We need more schedule flexibility during the academic year
At the risk of generalization, I’ll say that most faculty at research institutions don’t really get what it’s like to be faculty at teaching-focused universities1. And I’d say that most grad students and postdocs aren’t in a position to quite get what it’s like to be faculty at either an R1 or a non-R1. (And I should say that there’s no single experience, because the culture at any particular institution matters so much.)
Even if you might have been a student at SLAC or a community college or a regional public university, and even if you developed close relationships with your professors there, I’m telling you, this doesn’t really give you an idea of what this job is like. Because the day-to-day experience of being a professor is very different than the day-to-day experience of being around a professor. And I would say if you’re choosing a particular kind of role, or avoiding a particular kind of role, because of the culture of the institution that you’ve seen, I think that’s more about that particular place rather than the category that institution falls in. There are toxic SLACs and healthy SLACs, there are prestigious R1s where faculty lead normal balanced lives and others that bleed you to death.
These jobs are more similar than you might expect. Faculty at R1s spend more time teaching that most others realize, and faculty at non-R1s spend more time doing non-teaching than most others realize. (And this is also borne out if you dig through the IPEDS data, there’s a surprisingly little difference in how much time is spent by faculty on doing research at R1s and non-R1s.) Especially as you become more senior, you spend more time on leadership and governance no matter where you work (what folks sometimes call “service”). While the teaching load at non-R1s is higher, running a lecture course with several hundred students and managing a cohort of TAs and graders might end up as more work than having more contact hours and far fewer students. Everybody struggles to find time for research, no matter where you’re faculty. Managing people — whether they’re postdocs, techs, and doctoral students, or undergrads — takes a lot of time. The outcomes are different because you’re working with different career stages, but mentoring and managing projects is mentoring and managing projects.
That said, there are two persistent differences between R1 and non-R1 jobs that we can and should be change:
The first one is how the faculty at non-R1s are perceived by the research community. I think we’ve seen some positive movement in this area and I’d like to think that I’ve played at least some tiny role in making that happen. That’s a perennial gripe that always could use more ink, and that’s not what I’m here for right now.
I am here for the second one: the flexibility of our teaching schedule. I think this is huge, and eminently fixable, and it’s in the hands of our own institutions.
The difference is this: Even when they’re teaching, folks at R1 universities are generally far more available to disappear from campus for short/medium periods of time that those of us at teaching-focused institutions. Want to travel a couple days to give a seminar? Want to be on a grant panel, or join a working group? Have an important all-hands meeting for a big collaboration? Does your field have an annual conference that happens to fall in the middle of the semester?
Some of us can do these things more simply at our workplace, and some of us have a lot more trouble doing these things at our workplace. (I recognize that other factors are roles as caregivers, chauffeuring kids around, other parts of our personal lives, and such.)
As far as I can tell, this distinction has nothing to do with the quality of teaching instruction, or the number of contact hours, dedication to students, or teaching load. It’s not about being student centered or prioritizing students over our own research careers. It’s simply about the culture of an institution, whether or not it’s considered acceptable for us to structure our teaching in a way that allows us to have this flexibility in when we are physically present in the classroom (or zooming, for that matter), and when we aren’t necessarily required to be there.
Let me pose a set of highly contrasting examples. One friend of mine is teaching in the fall. It’ll keep them plenty busy. But it turns out that they have an important conference and research trip in a different hemisphere. While it’s not easy to arrange this, they have managed to cook their schedule to be away from the university for three weeks to make this trip happen. They are able to pull this off though a combination of midterm exams, guest lectures, remote teaching, and supportive colleagues.
At the other end of the spectrum, I have had conversations with many people who would love to attend the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America each year, but simply can’t make it because it’s usually in November a couple weeks before Thanksgiving. A couple people have told me that their chair won’t let them schedule a conference during the semester, even if they plan for that week months in advance. And other realize that they could but it would be a very bad look on their campus and not worth the grief from their colleagues. I think this happens most often at institutions where a bunch of senior faculty who run the place have stopped being research active and so then they set the policies and/or culture of the institution that equates constant availability to students as some sort of indicator of teaching effectiveness. (Which is most definitely is not.) Of course, there is no good time to have a meeting, and I’ve been fine with November, and was able to cook it into my syllabus. Though I wonder if colleagues in my first tenure-track institution resented that? I bet they did.
Those examples are at the extreme of a spectrum. Those people involved are equally dedicated and talented teachers, and all of them are capable scholars who are doing the professor thing of teaching/research/service thing. But some of us are working in environments where — even if we plan ahead — missing out on a few classes is simply not acceptable, either in policy or in the cultural norms. If you have an emergency pop up that calls you away, folks will understand. But if it turns out that being an active scholar in your field might have a scheduling incompatibility with your course schedule, gosh forbid you bend a bit to make sure that both can play well together.
It’s been far too common for me to hear from people at non-R1s that they aren’t available to serve on grant panels during the academic year (even virtual ones!) because that would take them away from the classroom for a couple sessions in a row. For some, it’s the additional labor, but for others, it’s simply because missing out on a couple class session is a big no-no.
If your university is expecting you to be any kind of scholar, then the institutional expectation for you to conduct that scholarship only when classes are out of session is rather absurd. Nobody wants professors to phone it in and be routinely absentee, but keep in mind the professors who are phoning it in are probably the ones who are physically present for every class. Whether or not a professor is not present in the classroom once in a while doesn’t compromise the overall quality of the educational experience. I would think that professors who are working to maintain their off-campus scholarship agenda are better positioned to keep their teaching up to date throughout their careers.
Let’s say missing a day once in a while is okay with our institutional culture, but we often put ourselves in a corner by coming up with an overpacked semester: let’s not do that! If you’re in a situation where you can’t flex a day here or a day there with alternative activities or a guest lecture or whatever, then your schedule is wound far too tight not only for yourselves, but also for your students. There’s no “rigor” in making the semester a big race through a ton of material. If you’ve build the right learning objectives with the right scope, not only do your students have some flexibility and grace, but you can make some for yourself.
And if you’re senior faculty or one of the people who actually sets policy (a good number of your are deans, I’ve sorted out!), then please do make sure that your faculty know that it’s okay that the teacher-scholar model means not being available to be in the classroom once in a while, because our job as scholars means that we occasionally will have valuable scholarly duties that conflict with the course schedule. You can set rules about how often this can happen, but you also know well and good enough that you can’t set policy to make a person an effective and attentive instructor. You just don’t want the bad actors to take advantage of an overly lenient policy, I get it, but breathing room helps everybody and hurts nobody.
This occurs to me because in recent years because whenever I do travel to give seminars at research institutions, it’s inevitable that one of the grad students will mention to me that almost none of the guest speakers are from teaching-focused institutions. This is a function of who gets invited, and also who accepts the invitation. I mean if I fly to give a talk a couple time zones away, that’s one and a half days spent traveling. A one-day visit is essentially a 3-day trip. I wonder how much of this can be attributed to folks not getting invited because their colleagues assume that they won’t be available because of their teaching load? And how often folks turn down these invites because they can’t cook into their schedules?
I think a realm where this availability to be unavailable during the semester (yes, I said what I said) particularly matters is for NSF and other grant panels. If you have been on a panel then you know that there’s a strong degree of institutional diversity. I’ve been on panels with community college faculty, folks from NGOs, state agencies, etc. And there are has always been a good representation of folks from teaching-focused institutions of various kinds. In my (limited) experience, NSF is very good about this. But I imagine it might be a bit hard for NSF to bring folks in from teaching-focused institutions during the academic year, because the time commitment isn’t just with the travel and/or the sequestering in an office, but the prep with carefully reading proposals and preparing reviews. But this is a hugely important professional development opportunity and if institutions aren’t doing everything they can to support their faculty from taking time out to serve on panels, then they’re doing. disservice to them. Because if you’re trying to learn how to write a successful proposal? Getting yourself on a panel is huge for this. Not to mention for staying current with ideas in the field, and building relationships with colleagues at other institutions.
So how do you build in that flexibility? There’s the cultural stuff and the pragmatic stuff. The cultural stuff is simple (and yet the hardest): don’t resent your colleagues if they miss class a few times during the semester because they’re out sciencing. And develop a culture of having one another’s back when needed, by administering an exam or stepping in for a lesson. And not judging how they juggle the time. Let people know that doing a bit of asynchronous instruction in an environment where this is uncommon is perfectly fine.
How do we make that flexibility for ourselves? I admittedly never understood the people who rigidly scheduled their entire semester well in advance, because I was never great at foreseeing how long a lesson would take. Even more so when doing a bunch of active learning, some things take longer than I thought, and some go by well more quickly! Even if I’ve already taught a class a bunch of times, I never got the schedule to fit well. So my syllabus lays out topics and lessons and readings and assignments, but with the caveat that it’s subject to change. But I also promise my students if there is an exam, that I won’t move that date on them, because changing an exam date on the fly is a major dick move. (One exception is if the entire course is polled anonymously and everybody single person agrees to move it, including myself.) In addition to being more loosey goosey with the schedule, it also helps to have a few modular components that don’t have to happen at any particular point within the semester. Often these things are heavily sequenced and for good reason, but somethings there are things that can just happen any ol’ time that take one lesson long? Leave space to lift those in when it works. Now that there’s a lot more expertise in online teaching than we had a few years ago, you know full well that it’s possible to develop a quality asynchronous component to your course. The opposition to this is a thing of institutional culture, not about instructional quality. If you have a colleague who says you can’t schedule a couple days away from your class because it would compromise your teaching, then you and I know they’re full of crap. Hopefully we can build institutional support structures where that view isn’t pervasive. Because your students will know that you’re not shortchanging them on a quality education if you’re actually providing one!
The bottom line is that if you’re at a 4-year institution that wants its faculty to be active scholars, then these institutions need to give us that space, which means allowing us time during the semester. Simple as that.
Some thoughts about nomenclature. After writing about this stuff at Small Pond Science for a few years, after calling them just “non-R1s,” I ended landing on “teaching-focused universities” as a catch-all that would include regional public universities, small liberal arts colleges, other privates with high teaching loads, etc. I mean one of the reasons I called it “Small Pond” science is because that metaphor/cliche was a useful catch-all. R2s are in a weird space, as some have R1esque environments, and some are RPU environments. As far as my internet forensics work, I think I might have been the first one to call them “teaching-focused universities” and have seen this terminology in the wild rather frequently. Did this originate somewhere else or what it here? I don’t know. A recent term of art that’s made its way into the federal scene is ERI, “Emerging research university” which essentially is most everybody that is not an R1. Anyhow, I think that that this figure that I created 10 years ago holds up, though now that the term RPU has caught on, I’d use that instead of “regional comprehensive.”