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By Root 493 0

total time a professor is in the classroom for the entire year is 120 hours at Williams and 140 hours at Columbia (i.e., three to three and a half forty-hour weeks per year). It is also important to note that the standard course load for students is four courses a semester and eight courses a year. Some students take additional courses, and some classes have required labs that increase class time. But many students are in the classroom between 240 and 280 hours a year (i.e., six to seven forty-hour weeks a year).

Teaching, of course, involves much more than the time one is in the classroom, but the total number of classroom hours is noteworthy. While Williams allocates faculty positions to departments based upon a formula in which each teacher is expected to instruct a total of at least 120 students a year, there is no general policy on the number of students a faculty member should teach at Columbia. The size of the classes different professors teach therefore varies widely. Since many faculty members receive course relief for chairing departments, programs and committees or use money from their research grants to pay the university to exempt them from teaching, a significant number teach fewer than four courses. In addition, faculty members at many colleges and universities are guaranteed regular leaves and sabbaticals. In most cases, these leaves do not depend on production or performance. At universities with graduate programs, graduate students teach small discussion sections in large lecture courses offered by professors, grade papers, run labs and meet with students. Advising grad students and sponsoring theses can be quite time-consuming for professors, though graduate courses typically have fewer students. Still, teaching requirements at the top schools are surprisingly low.

Now consider the problems at the other end of the higher education spectrum. Long the envy of many states and, indeed, foreign countries, the California university system, as I have said, is collapsing under the weight of the state’s fiscal crisis. Since the 1960s, higher education in California has been divided among research universities, where significant research is required and teaching loads are light; teaching universities (i.e., California state universities), where teaching loads are heavy but some publication is still required; and community colleges, where teaching loads are even heavier but there are no publication requirements. In contrast to Williams and Columbia, faculty members at California State University, Los Angeles, teach three classes each quarter and nine classes a year. While student enrollments vary from course to course and department to department, most faculty members teach roughly one hundred students a quarter, three hundred students a year. Unlike research universities, the state university provides no teaching assistants, and seniority does not reduce one’s teaching load. As for the sharp dichotomy between teaching and research, a colleague at CSULA properly wrote in an e-mail,

This distinction seems to me fallacious, since teaching and research are inextricably linked. Good teaching is founded on, among other things, the teacher’s active engagement in the ongoing scholarly discussion in his or her field. And research in the humanities, because it concerns texts and issues that relate to our common social, ethical, economic, religious and political experience, must stay connected with the transmission and exchange of ideas fostered by the classroom. I have witnessed, at our school, with a sad heart, the way that our heavy teaching load actually thwarts the putative teaching mission of the CSU system. So mind-pulping is the regimen that teachers flee from the classroom. They seek to create administrative projects and programs of doubtful intellectual worth to get “release time” from teaching. Matters are even worse in community colleges.

This is an extremely unfortunate situation because the escalating cost of higher education is driving more students to these institutions.

I gained insight into the problems