In my six years in university administration, one word has consistently been at the forefront of my mind: workload. At a research university, faculty workload refers to a wide-ranging set of duties and responsibilities that extends far beyond the mere teaching of classes in formal settings. The job requires time for reading, for information or data-gathering, and for writing articles, research reports, or outcomes assessments. Faculty spend a great deal of time in mentoring activities of various sorts--formal and informal student advising, tutoring, working with graduate students, collaborating with colleagues, and providing various services to the larger discipline or even to the general public.
Understanding, evaluating, and balancing these myriad demands on faculty time is crucial to the longer-term health of our programs and to our effectiveness as creators and disseminators of knowledge. One of our primary goals at present is to create more realistic workload systems to help faculty balance teaching loads with other forms of student direction (such as dissertation direction) and their various research and service obligations.
Data shared by Associate Dean Moser with our faculty at yesterday's Fall Faculty meeting revealed a startling reality--we are serving more majors, offering fewer "service" hours to non-majors, with more faculty, and thus teaching heavier loads with smaller average course enrollments than we did in 2003. We must work to create reliable, predictable course rotations so that students can get the courses they need within a reasonable time frame, while simultaneously increasing (slightly) the number of students in each section and thus lowering overall faculty teaching loads. This, we believe, is the best way to improve efficiency and ensure adequate time for faculty to meet all of their obligations to the university.