What do professors mean when they talk about their flexible work schedules? I understand when they say it about graduate school, although I point out that anyone who didn’t then make their own schedule and stick to it, did not make progress to degree and ultimately dropped out or was dropped from the program.
I understand when they say it about VAP jobs at R1 institutions. You teach your seminar and your undergraduate course, and the rest of your time can go to your research and/or your job and fellowship applications.
I do not understand when they say it about regular professor jobs. By the time you teach all your classes, hold all your office hours, meet with all your graduate students, go to their exams, go to all your meetings, and get to the library and the bookstore while they are still open, you are booked pretty much straight through 9-5, M-F everywhere I have worked, and very little of that time is scheduled with much latitude by you.
After 5 you probably have a night class once a week, and some sort of event or meeting another evening. And sometimes things have to be scheduled early; I have a thesis defense next month at 8 AM. All of this is why I am on campus, me, 8-8 most weekdays, heavily scheduled except for that 5-8 PM delicious quiet work bloc three or four nights a week. So is almost everyone else.
Why do you say you have a flexible schedule, if you say so? What are you comparing it to?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
This semester, I teach MW 10-10:50, then I have my office hours, then I teach 1:30-2:45. So on MW, I’m done by 3 pm. TTH I’m free all day long. Fridays, I teach 10-10:50 am.
In the Spring semester, I will only teach TTH, and have MWF free. Sometimes, there are meetings on Friday, but otherwise, I manage to have weekends that last from Thursday afternoon to Tuesday morning.
I try to select committee work that will not give me any regular meetings and where all the actual work can be finished by the end of October.
I think this is pretty flexible. I have autism and I know I wouldn’t be able to function if I had to be at work 8 hours for 5 days per week. So this is a perfect schedule for me.
I did work at one place where we had that much autonomy over time. It was nice.
My situation is similar to Clarissa’s. We’re asked when we want to teach, and my department is big enough that personal preferences and body clocks ensure that (mostly) the morning people teach the early classes and the owls teach in the evening and the commuters can get 2- or 3-day per week schedules. Major committees have standing times, so you know what you’re getting into if you volunteer for one, and can select your teaching schedule accordingly. The number of office hours we’re required to have is not onerous. It’s true that when I am on campus, I’m usually in a class or in a meeting or holding office hours; I have trouble getting to the library (or at least getting there for long enough, or when the unit I need to visit is open), and I feel like I don’t have enough time to just hang out and chat with colleagues. We definitely have a culture of busy-ness. But I’m working from home 2 work-days per week (and, in practice, on 3 or 4 days a week, since I usually work on weekends), so I can get groceries at quiet times instead of on Saturday mornings, and I can read for class or for scholarship while I’m on the exercise bike at the gym. So I say it’s flexible.
Sounds like you’re not as understaffed. *SELECT* your teaching schedule? I’ve *never* had that even at R1s.
We’re ordered to teach overloads and I’m the only one who even thinks of just refusing. We teach early and late, they don’t ask what our sleep preferences are, they ask when is a room free and what time does not create a conflict between this class and another required class.
The only schedules like yours I’ve seen are at R1s but there was never any discussion of “selecting” teaching schedules. And at a regional or a SLAC the teaching/service workload is just a lot higher, and it has to take place in business hours.
It’s also a question of the inefficiency in Louisiana; everything takes a lot longer because the machines are broken, the bureaucrats are slow, etc., like in Latin America.
At my SLAC, a huge impediment to getting any time to yourself was food – there had to be food at almost all meetings, so you either had to wait for Mariott to serve, or cook, or drive to restaurants, and all of this took forever. (“The compulsion to break bread together,” one colleague said.)
My main question is, how flexible is it if you have a lot to do and must schedule that really carefully? Do people who say “it is so flexible” just mean there is _some_ degree of self determination? Because that exists in the business world, too — not the McDonald’s serving world, but in the white collar world.
Oh, I see, though. Dame Eleanor is in English/History, large departments, where even at a regional U you can hide. Clarissa is at a regional where they are not trying to repress Spanish. These things make huge differences. I’m in a really understaffed unit that is under orders to fulfill freshman demand no matter what. That is why we’re all teaching 4-8 classes except for the chair’s boy who has 3 (and whom I do not begrudge this situation).
I select my teaching schedule. This semester, for example, the Chair asked me to his office, showed me the table where the schedules were being entered and let me do whatever I wanted with it. Theoretically, I could have scheduled myself to teach just 1 day a week if that’s what I wanted.
It is true that our Dean is very committed to making our Spanish program grow as much as possible.
I understand, of course, that I have been very lucky at this institution.
Do you have any mechanisms at your school to address the issue of being understaffed? The departmental review, for example?
Our schedules are hard fought. Chairs are not in Spanish and have odd ideas about what courses students might need to make progress to degree and what the expertise of the faculty is. So I’ll get assigned medieval or something if I don’t watch out, and they’ll put it at some weird hour. I just discovered two required courses had been scheduled at the same time and stopped that, but if I hadn’t done that piece of spy work, we’d have had students slowed in their progress to degree and since only half would have been able to take each class, it’s possible that neither class would have made.
Departmental review, you mean by outside scholars? We don’t have that, no. Our institution doesn’t set much store by outsiders unless they are paid consultants – if they’re just faculty at other universities, they’re considered bad. However, if such a thing were to happen, the university would say sorry, they are only developing certain so called Centers of Excellence and that is it.
PS reason for the hard foughtness – we have more M.A. instructors than professors and they have been here longer, have friends in administration, etc. They feel that if there were no professors then they could teach the upper division and graduate courses and they fight to get these now. Since they have such good connections in the administration, since they have the most collective cleavage, and since they cast themselves as poor maligned people, they really do manage to do a fair amount of damage as far as scheduling is concerned. They are also why language teaching is such h*** … if you have the students accustomed to grammar and translation, fill in the blank, matching, multiple choice, etc., then of course anyone modern and more challenging gets bad evaluations, is painted as “problematic,” gets tossed out at 3d year review, and so on.
Your situation sounds pretty bad, and now you explain about the MA instructors who have been around a long time, a lot of your other complaints fall into place with a resounding thud. Now I get it. Clarissa and I are in the same state, BTW, so that may have something to do with the similar situations, as well. Northern efficiency, maybe. But yes, in a larger department where grad students and instructors handle the freshman comp sort of stuff, and professors do mainly courses for majors (we are understaffed: it has been years since I could be spared to teach gen ed courses), things are different. And some of it is, I think, just a more humane attitude. I mean, why not ask people their preferences about teaching times? It may not be possible to give everyone exactly what they want, but surely there’s no point in scheduling the night owl with MWF 8:00 a.m. classes and the lark with T-Th night classes when they would be so much happier the other way around.
But don’t you have to have departmental review every five or 10 years to keep your accreditation?
Review, by the accrediting agencies, yes, but they are worried about far worse things than this. 10 years ago we barely made accreditation but this more recent time we were much better. I’ve been at places where review meant dealing with the kind of issue discussed here but it was at places that didn’t also have worse problems. However, here we are now one of the best 100 colleges in US according to Princeton Review or Newsweek or one of those, and if 51%+ of your line is in a PhD granting discipline your situation is completely different. This, I discern, is the problem of being a hybrid institution – under the old Carnegie classifications we were Doctoral II and now I think we’d be Doctoral I (we’re research-high, as opposed to very high which is how the R1 in our state is classified now).
The power of the MAs is key, yes. They rule because they bring in the most SCHs per salary dollar. And they’re very low paid so it’s accepted that they’ll teach overtime up to 8 classes per semester, so the curriculum has to be designed to accommodate that. And there aren’t enough *rooms* for everyone to teach at whatever time they want — rooms are full all the time and sometimes, if not, they’re rented out to something else!
We’re Southern so we’re a plantation so the default attitude is punitive as opposed to humane, yes. And we’re inefficient. I was a VAP at UIUC once, so I know Illinois. Loved UIUC, as much as I love my Linux box and my cat, it is so charming. The Ivy types they had hired hated it and thought it was hokey so I thought they were wimps. How can you complain: runners bring you books from the huge library, you’re on a 2-2 load, they pay you so much that you run in the black all month long, all the staff constantly tries to make your day easier, your computer works, everyone is massively collegial, sophisticated and interesting people are at department parties, and you can jump on the train and be at Union Station-Chicago in 2 hours.
Schedules, oh yes: at my other LA institution there was 1 other Latin Americanist who had reasons (kids of a certain age) to want all the early classes and none of the late ones. Fine by me since I was commuting in, was happy to leave home after rush hour and then leave work after rush hour, and let him be the early starter and early departer. Their problem with him: it wasn’t manly to say he wanted his schedule to mirror a kids’ school schedule. They didn’t even let him come up for tenure, tossed him out somewhere between 3d year review and then.
Clarissa’s place was famously bad when I was younger than I am now. I think the reason they’re being so nice now might be that they were put under the gun at some point to shape up.
P.S. on those instructors: if they’d say they were doing what they were doing because the teaching load is so high they can’t figure out what else to do it would be one thing. But they say they do it because it’s the best pedagogical practice, and that is what causes the trouble.
“They are also why language teaching is such h*** … if you have the students accustomed to grammar and translation, fill in the blank, matching, multiple choice, etc., then of course anyone modern and more challenging gets bad evaluations”
-I know what you mean! I bombed at two of my campus visits because the faculty members (mostly very advanced in age) were horrified at my teaching methods. You should have seen their faces while I taught! Oy.
“How can you complain: runners bring you books from the huge library, you’re on a 2-2 load, they pay you so much that you run in the black all month long, all the staff constantly tries to make your day easier, your computer works, everyone is massively collegial, sophisticated and interesting people are at department parties”
-I have a 3-3 load normally but, other than that, this is my department! And this Ivy League type totally loves it! 🙂 None of my friends from grad school believe me when I say I love this school. They think I’m putting a brave face on things and trying to get used to my horrible fate of “being stuck” (as some people kindly put it) here. For some people, if it isn’t an R-1 and you are not located on the coast, you must be a victim. But we should look at the actual working conditions rather than some vaguely defined prestige. You are either happy or not at the place where you are and I happen to be extremely happy here.
Illinois is extremely civilized and this is what people do not understand. I still bank with them and it is because even their bank is infinitely better than other banks.
I must have really adapted to this state because I experienced warm and fuzzy feelings when I read your comment about Illinois. 🙂
Well there’s the small town issue, the no ocean issue, and there are those industrialized cornfields. But, if you’re an academic, you have travel time. And all you have to do is glance at the Daily Illini or tune in to the WEFT to realize you have hit the mother lode for intelligence, compared to most places in US.
Go Fighting Illini – even though Chief Illiniwek is (correctly) gone, and I don’t like football, and that’s not your school!