March 26, 2008
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”?
By Gene C. Fant Jr. | Posted on Wednesday March 26, 2008 | PermalinkComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: Explaining Faculty Pay Gaps
Next: Out With the Old, In With the New
When I was a assistant prof (at an unnamed MA granting southern university), I rewrote the Dean of Arts and Sciences PHD proposal (this was 30+ years ago, when MA’s could be Deans)
for Nova University (great quality control there). The proposal had been rejected twice; it was accepted….I later ran the surveys, collated and interpreted the data, and wrote it all up. The Dean became Dr. – and I, tenured. Quid pro quo.
— richard Mar 26, 07:19 PM #
This doesn’t just happen at small colleges.As the upper administrators want to make more salary ,they cut back and increase responsibilities and reduce positions so they can split the salary savings among themselves.If you are a long term manager,you don’t stand a chance at getting a salary increase for increased repsonsibilities.It was 10% for the president and 2% for the rest of us…
— Brent Mar 26, 09:00 PM #
The new trend to “contracting out” clauses in faculty union contracts gives rise to very interesting situations. Take SUNY’s United University Professions’ contract. (As the largest higher ed union in the nation, UUP has been studied by a lot of us both in and outside of the borders of NYS.)
If a tenured faculty member is contracted out, then s/he will be given another job at the same or another unit in the system. Here’s the catch: the person will retain their “title” but not necessarily their job duties.
Yes, indeed, one of these days we will have (as in the days of the first SUNY censure by AAUP) a, say, Chinese historian’s work contracted out to the University of Phoenix online and the professor sweeping floors at another SUNY (and all, likely, in retaliation for “disruptive” speech, like criticizing an administrator, for example).
The SUNY union is apparently pleased that the latter-day Chinese historian will at least have a job, while the one back in the 70s and the first AAUP censure no longer did. And UUP doesn’t seem to have tried to eliminate “contracting out” in any successor agreements.
Choose your poison, I guess — with your union’s blessing.
— Anti-hypocrisy Advocate Mar 29, 10:51 AM #