Workload and Faculty Roles

I arrived at the annual conference of the Association of American Colleges and Universities this week and the first session I attended was a workshop on “Changing Faculty Workload Without Additional Resources.” I had immediately registered for the workshop when the preliminary program arrived, as workload has been a great concern of mine throughout my career as a professor and as an administrator.

The most interesting and encouraging part of the session was that it was predicated on the idea that it is essential to recognize the full scope of faculty work, and account for that work in a comprehensive and fair fashion. The outcome that all the presenters were seeking was to enable their colleagues to provide students with a more engaging educational experience in, but especially beyond, the classroom.

This session is relevant to academic hiring because it suggests that, at least at the margins, there is genuine recognition of the changed nature of faculty work in the past generation or so — a recognition that will strongly affect new faculty members.

Later, at dinner, I was discussing with two of my colleagues how much the relationship between faculty members and students has changed, and how those changes have increased demands on professors without much formal recognition or reimagining of their workload at the administrative level. It was gratifying to see a room full of deans, vice presidents, and provosts thinking about ways to adjust faculty workload that would foster both student and faculty success. Even in the current rather solemn fiscal atmosphere, this session suggested that a lot of people are thinking seriously about how to help both new and veteran faculty members be successful.