Some days, I go hunting for blog topics and what comes up are a bunch of ideas that might have made an entire post back in the days when this was a 450-word-per-post blog, but definitely don’t cut it in the 1100-word-per-post era.  But they are still good topics!  So today, I am throwing out a pair of unrelated thoughts for your consideration.

Workloads

A couple of weeks ago I mused about the causes of the current round of labour militancy, and one of the things I touched on was the issue of workloads.  I want to return to this issue now that workload seems to be one of the talking points in the York University Faculty Association’s negotiations with the University.

Allow me to make two brief points about workload.  First, the end of a two-year pandemic might be the single worst time for anyone to assess workloads.  Without passing comment on how reasonable/unreasonable “normal” workloads are, I would argue that they have been extraordinarily intense over the last 24 months.  That’s a good basis on which to push institutions for some gratitude, but a terrible basis on which to negotiate future workload issues.  Recency bias is going to make negotiations on this issue a nightmare.  If I were a university president with means, I’d be working out how to give academic staff a significant one-off payment in appreciation and in respect of those recent efforts, but I’d respectfully decline to talk about workloads in general.  Not this round.

But also, as a data guy, I find the idea of negotiating over workload to be amusing since it’s currently non-quantifiable. I mean, if there’s one thing both academic staff and universities agree on it is that workloads must never be quantified in a way that one could actually measure things over time.  I mean God Forbid anyone actually see how professors are using their time, and using that to make informed decisions, because if you did that then you might discover enormous inequities in workloads between academic staff members (or worse, gendered patterns of differences in academic workload), and that would never do.

To be clear, I am not suggesting here that workload isn’t an issue.  I am suggesting that arguing this point in the absence of data is strange.  It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone put forward a serious proposal to measure workloads as part of the bargaining package.

The Entrepreneurial Humanities

One of the sticks with which people like to beat the humanities is that they simply aren’t entrepreneurial enough, stuck in old paradigms, not listening to the market, etc.  I largely argue that this is nonsense: in some important ways, humanities faculties are actually better at listening to market demand than other faculties.  They just do it differently.

This may be easiest to explain by contrasting humanities with another field where there is currently a lot of curricular innovation; namely, Engineering (side note: our next issue of Monitoring Trends In Academic Programs is on Engineering curricula, and is out soon – keep an eye out!).  Here’s the difference: when Engineering faculties are looking to create new programs or new approaches, they are mainly listening to businesses who employ their graduates and to mid-career alumni, and what they are listening for are views partly on how the needs of the market are changing to see if new kinds of engineering specializations are need, but also for how professional practice is changing to see if new kinds of curricula for existing fields of study are needed. 

Humanities faculties do not listen to employers.  In fact, most of the time they barely have any comprehension of where their graduates are employed.  Nor for the most part do they have much sense of how graduates use the skills they gained in their degree.  But they are actually very interested in what current students think and are quite attentive to these shifting interests, since this listening tends to  lead to new courses or clusters of courses rather than new programs. Full program development is tricky because it tends to cannibalize demand within humanities, and in any case anything interdisciplinary – which most of the new stuff is – is always vulnerable to the vagaries of the budget process. But the point is the same: humanities programs do change things up in response to demand – they just define the client as actual students, not alumni or employers.  In that sense, they may be the most market-oriented faculty of all.

One could suggest that humanities would be better off broadening its definition of client, most notably to include students who aren’t already in the humanities.  But the point is that the necessary adaptation skills already exist: they just look a bit different than what the rest of the academy is used to.