An interesting little exercise in budget analysis:
There are just under 5600 humanities professors at Canadian universities, and 7600 in the social sciences (excluding law, which is another 600 or so). On average, these people make about $108,000/year (slightly higher in social sciences, slightly lower in humanities). Add another 25% on that for payroll taxes, health, and pension, and the direct costs of employing these folks is about $135,000 per year. That comes out to about $1.85 billion in total.
Now, what do we pay these people to do, exactly? Well, according to the standard formula (which I recognize does not apply to everyone), 40% of their time is for teaching, 40% of their time is for research, and 20% is for the ever-nebulous concept of “service”. So, while the transparent subsidies to humanities and social science research – the ones paid through SSHRC – amount to about $700 million, the non-transparent subsidies embedded in academic salaries is, all told, another $750 million on top of that.
When you start dividing out these salary-embedded research amounts by field of study, it’s kind of fascinating, particularly in the humanities. $33 million each year for research in philosophy; $58 million for history; $57 million for English. That adds up: nearly $300 million for humanities-based research. That’s almost as much as we spend on transfers to First Nations for post-secondary education each year.
I am not particularly concerned here about whether this amount of spending is desirable, or whether it offers value-for-money or anything like that; I’m sure there would be good arguments both ways. What does concern me is this: nobody in this country ever stood up and voted for $33 million of public money to be spent on research in Philosophy, and nor would they because nobody thinks that what Philosophy professors are actually paid to do.
When Canadian universities quietly – oh so quietly – began dropping faculty teaching loads about fifteen years ago, from 3/3 and 3/2 to 2/2 and 2/1, implicitly we were shifting compensation – paying more for research and less for teaching. In some fields – mainly in the sciences –that made eminent good sense. In others – such as the humanities – it’s not clear that made any sense at all. After all, the ultimate defense of the humanities is “we teach kids to learn how to think”. Fair enough: so why spend all that money paying humanities professors not to teach?
We never had a proper debate about any of this, mainly because we are not transparent about what services we are actually buying when we hire a professor. The quality of debates on higher education would improve enormously if we did.
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Your analysis involves a common but simple error which is to take number of courses to be the measure of amount of teaching. In fact professors are teaching about 40% more *students* each semester than in the 1990s in my department, and if you think about it for even a minute or so you’d realize that reducing the number of *courses* is the only way this could have been possible. Yes a “proper debate” is needed but it should not rest on misconceptions.
This piece makes many mistakes but the classic one is that research and teaching are not mutually exclusive enterprises but are actually quite related: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/universities-arent-about-teaching-v-research-theyre-about-teaching-and-research/article1361233/
I don’t understand how that argument has anything to do with what I’m saying, though. I haven’t suggested *eliminating* research funding. I’ve just suggested the balance is wrong. I can agree with you that the two are related while still saying the balance is wrong and needs to be shifted.
“Canadian universities quietly – oh so quietly – began dropping faculty teaching loads about fifteen years ago, from 3/3 and 3/2 to 2/2 and 2/1,”
Whose teaching loads have gone from 3/3 to 2/1? or even 2/2? You present a lot of data about salary but blithely drop anecdotes when it comes to workload. Consider this: have class sizes in that time period stayed the same? Every indicator I’ve seen suggests they increased. To the extent that professors teach fewer courses, has the number of students they are actually teaching also gotten smaller?
Put another way: a Social Sciences course I taught in 2000 to 50 students per term has sprung up to 130 students per term. That’s an increase of x 2.6. I assure you my courseload has not decreased by that same factor. In fact it’s not decreased at all.
Try here: https://higheredstrategy.com/a-zinger-from-heqco/. A recent survey across four relatively MOTR institutions in Ont shows an average course load per year at of 3.4 – that is, somewhere between 2/2 and 2/1.
Your statement that “nobody in this country ever stood up and voted for $33 million of public money to be spent on research in Philosophy” seems disingenuous. There are in fact, extremely few measures (especially that represent such a miniscule proportion of governmental expenditures) that ever receive a direct public vote, even and unless they form a major plank in a political party’s election platform. And even in legislatures, all too often budgets are voted on as a whole, not item by item.
So you might make a blanket statement that governmental budgets don’t receive adequate public scrutiny, and you’d be right. But it’s hardly fair to single out the poor philosophers for it!
Alex,
Another factor is that teching is much more time consuming than it was a few years ago, not just because we are teaching more students in each class (as pointed out above), but also a lot more is expected of us. This results in a lot more prep time, and in some cases signficiantly more.
Rick
That’s a fair point. That said, I’m fairly certain (though I could be wrong) that at most universities, when teaching loads went down, the justification was to increase the amt. of time available for research, no?
Well yes, because the teaching loads were becoming unmanageable due to the slowness of administrators to realize that the increases in enrolments that they were imposing are only possible with fewer courses. This is not complicated stuff but the point eluded them as it eludes many to this day.
Hello Alex! Although on vacation I want to question you on this. As far as I can tell, your line of reasoning applies in its entirety to “professors” rather than “humanities professors”. Yes, taxpayers are funding research in Canadian universities. Yes, they have not explicitly voted to do so. But it is the same for all research. Why make this distinction between (presumably) STEM research that we somehow “know” taxpayers want, and Hum/SocSci research that they might not?
Hi Ryan,
I;m not actually on vacation – just not writing the blog. You are correct about the nature of may argument and the reason I make the distinction is that I’d be prepared to lay serious money on the line that this is in fact the way the public sees it. Possibly they would include social scientists in there as well, I’m not sure.
I meant that I am on vacation ;-).
As to the points, you may be right of course, but I’d offer good odds that “the way the public sees it” is certainly unverifiable, and probably meaningless. Still, we can do a better job at explaining what universities do and why it matters, including research of all types.
Heh. I knew *you* were on vacation. I just got a bunch of messages yesterday saying “enjoy the time off” as if the blog were the only thing I do….
Just have to point out one thing related to teaching courseload versus teaching workload. The switch to 2/1 or 2/2 is a starting point for everybody. People get additional release from teaching because of “research intensiveness” or extra “service” roles. On the other hand, the teaching workload increases related to larger class sizes do not occur for all faculty members. Many research intensive faculty members, even those who carry a 2/1 load, teach very small upper-year and graduate courses only. The faculty members in the first-year trenches have seen their workload increase by a huge amount as students who later get filtered into specialized upper-year courses in a variety or programs all start in the same big melting pot course in first year.
Even though the high-level view you’ve taken in your blog leads to an imprecision — some faculty members have endured huge workload increases, not all as some responses have also imprecisely suggested — you are spot on with the assessment that the average taxpayer or parent has no clue of what the balance of effort is for faculty members and provide no input on what they would like from the system, either teaching-wise or research-wise..