Faculty Time Commitments

On occasion, I am asked to describe the typical faculty member’s workload at my institution. Although this may seem like a simple request, I know of very few academic units that track such a measure. I have always tried to explain the process by referring to the traditional view of scholarship which includes activities related to teaching, research, and service. Of course, one would expect much variability when comparing the amount of time an individual faculty member would spend on these three activities. Still, an IR professional may want to approximate this number for a variety of reasons to include collective bargaining, resource allocation, or course release policy development.

In my case, I took advantage of the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE) to approximate these time commitments at the institutional level. At our institution, approximately 400 full time faculty members were asked to complete the survey. Overall, 183 (47%) individuals responded to the survey. The area of the FSSE....

....I was interested in included 11 questions employed to track the number of hours a faculty member works during a typical week in the semester. There were eight time commitment options to include 0 hours, 1-4 hours, 5-8 hours, 9-12 hours, 13-16 hours, 17-20 hours, and 21 or more hours. With this information, the first step I took was to assign a numerical value to each of the categories. I did this by calculating the midpoint for each of the categorical variables. As such, 0 remained 0, 1 to 4 was converted to 2.5, 5 to 8 was converted to 6.5, and so on. Twenty-one or more hours was converted to 25. I then subjectively grouped seven of the questions into teaching (teaching UG students, grading, providing written an oral feedback to students, preparing for class, reflecting on ways to improve teaching, advising UG students, and supervising internships) two questions into research (research/scholarly activities and working with UG students on research), and two questions into service (conducting service activities and working with students on activities other than coursework). I then summed the estimated values to arrive at a total number of hours spent each week on the three activities typically associated with scholarship.

Of course, with any self-reported survey data, the presence of outliers became an issue. In one case, an individual faculty member reported working 208 hours during a typical week. Of course, there are only 168 hours in a week. With this in mind, the 1.5 * IQR rule was applied. This resulted in the elimination of seven respondents. The mean number of hours for the entire group considering all three activities was 55. More specifically, faculty reported 38.5 hours on teaching, 9.5 hours on research, and 7 hours on service. As a percentage, faculty reported spending 70% of their time on teaching activities, 17% on research activities, and 13% on service activities. Although not perfect, this is one example of how IR professionals can describe faculty time commitments at our individual institutions.