Other Duties as Assigned

At many small colleges, faculty and staff members are called on to perform multiple roles. This wearing of many hats is sometimes one of the benefits of such a setting, in that faculty members can pursue side interests or tangential areas of expertise for the benefit of the college.

But then there is the dreaded expectation that faculty or staff members use their expertise as a way for the college to get off on the cheap and avoid paying for some basic functions. I like to call this the “other duties as assigned” caveat, referring to that clause in many faculty/staff contracts that says, basically, “We can tell you to do pretty much anything we want.” That clause usually falls as the last item at the bottom of contracts or job descriptions.

Under that clause, an art professor is asked to serve as a free interior decorator. A computer-science professor is called on to set up a wireless network at an administrators’ home, with no compensation offered. An English professor is “invited” to edit or ghostwrite an aging alumnus’s memoir. A communication-arts professor has to sit at a soundboard and run the public-address system at all campus events, like graduation.

Closely related to this is the expectation that some persons have, especially regarding public institutions, that the college is there to serve the needs of the local community. These famous phone calls often begin with, “Hey, I have a great assignment for one of your classes. My company needs … and since you are public employees, I thought, I can just ask the folks at the college to do this.”

My university is very good about protecting folks from those sorts of expectations, but I know of other places that are not.

Do any of you have any stories about egregious acts of “other duties as assigned”? Where is it reasonable for a faculty or staff member to draw the line? If any of you have experiences like this, how were you able to “escape”?