How Much Do Professors Work? One Researcher Is Trying to Find Out

Courtesy of Boise State U.

How many hours should professors work each week? Everyone has a different answer, especially professors.

Case in point: When Nicholas A. Christakis, a professor at Yale University, asserted on Twitter that graduate students should work more than 60 hours each week, a debate ensued. Professors pointed to studies that suggested not everyone can devote more than 40 hours each week to their jobs — for example, if they have kids — or that the institutions and departments they work for may have different standards of work, research, and competitiveness.

Christakis drew his point from a 2014 study at Boise State University that found that faculty participants reported working, on average, 61 hours per week. They self-reported working 10 hours per day Monday to Friday and about that much on Saturday and Sunday combined, with a significant portion of their days spent dealing with email and attending faculty meetings.

The lead researcher on that 2014 study, John P. Ziker, began exploring the subject after learning Boise State had adopted a policy that professors there should spend 60 percent of their time teaching. Since then, he’s continued the research, developing an app to refine participants’ method of reporting. He spoke with The Chronicle about the renewed interest in his research and the next phases of his study.

Q. What did you think of the tweet that brought new attention to your work?

A. It definitely aligned with the findings that we had from our initial study back in 2014. So the method that we used was a 24-hour recall diary. But I would say something about our sample: It was not a random sample, and it was not really meant to be representative of all of Boise State University or of higher education in general. We sent out an email basically to the whole tenure-track faculty and asked them if they’d be willing to participate. We got 30 people. And so that’s about 5 percent of the BSU faculty, so it’s not a huge percentage. The people who did volunteer may have been the more motivated side of the faculty. But obviously there are faculty here working that much and that was an average. And so I think what Christakis said in his tweet kind of makes sense, especially [at elite universities], given how competitive it is to get there.

Q. But the study is ongoing.

A. Just going back to Phase 1 [in 2014], I’d say it was kind of a proof of concept on one level. So the goal here was to take methods used in anthropology to study small-scale societies and apply them to higher-education faculty.

We’re developing a mobile app. It’s kind of like the step monitors or heart-rate monitors that people wear now. It’s still self-reporting. You get a ping and you respond whether you’re working. We have to make it clear that what we mean by working is that it’s something that’s related to your institutional duties in higher education. So I could be working on my car or whatever or I could be working in my garden, but that’s not what we mean.

So if you say no, that you’re not working, then the survey is over. But if you say yes, then there are other questions. We have these dropdown menus that are populated by the categories [teaching, research, administrative work] that we got from the first phase of the study.

One of the side effects of having the app or being involved in the study is that an individual may work harder because they never know exactly when you’re going to get a ping, and you don’t want to be, say, walking to Starbucks when that happens.

The thing that we’re really interested in is work-life balance. We don’t want people to work 80 hours a week. So basically the app provides a way to reflect on what you’re doing. And people can take that in whatever direction.

Q. What’s the end goal?

A. What we’re trying to do now is create a reference sample or a couple of different reference samples to get a few departments to contribute their data for like a week so that we can get a good picture of what people are doing in that department. After that, we’ll kind of open it up to get different schools involved. That would be more like in Phase 3.

Q. How have you felt about the responses you’ve gotten?

A. In general, professors are a little bit averse to being monitored. So that’s why we’re kind of framing this more as a professional-development tool as opposed to monitoring. It’s generally not a top-down monitoring initiative. It’s more of a bottom up. What can we discover about the patterns of our work? And is there a way to make our lives more balanced?

The Christakis tweet exemplifies that people are working a lot harder than the average U.S. citizen probably recognizes, and that’s actually really bad for higher education. Because if people don’t think we’re working, they’re not voting in legislators who are going to give money to higher education. And we see this downward trend in terms of how much states are supporting higher education. If you look at different countries or Canada, they pay their teachers about twice as much as we pay our teachers, and in higher education they make significantly more than than we do, at least for public universities. So I mean anything we can do to demonstrate the value of what we’re doing is going to be beneficial.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.