College teaching has long been pictured as a life of relative ease from daily pressures, safely insulated from the harsh world of work with its time clocks and deadlines and rush orders. The campus skyscrapers, known to many somewhat derisively as ivory towers, are said to be filled with occupants who seldom descend to reality and who are permitted to ply their trade in bucolic if not idyllic surroundings, gently enveloped in ivy, pipe smoke, and chalk dust. How does the college teacher compare with the bulk of the American labor force? Has he already reached a desirable plateau where working and leisure hours are harmoniously balanced? Is the picture of the professor, calmly puttering about, plagued by absent mindedness, and casually strolling to the library, an accurate one ? Or is the picture more like the response received when I, just entering graduate school, asked my adviser, just starting college teaching, the penetrating question, Well, how do you like teaching at the University? He was quick to profess his love for the state, its people, the university, administrators, ad infinitum, but voiced one small lament, I only wish someone would tell me how many hours a week had to put in down here. In short, he would have preferred the flesh pots of graduate study and research to the traumas of teaching. In a world of decreasing hours of work1 and increasing leisure time, how does the college professor fare ? Could it be that the forty hours a week worker would rather fight than switch working hours with the academic mechanic who has no prescribed limit to the hours he may work? A questionnaire survey was conducted among five institutions of higher learning to determine the number of hours faculty members spent in their various duties. The participating institutions were Iowa State Univer sity and the four Nebraska state colleges located at Chaldron, Kearney, Peru, and Wayne. A total of 450 faculty members from the areas of business, education, music, English, the social sciences, biology, physics, mathematics, physical education, industrial arts, foreign languages, art, home economics, library science, electri cal engineering, and chemical engineering provided usable responses. The questionnaire asked each faculty member to estimate the average number of hours per week he has spent the previous twelve month period on : ( 1 ) Teach ing, (a) Direct classroom or laboratory instruction, (b) Preparation and grading for classes. (2) Student advising. (3) Research, (a) funded research (grant or contract), (b) non-funded research, (c) Writing for publication or creative performance. (4) Service, (a) administration, (b) faculty committees, (c) outside consulting services, (d) professional societies, (e) other. Table shows the mean estimated number of hours per week and the percentage of total time spent in each of the four major areas of duty, and the means of the total number of hours spent per week for each of the five institutions. Thus, for the faculty of Chadron State College the mean estimated number of hours spent teaching was 31.7 hours per week. This mean number of hours was 59.9% of the total mean estimated number of hours per week, 52.9 hours per week in all duties. The means of the estimated number of hours per week spent in teaching ranged from a high of 34.0 hours to 24.6 hours. The range among the four Nebraska state colleges was quite narrow, 34.0 to 30.6 hours. The percent of time spent in teaching tasks was from slightly less than half at Iowa State to two-thirds for the Nebraska colleges, of course, very similar in the relative amount of time devoted to teaching. In advising, the mean estimated number of hours was from 4.8 hours per week to 3.6, or approximately one-half day per week. The percent of time spent by faculty members on student advising ranged from 9.0 percent to 6.9 percent.
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Mar 1, 1995
Kuo-Shong Wang + 2
Open Access