The Uncertain Future of Academic Work

Now more than ever, people employed in higher education face the forces of change

By Audrey Williams June

Paul Hosefros for The Chronicle

How do professors spend their time? Kathryn Demps, an assistant professor of anthropology at Boise State U., helped lead a study there to answer that question. Above, Ms. Demps works in her office and meets with undergraduates.

Professors, administrators, and professional staff members can probably agree on one thing when it comes to the academic workplace—the times, they keep a-changin’.

Over the next several years, at least, new technologies are expected to drastically reshape the way professors teach, and when and where people on college campuses do their work. As lawmakers, parents, and students continue to question whether a college degree is worth it, and as higher education struggles to reinvent itself, professors are sure to face more scrutiny about their workloads. Those trends have set the stage for internal battles over administrators’ renewed attempts to measure faculty productivity.

Dedicated office space on campus may not always be a given in the workplace of the future, even for some tenured and tenure-track professors. But more colleges are expected to create family-friendly workplaces, as the next generation of faculty members signals how much it values work-life balance. That is increasingly true for both male and female academics

Employees must be prepared to see their careers changed by such trends. Many of these changes have been a long time in the making, such as the rise of a professoriate dominated by those who have no hope of long-term employment. But many academics, regardless of their status, are increasingly expected to excel in jobs that don’t always match up with their ideal vision of scholarly work.

“I’m worried about whether, down the line, the professoriate is going to be attractive to very talented, creative, forward-thinking people,” says Ann E. Austin, a professor of higher, adult, and lifelong education at Michigan State University.

For those who do end up in the academic workplace, how to best use technology in teaching and scholarship will be a challenge for the foreseeable future. Although massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are hot topics of conversation, even professors who have never taught online have seen the effects of technology on their work lives.

Some advice from Ms. Austin to graduate students who want to be professors: Get experience teaching online.

“You’ll be expected to teach fully online and to use technology quite skillfully in class,” says Ms. Austin, who has taught all-online courses in the College of Education’s online master’s programs.

As for senior faculty members, “we can’t just stay up on what’s happening our fields, but we have to stay ahead of the technology as well,” Ms. Austin says. “It’s more than just learning some technology. We need to think about it in the context of what are the most effective ways of helping students learn.”

Some colleges are helping faculty members think that way, using grants as incentives and providing a platform for professors to discuss best practices.

Saint Mary’s College of California considers itself a teaching institution, and that mission guides the way professors there think about technology. The college’s Education Technology Group, led by Jeffrey A. Sigman, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry, awards grants to faculty members who want to use a new technology in their teaching or scholarship or test a current one.

The grants typically are for $500, and the group awards about 15 to 20 of them a year. Recent grants have been used to pay for an iPad that a professor requested so she could test an app that would help her better track the attendance of her 100-plus students, and for a subscription to a video-sharing website for language learners, among other things.

Professors must submit a report to the campus group that includes details about how they used the technology they purchased and what they and their students gained from it. Often grant recipients share that information with a wider audience of their peers in forums or presentations sponsored by the technology group. And sometimes the group holds faculty talks on topics unrelated to grant proposals, such as online and hybrid teaching

“Faculty here like to talk to each other about their teaching,” Mr. Sigman says. ‘They’re interested in how their colleagues are engaging students. We frame the conversation around the teaching first. So it’s easy for someone to say, I’m going to a talk about teaching and learning—not, I’m going to a technology talk.”

Yet it’s technology—social media, texting, and the pervasive stream of email messages—that has helped ratchet up the workload of people employed in academe, in ways unseen by outsiders. Policy makers and the public tend to view faculty work in terms of how many courses professors teach, a debate that is expected to intensify, says Robert C. Dickeson, a former president of the University of Northern Colorado, who is now a higher-education consultant.

“We need to dig a little deeper so that everyone understands that it’s more than instruction, and the metrics that we use ought to link to measures of quality,” he says. “We’ve got the public saying, We have a right to know what’s going on.”

Mr. Dickeson thinks administrators need better ways to document exactly what faculty members do. Those who understand the nuances of academic work should decide what kind of metrics works best, he says.

Figuring out what faculty members do with their time is what John P. Ziker, chair of the anthropology department at Boise State University, had in mind when he set out to record faculty work patterns at his institution last spring. Mr. Ziker started the Time Allocation Workload Knowledge Study with Matthew C. Genuchi, an assistant professor of psychology; Kathryn Demps, an assistant professor of anthropology; and David Nolin, a visiting assistant professor of anthropology. The group was spurred by the debate leading up to a recent revision of Boise State’s workload policy, which now calls for professors to spend 60 percent of their time teaching. Faculty members are also required to report annually to administrators on how many classes they teach, how many students they teach, and how frequently they publish and where, among other things.

“There were all these debates, but we had absolutely no empirical data about what we do on a daily basis,” Mr. Ziker says.

Thirty Boise State faculty members were interviewed over a two-week period to recall details of specific activities they had completed during the previous 24 hours. The most surprising highlight of the study, Mr. Ziker says, is that professors reported spending 17 percent of their weekdays at work in meetings—a task many people outside academe may not associate with academic life.

Mr. Ziker and his colleagues have developed a prototype of a smartphone app for Phase 2 of the project. The app allows participants to provide details about what they’re doing at any given moment. The plan is to customize it for institutions beyond Boise State.

“I think all over higher education everybody’s facing the same thing,” Mr. Ziker says. “I’ve received a tremendous amount of interest in our work.”

Mr. Dickeson, who says he’s spent time on 700 campuses, says most professors are doing much more work than they get recognized for—as the Boise State study showed. One of the challenges is conveying that message.

“We’ve got to do a better job of communicating to policy makers and internally what we do,” Mr. Dickeson says.

It is already clear that for some employees, the physical academic workplace of the future is going to be wherever they decide to do their jobs, thanks to the ubiquity of technology.

“There’s a level of mobility with students and faculty and administrators that is much different,” says Michael Haggans, a visiting professor in the Center for 21st Century Universities at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “The reality is we simply don’t work the way we did 50 years ago.”

But that mobility may come at a price. As more people opt to work mostly in home offices or other off-campus environments, the sense of community and collegiality that scholars and other employees once enjoyed may disappear.

“It’s much more difficult than it would have been a decade ago to interact with people,” says Michigan State’s Ms. Austin.

Mr. Haggans predicts, however, that faculty members who have private offices are likely to keep them. Trying to take those away is the “third rail of academic-facilities management,” he says.

One bright spot in the future workplace is expected to be an increased emphasis on life outside of work. Many new arrivals to the academic workplace seek to have a reasonable work-life balance. Studies show that male academics can be just as committed to spending time with their families as their female counterparts are. So the attention that colleges have given to these issues—making it easier for men and women to stop the tenure clock, modify their workload to care for children or elderly parents, and find child care—has the potential to shape academic work for years to come.

“We’re seeing a generation that is interested in an institutional environment that has the practices and policies in place to help them manage personal and professional responsibilities,” Ms. Austin says.

For faculty members closer to the end of their careers, things are changing for the better in one key way. For years, discussions of retirement issues have focused on an expected wave of mass retirements, which was thwarted by the recession. Professors on the verge of retiring now might be more likely to consider taking the plunge as colleges strive to make retirement more attractive for those who still want to be productive.

“We’re definitely still talking about retirement issues, but the conversation has matured,” says Valerie Conley, chair of the counseling and higher-education department at Ohio University.

Efforts to make the transition to retirement easier are under way at Mount Holyoke College, where professors who are in the phased-retirement program can apply for one-time grants to complete research projects, and at Georgia Tech, where retirees can get part-time appointments to do research, teaching, or service.

But until they reach that stage of their lives, there is one trait all professors will need.

“If you look to the future, it’s really going to be necessary for faculty to have a good degree of flexibility,” Ms. Austin says. “They’ll need to be flexible enough to use new technology, flexible enough to respond to the changing student body. Appointment types are changing.

“Flexibility is going to be key.”