanent consequences.  

  • mcclellan4

    I’m struck by what I see as a very one-sided perspective, both in this discussion and in much of our culture today: the assumption that working more is unquestioningly better. The value of leisure doesn’t compete, and in fact it is a value I don’t think any of us has the option to stand up for: it would be unacceptable and risky, I think, to argue here that a professor who spends 30 hours a week “actually working” and the rest thinking, dreaming, or relaxing with family is the better, smarter, more valuable member of society. I’m not up on the literature on the topic of valuing leisure, but I know books have been written about this.

    As for me, I am an adjunct at four colleges/universities, and I also teach private music lessons and music theory for kids, in addition to being a part-time librarian and freelance music copyist, and member of a committed long-term relationship. Not to mention what I consider my “real” work, which is music composition. Rather than stating my working hours, it would be easier to count the hours I am NOT engaged in one of my nine jobs: between 11pm and 12:30am weeknights, and after 9pm on Fridays and 6pm Saturdays.
     
    So I am pretty formidable in the “working super-duper hard, almost all the time” race, a competition in which I sorely wish I were a more of a loser.

  • elirgreen

    I adjunct at 6 different campuses in 3 different states, and my total hours of work per week runs at about 75-80.  Most of the non-classroom time is working from home, so people assume that being at home means not working, but that is far from the truth.   I spend more time in my home office working than I do in the rest of my house.  

  • robjenkins

    Thanks for that perspective, elirgreen. I agree with other posters about the problem with “fixating” on hours spent. But it’s not our fixation. It’s the fixation of those who would judge us because they don’t perceive that we spend enough hours at our jobs. Stating loudly and clearly that we spend just as many hours as anyone else, and more than most, will not change that perception overnight, but it’s a start.

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