“Yale has gone 2-1,” a faculty member in political science told me, in the tone he presumably used in the classroom when discussing the perils of nuclear proliferation.
It became a refrain. During my 10 years as dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Notre Dame, the question of teaching schedules — a phrase I unsuccessfully tried to substitute for “teaching loads” — hovered in the periphery of my day-to-day life. Sometimes it occupied center stage. At times I wondered if the question — “Could I have a course off for that?” — would be chiseled on my tombstone.
It’s a “first-world problem,” as the kids say, and I hasten to acknowledge that deans or department chairs struggling with collapsing budgets, or faculty members routinely teaching four courses per semester, may want to proceed to the next article in The Chronicle Review.
For the rest of you, a question: How many courses per semester should a faculty member at a major research university teach?
The question is rarely asked — because it’s in no one’s interest to ask it. Not presidents, since in public institutions they, unlike faculty members, have to answer questions from more or less curious and informed state legislators about how professors use their time. Not provosts, deans, and department chairs, struggling to sustain the Maginot Line of standard teaching schedules while also competing to hire faculty members. Not graduate students, whose courses are typically taught by tenure-line faculty members anyway. And not professors, eager to conduct more research, certainly, but also craving the flexibility of a schedule not burdened by the day-to-day rhythm of class meeting times.
It’s actually in the interest only of innocent undergraduates, who don’t realize that the tenure-line faculty members supported by their tuition dollars may be teaching a decreasing number of courses. And although they don’t know it, it’s in the long-term interest of faculty members themselves.
John Boyer’s absorbing recent history of the University of Chicago is one of the few places where the topic is discussed. (Not coincidentally, Boyer is a longtime dean.) I suspect that the pattern he outlines there is typical: Tenure-line faculty members taught six courses per year (that is, two per quarter) through the 1960s, then five, and now, at most, four. Over time, teaching schedules, like salaries, began to vary a good deal by department or program.
Notre Dame’s pattern was similar: Faculty members in the humanities, social sciences, and arts moved from 3-3 on a semester system in the 1970s to 3-2 and then 2-2 in the late 1980s. When I started as dean, in 2008, tenure-line faculty members in science and engineering taught 1-1, with the expectation that they would be running funded labs; those in business taught 3-0. The “0" came about when the business school identified a semester without teaching, remarkably, as the uniform policy at the top business schools. Humanities, social-science, and arts faculty members taught two courses per semester.
The first strike came in economics. “We need to go 2-1,” the chair politely explained, “because otherwise we can’t hire anyone.” He was right, and so we did, with the proviso that teaching would be more than 2-1 for faculty members without strong research programs. Economics at Notre Dame had a spectacular decade, zipping up the rankings. Now I’m warned, somberly, that “some faculty at Duke are 1-1.”
The next barrage came in psychology. “No top department is 2-2 anymore,” an external reviewer told me, and besides, faculty members in psychology now each run a lab with a cluster of undergraduates and a few graduate students. So we moved to 2-1, with even stronger language on variable teaching schedules and active research programs.
Naïvely, I thought that this was where things might end. We could rationalize economics because it was, well, economics. We could justify psychology with the labs.
We could also point to the fact that teaching had never been taken more seriously at Notre Dame. We funded a center for teaching and learning. Administrators and elected faculty committees scrutinized teaching in the faculty-review process and did not hesitate to deny ineffective teachers tenure or promotion. Senior faculty members dutifully visited the classrooms of their junior colleagues. We occasionally persuaded faculty members to teach together. They more than occasionally liked it.
How many courses per semester should a faculty member at a major research university teach?
Still, I kept getting requests. Some elite philosophy departments, I was now told, are 2-1. One external reviewer in a top-five philosophy department cheerfully explained to me that her institution nominally set the teaching schedule at 2-2 but in actuality counted a reading group as a course. I asked other deans: Why is philosophy at 2-1 but not history or English? Will this extend to language and literature programs and the arts? No one knows. When Yale political science did, in fact, move to 2-1, I called an acquaintance affiliated with the department and asked why. The only, and I suppose age-old, explanation, after some hemming and hawing, was that Harvard had done it first.
I kept a mordant list of the teaching schedules described in outside offer letters to our faculty members. That top state institutions repeatedly bargained with reduced teaching schedules surprised me, given the potential public fallout. But the worst offenders were colleges, usually private, on the quarter system. One highly ranked institution positively boasted about the flexibility available to faculty members teaching only two 10- or 11-week quarters each year. (Teaching four courses a year at elite institutions on the quarter system often means two courses per quarter for two quarters and one quarter with no teaching obligation.) I began to wonder what the faculty members without labs, say in Portuguese or statistics, did for the other six months of the year. Did they come to campus? Another institution on the quarter system made the same promise of six months of teaching but then solemnly stated that faculty members should nonetheless be resident on the campus during the “research” quarter. I did not see an enforcement codicil.
So this is the puzzle: Why are tenure-line faculty members teaching less even as the financial situation of universities — including the most affluent ones — weakened in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis? The basic answer is that when one program reduces teaching schedules, faculty members at other programs use competing offers to begin the process of forcing change across the academic ecosystem. Anxious junior faculty members worry that their research productivity will be compared with that of peers at institutions less burdened by teaching than they are.
It’s also worth remembering that the standard teaching load — there, I said it — is generally a maximum. As programs, centers, scholarly journals, and institutes proliferate, they require leadership from successful faculty members and, for good reasons, course releases. Sometimes we give course releases as part of recruitment. Sometimes we give them for significant administrative service.
Faculty members would occasionally explain to me that this was simply the market at work. But it’s an odd market, isn’t it? Princeton, I am reliably informed, recently contemplated but did not implement a 2-1 for all tenure-line humanities faculty members. I sympathize with any administrator at Princeton or elsewhere navigating the course-load waters. Still, assuming Princeton eventually moves forward with some variation of the proposal, it may be hard in a couple of generations to distinguish the working conditions for Princeton faculty members from those at the neighboring Institute for Advanced Study. Presumably Princeton’s benefactors would find a reduction in teaching for full-time faculty members baffling at this financial moment. So too might its undergraduates, since the number of full-time faculty members will probably not increase fast enough to compensate for the decline in courses offered by those same professors.
The long-term risk is that residential, undergraduate liberal-arts education becomes less tethered to the research university. The combination of undergraduate education and research is one of the glories of the American higher-education system, envied around the world. But it’s harder to celebrate as faculty members move further away from teaching actual courses on the ground.
An additional irony is that faculty members themselves do not realize that the most vibrant departments are not those where they see one another only at the Delta or United Airlines club. In healthy departments, faculty members talk with one another: about recent scholarship or discoveries, graduate students’ work, undergraduate theses, department curricula. Every dropped course, every incentive not to come to campus, erodes the culture upon which good departmental decisions depend. It may even weaken the capacity for good intellectual work. That less teaching leads to better scholarship remains a curiously underresearched assumption.
But this is all speculative. Here’s the real question: If Columbia sociology is 2-1 (as I’ve been told), what should we do? And is some faculty member at another university telling her dean that “Notre Dame is thinking about going 2-1"?
