Last week, I wrote about Day of Digital Humanities–an annual tradition of digital humanities scholars blogging and otherwise chronicling their work for a single day in order to document the field. Lee Bessette, of College Ready Writing at Inside Higher Ed, took #DayOfDH as inspiration and called for a broader dialogue, Day of Higher Ed. The resulting posts yesterday on Twitter and academic blogs produced both documentation and reflection on academic workload and lifestyles. If you didn’t participate in #DayOfHigherEd, here are a few of the posts from the day’s conversation:

• Andy Driska’s hourly breakdown and reflection
• Kristen Abell’s day in the life of a housing director
• Stephanie Vanderslice’s day in the life of a college writing professor
• Melonie Fullick’s “Start Talking Back”
• Sonya Huber’s hourly breakdown

There was an activist impulse (or perhaps “slacktivist”, as…

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Looking at my calendar alone, it’s hard to get much of a sense of what I do each week. In between blocks of meetings, “office hours”, and scheduled classes, there are oddly placed gaps that are inevitably packed and yet unstructured. Perhaps that’s part of what makes faculty workload a popular target: David Levy’s editorial in the Washington Post, “Do college professors work hard enough?”, has added fuel to the endless debates about faculty workload. It includes accusatory gems like: “Though faculty salaries now mirror those of most upper-middle-class Americans working 40 hours for 50 weeks, they continue to pay for teaching time of nine to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks, making possible a month-long winter break, a week off in the spring and a summer vacation from mid-May until September.” Follow-ups to the editorial even take this a step further, suggesting that academics…

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