You may recall our post from a few weeks ago on how many hours a week college faculty work. Over at Brainstorm, Naomi Schaefer Riley has returned to this subject. She wonders just how much faculty time is spent doing things that do not have a direct bearing on students. Here is a taste:
…a professor at Kansas State University, Philip Nel, decided to keep a time diary for a week, chronicling his every move. Here’s the intro:
Since it’s fashionable in some quarters to attack state employees as lazy (Hello, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker!), I am — for this coming week only — blogging about precisely how I spend my time, as a Professor of English at Kansas State University. I’m also doing this because, when I was an undergraduate, I had no idea how my own professors spent their days. I mean, I assumed that they were working: they did show up prepared for class, and turn back graded papers, quizzes and exams. But what did they actually do when not teaching me? I didn’t know, and never really gave it a thought.
Most of what Nel counts seems like it’s perfectly reasonable. I hear more and more from professors that they have to work long weeks (read, longer than 40 hours). But how does that square with all of the studies that suggest students are spending less and less time engaged in academic activities? Studies like Academically Adrift suggest that students are spending somewhere less than 30 hours a week engaged in studying and attending classes.
One possibility is that each professor is responsible for many more students than they used to be. But assuming everyone is telling the truth, my guess is that a lot of time that faculty spend working doesn’t have much direct effect on students. Indeed, Mr. Nel’s diary reveals that he spends a significant amount of time “trying to keep up with the vast field of children’s literature.” He writes reviews of children’s comic strips, for instance.
And he also spends time writing applications for faculty-development awards so he can attend conferences on children’s literature. I am willing to believe that children’s literature is a legitimate field of study. But the idea that in order to teach Kansas State undergraduates about it effectively, one needs to “keep up with the literature” seems to me a bridge too far. And I bet you it’s a bridge too far for many state legislators as well.
Maybe it’s not that parents and taxpayers and legislators don’t know how hard professors work. Maybe they just have different priorities than the academic world.
I am not sure I agree with Riley’s critique. “Keeping up with the literature” and pursuing opportunities for professional development do have an impact on the kind of education a professor can deliver to his or her students.
What do you think?
This hits pretty hard for me. I think a lot about how I use my time because I think a lot of it is a waste. Though I'm a career academic, I am also the kind of person who can appreciate the end of a hard day's manual labor. A stack of wood, after all, is a stack of wood.
Sometimes what we do is so… negligible. If I read a book, it might change the way I see the world forever… or, it might gloss over my eyes and change nothing at all. I will give a cursory nod to someone who mentions the book's title the next time I hear it. In other words, it is not substantive.
I think, as with many other things, the fruit of our labor is in how WE see it. Many of us don't have very high opinions of governors, Scott Walker not excepted. Likewise, people hate college professors because of our politics or our methods or because we're not… doing whatever “they” deem valuable. However, if I am secure in my Calling, and I approach my day with that sort of dilligence, I can safely relax in the evenings with a fun book, a tv show, or just conversation with my wife, knowing that my work that day… though not a stack of wood, was still a worthwhile enterprise.