A new workload policy for professors aims to give them flexibility in their roles
Almost two years ago, Boise State University instituted a workload policy that worried some faculty members. Its basis is an algebraic-seeming formula with components — “teaching: 6 + x; scholarship: 2 + y; service: 2 + z” — that critics found difficult to believe could provide the flexibility that administrators promised. Some professors thought the policy would just add a layer of administrative bureaucracy.
“I remember when we sat down in our department meeting to go over it for the first time, I couldn’t understand how in the heck this was going to work,” says Lisa G. Bostaph, an assistant professor of criminal-justice administration.
But the policy, in place at the Idaho university since September 2006, seems to have won over the early skeptics, including Ms. Bostaph. After they meet the workload minimums for teaching, scholarship, and service, faculty members — with their department chair’s approval — can apportion the rest of their time among those three areas any way they choose.
Although faculty members at other institutions are sometimes afforded some flexibility in their workloads, Boise State’s move to spell out in a written policy the details of a flexible workload isn’t as common. The policy is credited with giving professors not only the option to do more of the work that matches their interests and strengths, but also the confidence that their varied contributions will be valued in their departments.
“The notion that everybody in the department needs to be doing exactly the same thing over the lifetime of their career doesn’t leave opportunities for growth and development,” says Sona K. Andrews, provost and vice president for academic affairs.
Before the new policy went into effect, professors rarely had the flexibility to concentrate on research for a whole semester. Part of the motivation for the change was to clear the way for them to pursue more research at the institution, which has long been known for teaching. “There is an expectation now that all faculty engage in scholarly activity,” Ms. Andrews says, “and this policy is designed to help them do that.”
Boise State has described its goal as redefining itself as a “metropolitan research university of distinction.”
“We recognized that our practice of allocating faculty workload just wasn’t going to work for the kind of university that we were becoming,” the provost says. It took about a year to fine-tune the policy, with the help of the Faculty Senate and through meetings with deans, she says.
The policy measures out in 30 “units” the teaching, scholarship, and service that faculty members are supposed to do in an academic year. Ten of the units, or one-third of the workload, are defined — six in teaching, two in scholarship (a term that also covers creative activity), and two in service. The remaining 20 can be assigned to one of the three categories or divided among them. The policy covers about 480 full-time faculty members (not including those in the library) who are tenured or on the tenure track.
When professors and a department head negotiate workloads, the needs of the department are foremost, Ms. Andrews says. Faculty members can’t fashion a workload that would make it impossible for a department to offer the classes that students want.
“It can get to the point where we’re all thinking about ourselves,” says Andrew Giacomazzi, chair of the department of criminal justice, which has 10 faculty members subject to the policy. “But students are No. 1 and are always going to be No. 1. We can do some of the stuff we want to do as long as we’re not compromising what we need to do for our students.”
Departments have some leeway when it comes to determining what makes up a unit in each of the three areas. At a 2006 retreat, the department of criminal justice hashed out what would serve as its definition of a teaching unit. For instance, an undergraduate class with 100 or more students is equal to six units. A class of 45 or more that requires a lot of writing is also worth six units, as are two writing-intensive classes with a combined total of 60 students.
The greater challenge for the department, says Mr. Giacomazzi, has been how to quantify research and service under the policy.
Ms. Bostaph says in the past she had to “just suck it up” when it came to finding time to take on the labor-intensive process of applying for a grant. But with the workload policy in place, tasks like writing grant proposals can be accounted for by adding more units under research, she says.
“It’s surprising how quickly people have adapted to it,” says Ms. Bostaph, who arrived at Boise State in 2003. “Everyone talks in terms of workload units.”
The policy also provides flexibility in how the 30 units can be completed over the course of a year. Some faculty members choose to satisfy their teaching workload units in one semester, so that in the second semester they can take a minisabbatical of sorts, to do fieldwork, Ms. Andrews says. “It’s really gotten individual faculty members to think about, ‘How do I really want to spend my time?’”
Although faculty members can tweak their workloads at any point during the academic year, planning is paramount, department chairs say. Mr. Giacomazzi, for instance, has already asked his faculty members to tell him their workload plans for the spring of 2009.
Pamela Springer, chair of the nursing department, points to a culture change at Boise State spawned by the policy. “You truly have to value all of the pieces that everyone is bringing to the table,” she says. “We try to figure out what their passions are and then think about how we can weave that into a strategic goal for the department and the university.”
Ms. Andrews says some departments have adopted the policy for all of their faculty members, while others are phasing it in more gradually.
She meets with department chairs monthly, in part to talk about how the policy is working. “In the next year or two I think we’ll have very few departments that will have their work apportioned in identical ways,” she says.
Faculty members and department heads alike say it appears that the way professors at Boise State are evaluated hasn’t become problematic in the absence of the uniform workload expectations that are common in academe.
Ms. Andrews, however, acknowledges that a policy whose effectiveness relies so much on communication between department chairs and their faculty members means that “you do have to have a good relationship with your chair.”
Ms. Springer says the policy encourages accountability. “We know at the beginning of the semester what people are supposed to be doing,” says the nursing department’s chair, who uses a spreadsheet to track the workloads of 40 full-time faculty members. “If you’re supposed to be doing 60-percent scholarship, then you’ll be evaluated based on that. You can get lax if every one’s doing 40-40-20.”
Having a flexible work policy, she says, “allows us to have every faculty member contribute in different ways.”
The flexibility offered by the policy is important for faculty members in the creative arts who can’t plan their professional creative activities far in advance, unlike their colleagues in other disciplines, says Richard Klautsch, a professor and chair of the department of theater arts. Hiring decisions by professional theaters, he notes, often happen with little notice.
Philip W. Atlakson, who oversees the department’s courses in dramatic writing, got a last-minute opportunity to direct an off-Broadway production of Macbeth in New York in February and March. Mr. Klautsch found a way to accommodate the professor’s request.
“If they’re already teaching classes, then I’m going to have those classes covered while they’re gone,” says the chair, whose department has eight full-time faculty members. “With this policy, we’re able to recognize what they’re doing as valid professional activities as they apply to tenure.”
Mr. Klautsch himself has benefited from the policy. He went to Santa Barbara, Calif., in the fall of 2006 to act in a Shakespearean tragedy and teach two acting classes for seven weeks at the University of California campus there. Previously he had allowed faculty members to do what amounted to research in their field by giving them up to two weeks off and making sure their classes were covered.
Faculty members and administrators agree that the flexible-workload policy has served as a catalyst for professors to broaden their scope.
“It just really removes all the excuses about doing something,” Mr. Atlakson says. “The traditional barriers are gone.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Academic Workplace Volume 54, Issue 45, Page B24