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Tag: Faculty

The Workload Conundrum

One of the weirdest things about Canadian academia is how workload is defined. You’ve probably heard somewhere that professorial workload is “40-40-20”, that is, 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% “service.” But this is not an actual description of anyone’s actual workload, which can vary enormously from year to year, it’s more a kind of general rule of thumb, like the Chinese Communist Party’s adage that Mao was 70% good and 30% bad. It’s meant to be taken seriously but

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September 24, 2024 8 Comments

Faculty Salary Data 2022-23

Nota bene: There will be a podcast tomorrow, but the blog will be off all next week. Regular service resumes March 4. Everyone seemed to enjoy the look at Presidential salaries a few weeks ago. And, since we haven’t done faculty salaries in awhile, today seems like a good day to do that. Let’s start with average salaries by rank. Figure 1 shows current averages by rank along with (inflation-adjusted) comparisons with 5-, 10-, and 20-years previously. Current faculty salaries

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February 21, 2024 8 Comments

Two Ways of Looking at Academic Hiring

One of the endlessly recurring debates in Canadian higher education concerns whether institutions are properly investing in faculty.  It’s never entirely clear what “properly” means – the goalposts move a bit depending on who is talking.  Sometimes it’s about faculty hiring lagging behind student enrolment, sometimes it’s faculty not getting their “share” of money coming into universities.  The comparator varies, but the ratio is always claimed to be moving in the wrong direction.  This blog seeks to examine this claim

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November 21, 2023 2 Comments

Reducing Work

Recently, I asked my Twitter followers who taught in universities about the part of their job they liked the least.  I asked because I am pretty convinced Canadian higher education isn’t going to get through the next decade or so without some reasonably big changes in the way faculty spend their time. Here’s my basic assumption: as I noted back here, we’re on the brink of a pretty big increase in youth numbers. The best guess is that the number

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February 14, 2023 3 Comments

The EDI Hiring Bulge

A couple of days ago on the website Minding the Campus, a product of the National Association of Scholars (one of those Alan Bloom-loving revere-the-classics, free-exchange-of-ideas, but no-not-those-kinds-of-idea outfits) a research associate named John Sailer posted a list of academic jobs that were being advertised at The Ohio State University (you have to include the “the”. It’s a rule.) as an example of “political activism.”  Here’s the meat of the post: [OSU’s] RAISE initiative (extends to fields that have little

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February 6, 2023 2 Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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