I often get into discussions that go like this:
Me: Over time, the number of classes each professor teaches has gone down. Places where people used to teach 3/2 (three classes one term, two the other) now teach 2/1. Places where 4/3 or even 4/4 were common are now 3/2. This has been one of the main things making higher education more expensive in Canada.
Someone else (usually a prof): Yeah, but classes are so much larger now than they used to be.
Me: Do you not think that teaching fewer classes maybe the cause of higher average class size? Do you think that if everyone taught more classes average class size would fall?
(nota bene: This isn’t the whole story, obviously. Student-staff ratios have gone up to such a degree that even if profs were teaching the same number of courses, numbers would still be up a bit. Though how much is hard to say, because of the changing use of sessional lecturers.)
Someone else: Does it matter? Same number of students, same amount of work.
Me: Is it? Are three classes of fifty students actually the same amount as five classes of thirty students? Doesn’t less class prep time more than make up for the increase in marking?
Someone else: Um, well, yeah. Probably. But we’re still doing lots of committee work! And tenure requirements have become much more punishing than they used to be! And those teaching loads don’t count graduate student supervisions.
Me: No doubt, committee work can take up a lot of time – though much of it exists simply to make the university less effective. But that research one – that’s not distributed equally across the university, is it? I mean, we know that the pace of publication falls pretty quickly after tenure is granted (see figure 3 of this PPP article by Herb Emery). And not all university research is of the same quality: Well over 10% of all Canadian faculty (24% in the humanities) have never had a publication cited by anyone else (HESA research, which we demonstrated back here).
Someone else: And graduate supervision?
Me: Fair point. But graduate supervision is all over the place. Supervising a PhD in Science tends to be more intensive than in Arts. And course-based Masters’ student are increasingly more like undergraduates than doctoral students in the loads they bring. Hard to measure.
Someone else: But shouldn’t all this be measured?
Me: Of course. But notice how Canadian university Collective Bargaining Agreements avoid the question of overall workload, even though they often get really specific about teaching loads. Universities don’t want to measure this stuff because it would expose how many profs are working way too hard, and unions don’t want to measure this stuff because it would expose how many profs aren’t. Look how hard both sides worked to discredit the HEQCO paper on professorial productivity, which posed exactly that question.
Someone else: is this ever going to change?
Me: Governments could put pressure on institutions to actually enforce the bits of the CBAs that require faculty to actually do the hard-to-measure stuff (committee work, research). Junior staff could make more of a fuss within the unions to start ensuring equal treatment of workloads within the bargaining unit. Short of that, no.
Someone else: Aren’t you a bit cynical?
Me: Around here, hard not to be.
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There is one other big difference between, say, 1982 (when I first started teaching) and now that does not get mentioned. The students are different. Half of the students currently in my classes would not have been admitted into university in 1982. So I have to teach differently than I did back then, and it is a lot more work. Nowadays I find that I have to keep up a steady stream of assignments, practice problems, sample questions, and other sorts of feedback that cover everything that students will see on tests or exams. I also, mostly, have to give them their notes through one method or another. If not, the students will be totally unprepared when they sit the tests and exams. So teaching a course, for me, is a lot more work than it used to be. There is also the extra work from the greatly expanded special needs offices and increased numbers of international students who often require a lot more help and support. So, in my experience, comparing numbers of classes taught over time, even holding the number of students constant, is not a comparison of like objects.
The debate could go on endlessly, but in order for there to be a point to it, I’d like there to be some compelling evidence of some reduction-in-workload problem needing a solution (about which we could then debate endlessly). In the face of huge increases in students/professors, what is that evidence? (No, reduction in # of courses taught is not evidence, it’s exactly what you would expect given a huge increase in numbers taught.)
I’d agree that the problem is in measuring, since all measures can be misleading. I just looked this up on wikipedia: “[Gregor] Mendel’s work was rejected at first in the scientific community, and was not widely accepted until after he died.” Good thing that he had tenure as a monk.
One other thing: insisting that course loads ought to be equal across the institution, erases differences between disciplines.
In some disciplines, you might be able to teach 1000 students in a giant lecture hall or by podcast, and then test them all using a scantron. This isn’t true of a laboratory discipline, or of any humanities discipline, requiring essay-writing.
Since administrators insist on seeing the value of a discipline in the number of students it processes, every department’s so-called productivity will be judged against the worst teachers. Moreover, it’s hardly equitable to ask someone in a marking-intensive or hands-on discipline to teach more classes than his colleague in a discipline where class sizes seem designed to test to destruction the principle of economies of scale.