The 5 Types of Professors: Which One Are You?

Efforts to dictate or even describe the work habits of professors are often controversial. They also have a blind spot: Such exercises often fail to account for the different roles that faculty members fill.

That observation led a team of researchers from the Center for Postsecondary Research, at Indiana University at Bloomington, to examine the time that professors devote to the key components of professorial work: teaching, research, and service.

The report, “Faculty Types and Effective Teaching: A Cautionary Exploration of How Faculty Spend their Time,” maps out five core types of faculty members based on the relative amounts of time they spend on those three core areas of work. It captures a more nuanced view of faculty roles than job titles provide.

The researchers devised the categories using their analysis of responses to the center’s Faculty Survey of Student Engagement by some 16,000 full-time instructors who teach at least one undergraduate course.

The five types of professors in the study are the classic, teaching-heavy, research-heavy, service-heavy, and moderate-load.

Among the study’s surprises: Teaching-focused faculty members made relatively infrequent use of effective teaching practices — a group of behaviors, like “discussions with diverse others,” that research suggests enhance student learning.

“Our initial reaction was: Are you sure you did it right?,” said Allison BrckaLorenz, an assistant research scientist at the center and the report’s lead author. “I don’t know that we came up with any answers. The differences we see aren’t huge, but they’re consistent. So there’s something there.”

The researchers hope that their work, which is to be presented on Friday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, in New York, will raise questions about how professors on particular campuses spend their time, and whether that matches institutional goals.

How the 5 Types of Faculty Members Spend Their Time
The hours per week they devote to teaching, research, and service vary widely.

From “Faculty Types and Effective Teaching: A Cautionary Exploration of How Faculty Spend Their Time,” by Allison BrckaLorenz, Tom Nelson Laird, Bridget Yuhas, Joe Strickland, and Kyle Fassett

Here’s what the researchers found about the five types:

• Classic faculty: 16.3 percent of professors, 53.5-hour average workweek on research, teaching, and service. They spend most of their time teaching, a moderate amount on research, and a low amount on service. Tenured and tenure-track faculty members are very overrepresented in this group. Asian, black, and multiracial professors are slightly overrepresented, and white professors are slightly underrepresented. Professors working at public institutions are overrepresented. Use of the effective teaching practices asked about in the survey is higher than average for this group.

• Teaching-heavy faculty: 32.5 percent of professors, 38.6-hour average workweek on core tasks. They spend most of their time teaching, with low amounts on research and service. Lecturers and instructors are very overrepresented. Professors working off of the tenure track or at a college without a tenure track are overrepresented. Women are overrepresented. Professors working at very small or small colleges are overrepresented.

This group uses the measured effective teaching practices less than the average professor does. Given that teaching-heavy faculty members are disproportionately lecturers and instructors, that could be because “one, they may be overworked, and two, they may not feel as much a part of the institution,” said Tom Nelson Laird, an associate professor, director of the center, and one of the paper’s authors.

• Research-heavy faculty: 15.5 percent of professors, 42.8-hour average workweek on core tasks. They spend most of their time on research, a moderate amount teaching, and a low amount on service. Those in biological sciences, agriculture, and natural resources; physical sciences, mathematics, and computer science; social sciences; and engineering are overrepresented. Men are overrepresented. Asian professors are very overrepresented, and black and white professors are underrepresented.

Professors working at very competitive colleges are overrepresented, and those at colleges with any other Barron’s selectivity rating are underrepresented. This group uses the teaching practices asked about in the survey at levels comparable to those of the average professor.

• Service-heavy faculty: 9 percent of professors, 52.4-hour workweek on core tasks. They spend most of their time on service, a moderate amount on teaching, and a low amount on research. Tenured professors are overrepresented, and those on the tenure track are underrepresented. Full or associate professors are overrepresented, and assistant professors, lecturers, and instructors are underrepresented. Professors working at highly competitive institutions are underrepresented.

[[relatedcontent align="right” size="half-width”]] Members of this group have more frequent out-of-class interactions with students than the average professor does. The researchers didn’t expect to find this group, Nelson Laird said. “As we thought more about it, it could be department chairs, it could be deans, it could be center directors, practicum supervisors.”

• Moderate-load faculty: 26.7 percent of professors, 27.6-hour workweek on core tasks. They spend a moderate amount of time teaching and low amounts on research and service, devoting less time overall to those three activities combined than do the other groups. The researchers suspect that many professors in this group may be seeing patients or clients or otherwise engaged in work outside of these categories.

Professors in education, health professions, and social-service professions are overrepresented. Professors working off of the tenure track or at colleges without a tenure system are overrepresented. Those working at private colleges are overrepresented. Professors working at noncompetitive colleges are overrepresented. They use the effective teaching practices less than the average professor does.

Are there really this many professors putting in less than a 40-hour week? Probably some, Nelson Laird said, but that is very likely not the full explanation.

“We definitely don’t want to tell the story that there’s a bunch of lazy faculty here,” BrckaLorenz said. “The language to classify the work is maybe different” in the practical fields where these professors are concentrated, “and somehow we’re not capturing their experience.”

Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.