Here’s an important question. Why do we care about how many classes a professor teaches?
Virtually every university collective agreement has some kind of minimum or average or desirable teaching load – 2+3, 2+2, etc. It doesn’t really matter since so many professors are buying their way out of these anyway and going down to one class a term. Regardless, though, the unit of analysis here is the course.
This makes absolutely no sense. Universities don’t get paid based on how many courses they teach. They get paid by how many students they teach. And the term “course” isn’t exactly homogenous. It includes tutorials, small seminars, regular classrooms and enormous 500-student affairs. And the price professors pay to get out of teaching a class is more or less the same no matter how many students are enrolled in it.
Let me suggest the following: let’s get rid of course-based workloads and adopt student-number workloads instead. Why not say that every professor has to teach a minimum of 160 student half-courses (e.g., one half course of 160 students or 4 half courses of 40 students each) per year? And, equally, that when professors want to get out of a course, the payment to do so must be proportional to the number of student half-courses being abandoned.
The benefits of this go far beyond standardizing workloads. It would prevent proliferations of small niche courses and send signals to deans and department heads about when to stop hiring (no department head will want to hire if it cannibalizes student numbers that existing professors need to hit in order to get paid). And it would put a cap on the number of students being taught by sessionals.
In fact, just looking at Statistics Canada’s FTE numbers in the CAUT Almanac, assuming that every full-time students takes five courses per term, it seems that there are a little over 8.7 million half-courses being delivered at Canadian universities. If every institution adopted the 160 student rule, then the country’s 38,300 full-time academic staff would be able to teach a minimum of 6.1 million half-courses – or very nearly three-quarters of the total.
Think about it: adopting a minimum student standard has benefits for workload standardization, cost control and decreasing reliance on sessionals. With tighter budgets on the way in most of Canada, it’s an idea whose time might be now.
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I’m not quite sure how this would work at smaller schools. For example, at Trent University, when I was an undergrad, there were something like 200 students registered in first year calculus. These students were divided between two sections. The total number of math students in upper years (single major, joint-major, minor, those who just happen to have prereqs) totalled around 30. So if we take the number of students to be taught per semester to be 100, then a professor could teach 1 section of first year calc or 10 sections of uppear year courses with 10 students apiece. In other words, either teach intro calc for a semester or all upper year courses. Lowering the number reduces the incentives to teach larger low level courses. Raising the number could lead to impossible situations where there are literally not enough students to fulfil the requirements.
And this doesn’t even begin to address how prerequiste chains in the sciences would come into play.
It’s an interesting idea but it might not work outside of the arts.
I take the general point that it’s not a rule one could implement blindly; however, if your department doesn’t have enough students to fulfill the requirements, that’s probably a good indication that it’s overstaffed.