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 not literally.
But despite Canada having among the most unionized academic workforces in the world, it remains the case that almost none of these concepts is especially well defined in academic collective agreements. Teaching, for instance, is often (usually?) defined as undergraduate teaching; how the supervision of graduate students is divided is often left to the whims of individual department chairs. Service is usually defined so vaguely as to be almost meaningless (Service to the community? Service to the institution, i.e. committee meetings? Service to the discipline? Yes, yes and yes!). Research is basically a residual: output does get measured for purposes of promotion, but on an annual basis it is rare that publications are measured (reported, yes, but measured to look at work output, no) And as for anything that might suggest an equivalence between teaching hours and research output or service time, something that might help someone come up with an absolute measure of total work effort? Fuhgeddaboudit.
Now, I am absolutely not suggesting that this situation results in poor results on aggregate. Universities are full of people working like dogs. But I think there is a lot of evidence to suggest that it does result in workloads which are unequal. Some people spend lots of time in research; others do not. Some make up the difference with extra time teaching or extra service, others pursue a strategy of weaponized incompetence, making themselves undesirable as teachers or committee members.
(I would not suggest that there might be a gendered pattern to this kind of weaponized incompetence. But I know a lot of professors who would.)
Everybody knows this happens. Everybody. But nobody does anything. Management can’t do anything because changing the conditions of work will get the union in a lather. But unions can’t do anything either because while this situation clearly makes many of their members miserable, it also benefits quite a few of them as well.
What to do about this problem? Well, what about radical transparency?
Imagine a world where every year, each university published a record for all of its academic staff, including:
- the number of undergraduate courses taught (noting where appropriate if this is a new course for the instructor requiring extra time for preparation), along with the course enrolments,
- the number of master’s course taught,
- the number of graduate research students supervised,
- a list of publications for the year (including edited volumes),
- a list of departmental, faculty, and university committees served on,
- a description of activities in service to the community, and
- a description of activities in service to the discipline (article reviews, managing a journal, organizing a conference, etc.).
This is all information universities already receive from their faculty via annual reports or registrar systems. Institutions would need to collate it all a bit differently, but it’s all available. No new data collection required. Everyone would be able to see the inequalities between colleagues in the same department. And then there would be pressure generated internally to start equalizing workloads. Eventually, this might result in labour and management being willing to come up with rules around workload that might enforce some fair distribution of labour.
Ah, you say, but how could this happen? Didn’t I just say management can’t do this kind of thing because of likely union opposition? Well, yes, I did. I wouldn’t rule out an administration trying to do this on its own, but I agree it’s unlikely.
But a provincial government…. now, that’s a different story. A government could simply ask for this information and publish it or require institutions to do so. Faculty might argue some kind of privacy violation, but given how many provinces already have sunshine legislation which allows for professors’ salaries to be made public, I doubt this argument would go far.
Of course, You may doubt that a provincial government would care very much about work inequality in universities, and you’d probably be right. But if they couched it as a measure to help “reduce inefficiencies” in the face of institutions teetering on the brink of insolvency…well, that might be quite a different story.
Watch this space. I have a feeling something of this nature might be on the way.
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Australian higher education has long had the concept of equivalent full time student load (eftsl), the study load that a normal student would normally take in a year of full time study. So one may have 1 eftsl of undergraduate study which is all coursework, 1 eftsl of masters study which is mostly coursework but some research, or 1 eftsl of later year doctoral study which is all research.
Academics’ workload is calculated by the number of eftsl they teach or supervise, with the normal full time teaching load for a full time tenured academic being from 12 to 15 eftsl per year. This could be generated by supervising 15 full time doctoral candidates in a year.
A standard undergraduate study load is 4 courses in first semester + 4 courses in second semester = a total of 8 courses for a full time student in an academic year. Each course is thus one eight of a full time study load. So doing all of the teaching of 120 students in a standard course would generate a standard teaching load for a year, or more likely, 60 students in 1st semester and 60 students in 2nd semester.
This simplifies the comparison and standardisation of teaching loads, and allows for the construction of academic workload formulas, many of which are negotiated with The Union (Australia has only 1 academic staff union, which also covers general staff in many states).
Some Australian academic workload formulas are silly, with a lot of nickel-and-diming (what a great yanky expression!), and many are contentious.
So Australia’s radical transparency might report for each academic:
i etfsl of undergraduates taught
+
ii eftsl of masters taught
+
iii eftsl of graduate research students supervised
= total teaching load.
Those in professional teaching positions will come out ahead on the number of courses taught, although they may have smaller classes and fewer course preps. Those in faculties with established graduate programs will look good on the second two points. The rules for point IV have changed tremendously and, in the Arts and Social Sciences at least, there are growing challenges if your research doesn’t align with current ideological trends. The continuing infantalization of students and ever-changing rules of engagement (not to mention the challenges of defending against, identifying and responding to use of AI), have many of us just keeping our heads above water until we’re close enough to a not-awful pension payout. A better option for squeezing more blood from the mill-stone that is higher ed, may be a little more scrutiny of administrators’ workload. Their remuneration is significantly higher, their outputs questionable, and nobody seems to be holding them accountable.
A few problems at first blush (and I’m not necessarily averse to this sort of thing):
– Shadow work: there’s also a lot of academic work that falls into the un-countable (e.g. mentoring, student pastoral care, open office hours, student advocacy, research meetings, etc., etc.); it’s very difficult to add up how much time this takes academics and it’s never put on CVs that the employer collects. It’s also disparately distributed, falling more often on equity seeking groups.
– Non-institutional work: employers generally don’t want to recognize outside service work (e.g. journal editor) as it doesn’t contribute to the university’s operations; there’s no institutional work release for it, or if there was it’s being slowly withdrawn. This creates a major disincentive for academics to take on these important and university-enhancing roles. I don’t see employers wanting to include this in any workload discussion.
– Productivity: counting research outputs ignores differing individual levels of productivity, which individuals may be able to do nothing about (it’s just how people work). I think of myself a pretty productive but know that my work practices are different from others. Having a basic research criteria (e.g. you must publish 1 peer reviewed journal article in a field’s top 50 journals once per 2-years – or equivalent) that every academic should be able to meet would make some sense, but it’s as likely to have unintended negative effects as positive (e.g. I and other productive academics would think about whether it makes any sense for us to bust a gut every year rather than just hit the threshold). Any metric like this can end up being gamed; and employers seem loath to introduce basic performance incentives for criteria everyone can meet (as above).
– Success: the real problem with universities as institutions is that research success has no institutional reward; it doesn’t matter how successful someone is research-wise (e.g. grants, papers, books, supervision, external editing, reviewing, invitations to speak, etc.), all these activities are simply added on top of the usual workload. Hence, there is no incentive as an individual academic to do more than the minimal necessary (which is low after tenure) unless you want to get a job somewhere else.
Very interesting. In my experience the variance in workload across faculty comes in the research & service side. Most departments have binding annual teaching requirements. Some faculty do little to no research. The don’t get grants, the don’t supervise graduate students, and they do not publish. Yet they are in research based tenure based positions. These faculty are really only doing half their jobs as the are also not often involved in service too much.
I think that the one size fits all nature of time allocation does not work. Staying in a research based tenured position should require research outputs. We should allow those not doing research anymore to transition to a teaching based position that is a better match for their career goals at that stage. As you point out unions are not going to be in favour of this. But taxpayers are not getting value for money by paying people to do research who are not actually doing it.
I see just counting outputs for research and service as problematic. It’s like saying that someone with 2 watermelons and 32 raisins has 34 fruits, and we are going to keep track of the number of fruits a person eats. As you note some committees take much more time than others and faculty play a much more central role in some areas than others. Serving on a faculty hiring committee is very different than being an advisor to a student club that meets one time a year. In a similar vein research outputs differ enormously in their impact and importance – a key finding on the way to curing cancer is far more socially important than a review article that lists well know moments of medical discovery for the 100th time. Experts are needed to make assessments of research impact. This would take us more to a UK REF model – which many decry for gaming and stress. But it is surely better than the alternative of just counting stuff without looking at what is actually being discovered.
Overall I feel that Canadian academics are held back by so much bureaucracy and micro management. I would be much rather be help accountable by outcomes – are my students learning alot and getting great jobs? am I bringing in lots of grant$? Are my Phd students well supervised and on the path to the next generation of leadership? Am I delivering on service commitments?
University faculty are plagued by what the Airbnb CEO calls ‘fake work’. This is work that has nothing to do with the core value proposition of the organization. Administration dream up a million mandates of faculty time to go on activities that have nothing to do with student learning or discovery. Universities desperately need to focus on their core functions. More reporting will require much more ‘fake work’ time and less focus of faculty student learning + discovery. There is no way for high performing faculty to fight back, so they have to adopt the low performance/high bureaucracy model.
If the aim is transparency & equity iv “a list of publications for the year (including edited volumes),” would need to be greatly expanded to included a whole host other forms, formats & approaches to scholarship that aren’t necessarily strictly a publication
Yes! I love it! The issue of very different workloads is not so much an intra-departmental (inter-personal) issue nor an inter-departmental issue. It’s first and foremost an issue between different Faculties/Colleges/Schools.
Being member of a Faculty where many colleagues do work like dogs, I love the idea to publish
– One-semester course sections taught as a single instructor;
– One-semester course sections taught as member of a team;
– Total number of students in those course sections;
– Number of MSc students supervised within 3 years from start of their program;
– Number of PhD students supervised within 6 years from start of their program;
– Number of undergraduate students supervised for individual art/work/research/internship projects;
– Number of Faculty/College/School/University committees chaired;
– Number of Faculty/College/School/University committees served on, but not a Chair;
– Service as Chair of a departmental committee;
and all this in the same table with our published salaries. What a revelation that would be.
Not happening, though. Can you guess why select Faculties and administrators would be dead-set against this?
Just kidding. Of course, you can.
This is such an interesting problem! I wonder if any of the provinces would try to use the inputs to construct an efficient frontier. I would imagine that aside from the publications, it would be quite valid to compare workloads that way, although you’d have to figure out some way to compare things like committee workload numerically. Perhaps some boundaries should be draw between departments or disciplines, but once you have the data in one place it’s easy enough to experiment with grouping academic staff in different ways. I’m curious to see who tackles this and how.
To your list I would add number of research grants applied for, and number of grants being administered as PI. Both activities can consume a lot of time.
Even with all this information, it is notoriously difficult to judge “workload”, especially for research and service, and especially for anyone outside the department or institution.