One issue that may be moving onto center stage in higher education is faculty workloads. State legislators are starting to wake up to the way research universities permit faculty to teach only few classes, yet claim that they cannot possibly function without more state money.
Inside Higher Ed has a story that starts with one such legislator in Missouri who became aware that roughly half of the tenured professors at UM-Columbia, the state’s flagship and most research-intensive university, get waivers from teaching a full course load. That course load is defined as a “2-2”; that is, two courses per semester, four per year. Not exactly the sort of thing most professional workers would need a “waiver’ from.
The rest of the IHE story mixes fun with numbers and rhetoric from experts to suggest that the legislator doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But it’s worth reading to the end for this memorable quote by an “expert”: “how much stronger, how much richer would our nation be if we had more faculty over all, each teaching fewer classes?”
Before that mind-boggling slice of cluelessness, the expert, Kiernan Matthews, director and principal investigator at the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, says that “[T]he cure for cancer, the solution to world hunger, faster computers and the next great American novel — none of these will be discovered by a professor on a 4-4 load.”
First of all, the 4-4 teaching load in this case is a strawman fallacy: the legislator in the article does not suggest that Mizzou adopt a 4-4, only that they start actually teaching the required 2-2. Furthermore, there are millions worldwide working on cancer already, the cure for hunger is primarily political (the science has long existed), faster computers are produced by computer companies, and professors rarely write the truly great novels. (They do, however, seem to produce an inordinate amount of overrated novels).
The education establishment must resort to such trickery to maintain low teaching loads in all subjects, since the arguments against having six-figure salaried humanities and social science professors teaching no more than three or four courses a year are many and powerful.