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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Mark Bauerlein

Stop Pushing Yourself

The Woessner report that I posted on yesterday prompted an interesting commentary in the Wall Street Journal by Naomi Schaefer Riley. Ms. Riley notes, among other things, the heavy lean toward Obama in academe as measured by campaign contributions (reported here by The Chronicle), and she notes the finding that conservative students meet with professors less often. What she highlights most, though, is the assumption that “someone who places more importance on raising a family would shy away from academia.”

Professor April Kelly-Woessner (the liberal wife to conservative husband Matthew Woessner) tells Riley in an interview of the “great misconception in popular culture about what it is that academics do, that we teach a couple of days a week and have lots of free time.” We have seen, indeed, many books and articles on the subject, such as Profscam by Charles Sykes, and when people hear about a 2-2 teaching load that means 6 classroom hours a week for 28 weeks out of the year, they wonder what all the complaining is about.

But Professor Kelly-Woessner maintains, “Our average workweek is 60+ hours. And unlike a regular job, where you come home at 5, we’re grading well into the evening.”

Can this be true, 60+ hours?

Maybe for some segments, such as teachers with a 4-4 load that includes heavy writing assignments on the syllabus. And maybe for assistant professors struggling to get the book finished before tenure time, or researchers in the sciences working on a timetable because of funding.

But if we look at tenured professors in the humanities and in many other disciplines, it seems to me that much of the work they do is entirely self-generated. The conference papers that have to be written, the scholarly articles they want to complete, the book projects that hang over them . . . these are not required. They are elective. Yes, they can enhance a career, extend a CV, or even contribute to the historical record—sometimes. But the fact is that the degree to which the vast majority of conference papers and articles in the humanities effectively change the working conditions of professors doesn’t come close to justifying the number of hours they spend on the projects. These projects fill their afternoons and evenings, and in my experience inside academia and out I have never heard any groups speak as loudly about how “busy” they are as professors do. Plainly, the situation makes many of them unhappy. So why do they do it? Is it really worth sweating all those months getting that manuscript in order—which upon publication will sell only a few hundred copies—just to boost your annual raise a few hundred dollars?

Posted at 12:34:32 PM on March 4, 2008 | All postings by Mark Bauerlein

Comments

  1. It might be useful to remember that many, many professors work at smaller schools with a heavy service requirement in addition to 4-4 teaching loads and scholarship requirements for advancement in their careers. It seems to me that a disproportionate number of those faculty are in the kind of programs where they are teaching lower division courses for the majority of their teaching loads, and that they get to teach maybe one or two upper division courses in their fields per year. In addition, the heavy service requirements generate their own intrusions into the time needed for grading during the day, and therefore much of our work is taken home to be done well into the night. Couple that with the need to participate even minimally in the kind of “self generated” work Bauerlain describes in order to be considered for that “few hundred dollars” (which is a substantial issue if one isn’t pulling in the big bucks offered to professors at larger institutions), and we get an overworked and undervalued professoriate. I won’t even include family demands outside of the job that many (primarily female) professors juggle. So that 60+ workweek seems about right to me. In discussions about the workload of professors, it appears that too many hasty generalizations are made on both sides of the issue, and that any kind of meaningful dialogue would include consideration for those thousands of us who work at smaller institutions with radically different expectations for faculty than the 2-2 fantasy life Bauerlain describes.

    — Julie Brannon · Mar 4, 03:07 PM · #

  2. I have always viewed the work habits of colleagues in academia (and my own) as largely a matter of socialization. Working in the field of education/special education, since graduate school I have been socialized in the direction of higher levels of achievement both in terms of academic productivity (e.g., publications) and making a positive impact on schools and children’s lives. Attempting to make such a meaningful difference requires working beyond a typical 40-hr. week including teaching and teaching prep (and grading), advising/ supervising students, conducting research and writing grant proposals to support that research, writing and submitting articles/chapters/books, preparing and conducting training activities for inservice teachers, and a raft of service activities (e.g., reviewing articles submitted to journals, department, college, and university committees, school district and state office of education committees, etc.). It would be interesting to see if faculty engaged in more professional preparation type situations that will have a direct impact on people (i.e., school children) perhaps have different work scenarios than those from other types of academic endeavors (e.g., humanities).

    — Rob O'Neill · Mar 4, 04:27 PM · #

  3. Mark — Just to clarify: Is your point that professors should stop working so hard or that they should stop whining so much?

    I would just like to know, so that I can be clear.

    — Michael Elliott · Mar 4, 08:59 PM · #

  4. Academics work so hard because they want to and need to, especially if they are working towards tenure. You can’t force someone to do academic work. They will either do it or not. People who do it, want to. Those who don’t may adjunct at colleges, without a publishing pressure in the world, beyond their own. It is worth it to them, or they would not do it. If it was worth it to more conservative students they would do it to, as I mentioned in my previous post. But, it is not worth it to many conservative college students, if we can trust the numbers on how many conservatives are in Academia in the first place. Many of my colleagues have become mothers and fathers over the years. They seem quite happy with raising a family with one or more academic bread winners in the family. Riley, the “taste editor” of the Wall street journal, obviously an important expert on this issue, who published the opinion piece that starts off Mark’s blog, is humorous. Now that is truly funny: Riley’s conclusion that conservative students don’t want to hangout with the liberal students who want the PhDs and that is why they don’t get PhDs. Wrong. If PhDs paid more, more people would want to get them, regardless of who they vote for or what party they support. It is not a secret; everyone knows that getting a PhD and then a college faculty position, especially in the humanities, is a risky proposition financially. You better be good and lucky. There is a good chance you will not make it to see tenure or a salary that compares with those who went for the sure thing. Those who really want it—will get it—a PhD that is—one way or another. By the way maybe academics support Obama and democrats because by doing so they are supporting their economic self-interest. I don’t see Obama declaring a new aw shucks buck stops here bill of “No Freshman left behind, or no conservative freshman left behind.” Democratic candidates support education more than their Republican counterparts—and they are more willing to make education a priority in budgeting. It is not just that Obama is a liberal, he will invest in Education which obviously benefits college faculty directly and indirectly. Middle class academics, are not as easily tricked via red herrings into voting for candidates that don’t support their economic or other interests, unlike many of their nonacademic peers in salary. Should we have PhD affirmative action for self described conservative students that also brainwashes them into thinking no you really want the least profitable of degrees, it’s just the liberalness of it all has turned you off to your true calling? In our post modern workplace, there are many professions you can be, and college conservatives may prefer them more to the PhD option. I really doubt it is the social aspects and camaraderie of stock brokering that attract so many to it. Conservative mentors in Universities are not so few in number that they can’t be found by conservative future intellectuals who feel vulnerable to all those dirty liberals who want to stop them from getting a PhD.

    — hari · Mar 5, 02:28 AM · #

  5. To get tenure in a humanities department at a decent university, the candidate needs to have published a book, a substantial stack of articles, and to have delivered conference papers at major meetings in his or her field.

    To get tenure with promotion, the candidate often needs even more published articles.

    To get promotion, the candidate must publish another book, another substantial set of articles, and she must have remained active in the conferences in her field.

    For meaningful raises after promotion to full professor, the professor often must remain a desireable commodity. Which means attracting offers from other, good universities. Which means steady publishing, steady conference papers, etc.

    The academy attracts self-motivated workers, people who don’t need to be told exactly what to do and when to do it. It often attracts over-workers, who never rest.

    — Luther Blissett · Mar 5, 06:03 AM · #

  6. At my community college we teach a 5/5/2 load, meaning that the first part of summer is a REQUIRED load of two extra long classes every day of the week. Add to this grueling schedule three to four preps for different classes, plus required writing assignments and I’ll tell you that some weeks, I’m working far more than 60+ hours….and no, I’m not doing it just for the “fun” of it.

    — D. · Mar 5, 08:03 AM · #

  7. I find it interesting that Bauerlein emphasizes “self-generated” research projects in his description of a typical professor’s work load, while throwing a paper-grading bone to those unfortunates burdened with a 4-4 teaching load at inferior institutions. What arrogance!

    In the first place, published research is key to tenure and promotion at all levels and is valued much more highly than service or teaching even at “inferior” institutions. Some might question these priorities.

    But second, I wonder how much time Bauerlein spends on course preparation and student advisement. He never mentions that component. In my 30 years of teaching, I was always tinkering with course content, different assignments, class presentations/discussions, and assistance to students. That took up a great deal of time and made the 60+ hour week unavoidable.

    The larger question, it seems to me, is what should professors get paid to do, not how many hours it takes them to do it.

    — William Barnett · Mar 5, 08:14 AM · #

  8. Prof Bauerlein has a very curious understanding of what it is most of us academics do on a daily —6 to 7 days a week, not 5 — basis. Perhaps the rarified atmosphere of Emory University has keep him at a distance from the reason WHY so much of academic work is “self-generated”? That “why” includes curiousity, a passion for one’s subject, a strong desire to inform others (ie, one’s students) about one’s discoveries and inventions, and occasionally, an interest in making a contribution to knowledge. All of which get rolled into one’s “work” in the classroom and without which the professor quickly becomes the equivalent of a Dr. Xerox — only reproducing the obvious and not ever generating anything new.

    Physicians and lawyers also “self-generate” their work (ie, their clients), and they typically charge by the minute. Included in their every six minutes (for lawyers) fee are the hours it often takes researching a new legal ruling, or (in the case of a physician) a new medical procedure. The fees each changes ultimately includes such learning time (non-billable) as a matter of course. Why should not the average academic — teaching even as few as six credit hours a semester — ALSO include in his/her work day such prep time, without which our work would become as obsolete as any lawyer who argues out-dated case law? A sixty-hour+ academic work week is the norm for most in my university. It had better be; there is far too much to learn otherwise — even for us old timers.

    JVK

    — John V. Knapp · Mar 5, 11:11 AM · #

  9. I agree with the comments above about tenure, promotion, etc. To be competitive, graduate programs have to attract and retain the most distinguished faculty. That is assessed on the basis of publications, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Because we do belong to a profession, constituted by an ongoing disciplinary conversation, it is difficult to perform at the highest level unless one presents one’s work in an audience of critical peers. Conferences serve the function of letting one float trial balloons, hone work in progress, take the temperature of expert opinion, etc. If competitive distinction in terms of excellent publications is the goal, none of this is optional.

    Sixty-plus hours per week sounds low to me. And the work is “self-generated,” in a way, but not because it is mere busy-work or self-indulgent folly. A competitive system, which measures both graduate programs and individual faculty, is ultimately what generates the both the publishing itself and the networking required to sustain and polish it.

    — Clement Hawes · Mar 5, 11:15 AM · #

  10. Quit bitching and moaning. The rest of the world puts in 60+ hours and doesn’t get summers off, tenure, sabbaticals, and whatever celebrity comes from publishing. Grow up.

    — mn · Mar 5, 12:13 PM · #

  11. I see very little bitching or moaning here, mn. I see people trying to explain why they are working 60-hour weeks, since the column suggested that either they shouldn’t or don’t.

    — Michael · Mar 5, 12:45 PM · #

  12. I agree with many of the other comments here – Bauerlein is full of it. I am a tenured full professor, and I regularly put in 60 hours a week – and right now publication counts for little of it. Where does my time go? New course preparation, grading (I am in a writing-intensive discipline), supervision of graduate student research, hiring (I’ve chaired several hiring committees in the past two years), curricular reform … the list goes on. Yes, I could probably refuse to do much of this work (I do have tenure and a good salary), but it obviously needs to be done – and as a full professor I should do it, so that my more junior colleagues can have time to publish. Btw, I’m not whining – I went into the profession with my eyes open, and I consider myself lucky to have a job – esp. one that I like! But I am getting tired of people from the more elite institutions speaking for the entire profession, when it is clear that they are clueless about the work conditions under which the vast majority of us labor.

    — Poe · Mar 5, 01:04 PM · #

  13. Are you kidding me?! The demands on my time are easily in the 50-60 hour per week range. Add a personnel emergency or candidate interviews or an on-campus workshop and you can add another ten hours. I have a 12-month appointment and certainly do not get summers off. If anything, I’m expected to redirect ALL of the time I would have spent on teaching back into research. And, by the way, to use the same time to upgrade my lectures for the following academic year. And to attend to some administrative tasks that have gotten backlogged … Yes, Joseph Heller could have written my Faculty Activities Plan.

    — Catalin Dunnett · Mar 5, 01:25 PM · #

  14. Professor B. lives in Fantasyland, happily, I’m sure. (Think about Bush being a little taken aback that gas might hit 4 bucks a gallon,) Read Marc Bousquet’s HOW THE UNIVERSITY WORKS. Also, think about what other professions have allowed more than half their numbers to be employed part-time, many without benefits. That’s the state of the American professoriate. Professor B. should also take a peek at the PBS Docummentary DECLINING BY DEGREES. There’s a book by the same title, but I doubt Professor B. is educable at this point.

    — George T. Karnezis · Mar 5, 04:02 PM · #

  15. those who are involved in the academia can testify how hard it is to get tenure and promotion. “You publish or perish” + heavy teaching loads + administration to enhance your CV… are 60 hours enough? The reality is hard…

    — Nina Bruni · Mar 10, 09:41 AM · #

  16. Hours worked is the idiot’s measure of “work done”. Businesses are full of stupid “managers” incapable of assessing mission worths and missions accomplished, so they fall back on how many hours someone “worked”. At Coopers & Lybrand I passed the office of an Ecole Polytechnique grad, each morning on my way to my own office, observing that he never did anything and his desk was always perfectly empty, except for a oversize cup of coffee. After months of this I boldly intruded one day asking him what he did—“I think” he replied gaulic-ly. Sure enough, 18 months of doing nothing later, he and our Chairman were in cohoots announcing a new consulting practice and its first 5 global corporate customers funding a reseach center to endow it at its start. So apparently “doing nothing” for 18 months was more profitable than “doing something” like I and hundreds of other peons were doing. Hours worked is the idiot’s measure of work done—people too stupid to know a value when it hits them.

    On the other hand, academics who “educate” without modern social science research evidence defining that and how much of what sort of it actually occurs in particular courses, classes, books, on campus incidental incidents, and the like, are irresponsible and unprofessional, however much they “believe” in what they do, never clu-ing in the public on it real contents.

    Both sides have their own particular faults and lazinesses and deserve each other—the same kvass Vonnegut said.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Mar 10, 10:27 AM · #

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