Faculty should ‘radically reduce’ time spent on ‘administrative duties,’ report says
The culture in academia treats mentorship and teaching like a “burden,” creating a “competition to teach less” for professors, according to a new report from the Manhattan Institute.
One of the report’s authors, as well as a spokesperson for the American Association of University Professors, raised concerns with The College Fix about the lack of information on teaching in higher education.
The Manhattan Institute report found professors are teaching less due to the rise of faculty administrative duties. In addition, four-year institutions tend “to reward research and publication rather than teaching,” according to authors Frederick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and Richard Keck, a research assistant at the conservative think tank.
Highly regarded faculty often teach fewer courses, and a lighter teaching load is seen as a symbol of professional achievement. As a result, colleges rely on part-time faculty to do much of the teaching.
“Between 1999 and 2022, the 45% growth in faculty substantially outpaced the 25% increase in undergraduate enrollment. At the same time, the share of full-time professors on the tenure track declined from 72% in 2002 to 62% in 2023,” the report states.
Hess and Keck’s report also calls on universities to “recalibrate the amount of research activity that faculty are expected to engage in” and to “radically reduce the amount of time that faculty are expected to devote to administrative duties.”
Additionally, colleges should “[place] a premium on faculty who willingly teach essential courses, make exceptional efforts to mentor students, help colleagues to become more instructionally effective, or have a record of excellent instruction.”
Moreover, the report proposes a sample distribution of how faculty time should be spent during the typical nine-month teaching contract.
“Colleges should adopt a norm that faculty commit 30-32 hours a week to instructional tasks” during the 26 weeks out of the year that most professors teach.
Hess told The Fix via email his proposal to refocus a professor’s job on teaching would still attract candidates, given there is a surplus of applicants. His proposal “would permit institutions to [seek] out those scholars who embrace teaching and mentoring.”
He also said, “individual faculty” have conceded they would like to teach more, but “busy work and grant chasing” make them “feel stuck on a hamster wheel.”
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The education scholar said data on faculty teaching loads has not been collected or publicized “because neither administrators nor faculty have seen any benefit in making this public, and because neither public officials nor journalists have evinced much interest in it.”
The AAUP shares this concern about a lack of data.
“We agree with the authors that there is a dearth of information on teaching in higher education, and have repeatedly called for Congress to provide more funding and resources to NCES and ED in general,” AAUP Senior Researcher Glenn Colby told The Fix via email.
However, Colby believes the root cause of this lack of information is funding cuts to the National Center for Education statistics, which previously prepared surveys on faculty teaching loads, career plans, and attitudes.
“Until 2004, [the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty] provided critical data on faculty’s backgrounds, professional roles, workloads, compensation, attitudes, and career plans. Since 2004, we simply do not have that type of information, including faculty workload data,” Colby said.
He pointed The Fix to an AAUP report titled “The Work of Faculty: Expectations, Priorities, and Rewards,” which diverges from the recommendations made by Hess and Keck.
“External mandates of workload and productivity are not an effective or desirable means of enhancing the quality of cost-effectiveness of higher education,” the report states.
“We believe that nothing of any value, insofar as the quality of higher education is at issue, is likely to result from extramural efforts to define workload or to determine an appropriate mixture among types of professional activity, whether we refer to individuals or to institutions,” it states.
Colby also told The Fix that research, teaching, and other faculty responsibilities are “complementary rather than competitive.”
“An essential element of teaching a discipline is the process of scholarship and research in the discipline. Attempts to separate teaching, research, and service or define them as competitive distort the enterprise of higher education,” Colby told The Fix.
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Professor teaching class; SDI Productions/CanvaPro