How many courses should professors teach? It’s an important topic, not just for faculty recruitment and retention, but for student learning and experience. So it’s a shame that we’ve been thinking about teaching loads the wrong way.
Faculty and administrators conventionally see teaching in opposition to research. By this logic, heavier research expectations mean less teaching, and vice versa. In one sense this is an obvious fact, since colleges ordinarily require faculty members to produce some amount of research, and time is finite. In another sense, however, this oppositional logic harmfully constrains our conversations about how much professors should teach.
I suspect two factors in particular drive this narrow thinking about teaching loads. First, elite and research-oriented institutions with low teaching loads and high research expectations have outsize influence on higher-education policies and practices; they set standards that others follow. Second, within such institutions, departments and programs whose research is monetarily more valuable than their teaching — medical and applied sciences, engineering, and economics, among others — can justify extremely low or even nonexistent teaching loads (1-1, 1-0, or pure research staff), which drive down what the wider academic community perceives as a competitive teaching load.
Fewer courses means more time for students, more time to grade thoughtfully, and more time to plan well.
Different valuations of teaching and research in different fields can create tensions within institutions. In my field, English, a 2-2 load is for the most part the lowest anyone can expect, even at an Ivy League university. Yet in other, mostly lab-intensive fields, a 2-2 can seem devastating for research productivity. As lab-intensive teaching loads decline, though, humanities and social-science faculty members understandably call for teaching loads commensurate with their colleagues in the sciences.
For these reasons, as John T. McGreevy discusses in a recent Chronicle Review essay, “The Great Disappearing Teaching Load,” a subset of elite, research-oriented universities are competing for faculty by reducing teaching loads to as low as 2-1 in humanities and social-science departments, and even lower in lab-intensive sciences. McGreevy worries that, by moving “faculty further away from teaching actual courses on the ground,” these reductions threaten the value of one of the most admired features of American universities, the undergraduate liberal-arts education. In other words, it’s hard to tell students they’re getting a top-flight education from leading faculty researchers when those researchers aren’t actually teaching the classes.
McGreevy is right to raise the issue, particularly because the competitive advantage of teaching-load reduction is almost always framed as time away from students, time dedicated to research on a schedule professors can set for themselves. But the real problem isn’t reduced teaching loads. It’s the misguided notion that changes in teaching load are or ought to be a function of research time and expectations. Instead, we should discuss teaching loads not in terms of research but in terms of teaching.
After all, teaching loads don’t simply impact our research. They impact our teaching. The best case for lowering teaching loads, then, is not to make more time for research, particularly for the minority of professors with tenure lines who are actually getting paid for their research; it’s to make more time for better teaching. Viewed correctly, reduced teaching loads are not moving faculty away from the classroom — they’re allowing us to be better, more attentive, more dynamic teachers.
Having taught 3-3, 2-3, and 2-2 loads, both off and on the tenure track, I can confidently assert that the difference between a two-course semester and a three-course semester is stark. Fewer courses means more time for students, more individual attention, more time to grade (and grade thoroughly), and more time to plan. Perhaps most importantly, it means more time to reflect on how to do things better the next time around. Fewer courses means more time for independent studies, and for integrating students into our research programs. Fewer courses means more time for innovative assignments, rather than using the same old methods because they’re what we know best and all we have time for.
Teaching fewer courses, in other words, makes us better teachers. And, in a competitive market for talented students, it’s a selling point for institutions looking to demonstrate that students will have the attention of their professors, and all the opportunities that come with it.
If there’s a problem with research universities losing touch with their core undergraduate teaching missions, it’s less about teaching load than about institutional priorities. If an institution doesn’t value teaching, it doesn’t value teaching two courses or three courses or four. And if an institution says it values teaching, but its faculty members teach four or five courses per term, we should ask why such a statement of value isn’t accompanied by better resources, and who’s responsible for the mismatch.
If you want a fatigued trauma surgeon to improve the quality of his surgeries, you don’t ask him to do more surgeries in the same amount of time. If you want an exhausted police officer to do better policing, you don’t double her shift and cut her pay. So if you want better and more attentive teaching, don’t equate higher teaching loads with a teaching-oriented institutional mission.
So far, I’ve discussed teaching-load reductions from the standpoint of tenure-track faculty at elite, well-resourced institutions that can probably afford to prioritize the kind of teaching I’ve described. But of course the vast majority of faculty members work in underpaid, underresourced, contingent positions, and at colleges that can’t just summon the resources required to reduce teaching loads equitably for all faculty.
I close with this acknowledgment neither as an afterthought nor a caveat, but because recognizing the relationship between institutional priorities and the labor structure of higher education is central to my argument. If we really care about teaching, student access to faculty doing active research, and integrating our own research in the classroom, it’s long past time to be honest with ourselves and our students about what it takes to provide the kind of world-leading education for which the American academy is known. “How can we lower teaching loads to improve teaching and learning?” is a secondary question, derived from the premise that increasing faculty time and resources for teaching will lead to better teaching. The primary question is how to address the most overworked and underresourced faculty members in the system. You don’t start remodeling your kitchen before you put out the fire in the house next door.
