Mern Þonke

Today I discovered a document entitled Findings and Recommendations of the Advisory Committee for the CSU and Comparable Faculty Workload Studies January 2003. The findings listed in this document are rather damning:

1. CSU faculty work hard. They put in more hours of work for the university and more hours outside the university than their counterparts across the nation.


2. CSU faculty not only work harder, their workload has changed. Faculty now are doing different things than they were ten years ago: to be effective they must respond to different learning styles and to different levels of student preparation, embrace service learning, manage complex academic programs, use new academic technologies to enhance student learning, and find time to maintain an active agenda of scholarly and creative work. It is noteworthy that with all these demands, faculty managed to maintain an active agenda of scholarly and creative activity and to increase the time spent on scholarship and creativity.


3. Lecturers (non-tenure track faculty) make substantial contributions to the high quality of learning environments across the system. They compare favorably to tenured and tenure-track faculty in terms of their commitment to students and to scholarly and creative activities.


4. Most faculty in the CSU want more time for creative and scholarly work.


5. Tenured and probationary faculty in the CSU teach, on average, one more course per academic year5 than their counterparts at other universities. On a weekly basis, CSU faculty spend, on average, about 4.4 more hours per week on teaching activities than their counterparts.


6. While new probationary faculty in the CSU are productive scholars and have the same career aspirations as faculty across the country, they are less likely to reach the same levels of scholarly and creative achievement, e.g., publications in refereed journals.


7. CSU tenured and probationary faculty are less positive than their counterparts about their working conditions and relationships at their institution.


8. One-third of tenured and probationary CSU faculty believe that effective teaching is not rewarded at their institution, suggesting a misalignment of rewards and expectations for CSU faculty.


9. CSU faculty are deeply committed to the success of their students and are more likely than their counterparts to engage in the kinds of educational practices that enhance student learning.

The last point (and point 3) demonstrates that, despite the fact that the odds are stacked against us, we continue to work hard to serve the needs of students. But the other points paint a damning picture of the conditions under which we work: longer hours, more varied tasks, and less time for scholarly achievement. We need to start working towards some institutional changes to change these conditions; otherwise we’ll go the way of the California secondary school system (i.e. from one best to one of the worst). And by we, I mean the (already overworked) faculty, because the taxpayers and their elected representatives do not have a clear enough vision of what the university must be to compete with other US institutions. Furthermore, I think the students are too easily satisfied with what they are getting. If they only knew what we could achieve--achieve for them--if we had better working conditions...