Spring Break
College professors not slackers
Issue date: 3/7/07 Section: Opinions
College professors take a lot of abuse, and not just in teaching evaluations. A lot of people seem to think they are ivory-tower slackers. As a non-tenure-track faculty member, I have both an insider and outsider perspective on the whole issue.
Do you know what your teachers do besides teaching? Below are some of their less-appreciated tasks:
1. Grant proposals. Grants are becoming the mother's milk of the modern university.
How do you get a research grant? First, an agency has to be willing to pay money for research in your field. Second, you need a brilliant idea that perfectly matches the agency's interests. Next, you have to devise a three-year plan to prove your idea is right, defeat evil and establish world peace.
You race to meet the frenetic timeline of the funding agency, filling out their impenetrable forms and securing the signatures of half the University administration. Then, you wait months for the agency's decision.
What are the odds of success? No better than coaching a Division I men's basketball team all the way to the Big Dance. Sixty-five teams out of 336 means 19 percent go to the NCAAs. In my field, a 19 percent funding rate for grant proposals is good in this era of government disdain for science.
My estimate of total time commitment per grant proposal is one person-month - i.e. the equivalent of one person working eight hours a day for four weeks.
At a 19 percent funding rate, you have to write five or six proposals per year to get any grant money at all. Without collaborators, a faculty member can spend half the year away from the classroom working on grant proposals.
2. Reviewing and editing. Who is expected to review all those grant proposals and the journal articles that are written in support of them? Faculty members.
It takes me roughly the equivalent of one day to review an article or a proposal. My Ph.D. adviser writes 30-50 reviews per year. I spend a similar amount of time per manuscript as an associate editor of a journal. End result: a nationally prominent faculty member may invest at least one month per year on these tasks.
3. Letters of recommendation. At some point, nearly every student needs letters of recommendation for something. I spend at least one hour on each letter.
My honors mentor at the University of Alabama-Birmingham writes 200 to 300 letters per year for students, some as long as three pages. The time commitment: one to two months a year for student-oriented faculty.
4. Job-hunting. Universities are trending away from full-time faculty. Less than 35 percent of faculty members nationwide are professors. The rest are in less secure positions. Many of the latter (and some of the former) apply for permanent jobs elsewhere at the same time they are doing their current jobs.
The odds of landing a faculty position are roughly 1 percent per job ad. Some job-hunters ship out scores of applications and go on several interviews. Others meticulously craft just a few applications each year.
Either way, I estimate it takes one month per year to do a job search right, including travel.
5. Faculty search chair. On the other end of the job hunt is the chair of the faculty committee that conducts the job interviews.
That, too, is a time-consuming job. The ad must be worded correctly, the administration must approve it, reams of applications must be read and tough decisions must be made.
When it's time for interviews - in the middle of all the chair's other duties - he or she must be first-date-nice to the candidates, or else. If you're the chair and you screw up, you may have just cost your university its next Nobel Prize winner.
Chair's time investment: perhaps one month per search, if all goes well.
Add up the time commitments. Ivory-tower slackers? You should ask instead, when do these folks find the time to teach?
- John Knox is an associate research scientist in the Faculty of Engineering and an instructor-advisor in the Department of Geography
Do you know what your teachers do besides teaching? Below are some of their less-appreciated tasks:
1. Grant proposals. Grants are becoming the mother's milk of the modern university.
How do you get a research grant? First, an agency has to be willing to pay money for research in your field. Second, you need a brilliant idea that perfectly matches the agency's interests. Next, you have to devise a three-year plan to prove your idea is right, defeat evil and establish world peace.
You race to meet the frenetic timeline of the funding agency, filling out their impenetrable forms and securing the signatures of half the University administration. Then, you wait months for the agency's decision.
What are the odds of success? No better than coaching a Division I men's basketball team all the way to the Big Dance. Sixty-five teams out of 336 means 19 percent go to the NCAAs. In my field, a 19 percent funding rate for grant proposals is good in this era of government disdain for science.
My estimate of total time commitment per grant proposal is one person-month - i.e. the equivalent of one person working eight hours a day for four weeks.
At a 19 percent funding rate, you have to write five or six proposals per year to get any grant money at all. Without collaborators, a faculty member can spend half the year away from the classroom working on grant proposals.
2. Reviewing and editing. Who is expected to review all those grant proposals and the journal articles that are written in support of them? Faculty members.
It takes me roughly the equivalent of one day to review an article or a proposal. My Ph.D. adviser writes 30-50 reviews per year. I spend a similar amount of time per manuscript as an associate editor of a journal. End result: a nationally prominent faculty member may invest at least one month per year on these tasks.
3. Letters of recommendation. At some point, nearly every student needs letters of recommendation for something. I spend at least one hour on each letter.
My honors mentor at the University of Alabama-Birmingham writes 200 to 300 letters per year for students, some as long as three pages. The time commitment: one to two months a year for student-oriented faculty.
4. Job-hunting. Universities are trending away from full-time faculty. Less than 35 percent of faculty members nationwide are professors. The rest are in less secure positions. Many of the latter (and some of the former) apply for permanent jobs elsewhere at the same time they are doing their current jobs.
The odds of landing a faculty position are roughly 1 percent per job ad. Some job-hunters ship out scores of applications and go on several interviews. Others meticulously craft just a few applications each year.
Either way, I estimate it takes one month per year to do a job search right, including travel.
5. Faculty search chair. On the other end of the job hunt is the chair of the faculty committee that conducts the job interviews.
That, too, is a time-consuming job. The ad must be worded correctly, the administration must approve it, reams of applications must be read and tough decisions must be made.
When it's time for interviews - in the middle of all the chair's other duties - he or she must be first-date-nice to the candidates, or else. If you're the chair and you screw up, you may have just cost your university its next Nobel Prize winner.
Chair's time investment: perhaps one month per search, if all goes well.
Add up the time commitments. Ivory-tower slackers? You should ask instead, when do these folks find the time to teach?
- John Knox is an associate research scientist in the Faculty of Engineering and an instructor-advisor in the Department of Geography
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