Humanities and Sciences Faculty Senate
Recommendations on Faculty Workload
Spring 2003
The current effort to move the College faculty workload from a standard of 24 hours of teaching to 21
hours of teaching each year is a welcome initiative. This program will help faculty and departments to
fulfill our teaching, advising, and scholarship roles. We applaud the administration of the College and the
School of Humanities and Sciences for embracing this change.
Notwithstanding the positive faculty response to this workload initiative, a number of faculty and
departments have also raised concerns about the particular process we are going through to implement this
change. The Senate has surveyed the departments which have already completed their workload effort or
are currently working on it. We have discussed this issue, the survey results, the concerns they raised, and
the "Humanities and Sciences Faculty Position on Faculty Workload" put forward in the Fall, 2000 (for
reference, this document is archived on the website of the H & S Faculty Senate) to arrive at the following
recommendations.
The H & S Faculty Senate submits the following recommendations regarding the changes attending the
College-wide faculty workload effort:
I. We recommend that the administration continue to pursue workload issues with the goal of easing
the burden of the workload the faculty currently bear.
Faculty workload has increased in the last generation - we teach at least as many students, we are
innovative in pedagogy, we have increasingly added various technological tools to our teaching and our
classrooms (which can be labor-increasing devices rather than labor-saving ones), we serve on many
committees, we advise, and the College's standards for faculty scholarship have risen significantly over the
last thirty years without adjustments to the teaching burden.
The faculty of H&S welcomes this change in workload, but we also believe that what we require is an
actual workload reduction. The current effort reduces teaching workload slightly, a change that is welcome
and needed. But its central thrust is to redistribute the teaching work that we do. The faculty strongly
believe that this is a good start, but also that it needs to be followed by a concerted effort to ease what has
been a growing workload for the faculty.
Our teaching, our scholarship, our service, and our students - and therefore the whole of the School and
College community - would benefit from such a teaching workload reduction. It would enable us to engage
in more scholarship, creating advantages for the College and our students: revitalizing our teaching, raising
the profile of the School and College, and allowing faculty to engage with our respective disciplines more
substantially. With a reduction in teaching workload, our faculty would enrich the College community.
II. We recommend that the administration resist using numbers as a primary means of evaluating
faculty work at Ithaca College. We further recommend that the administration proceed with caution
in delineating the meaning of these changes in workload and in evaluating departmental work. The
involvement of the faculty in this process could be critical to its success.
The current workload effort appears to place an emphasis on numerical evaluation of teaching - credit
hours generated by a department's full-time faculty. We believe that this emphasis on such numbers is, at
best, a focus upon one part of the teaching done by departments. Teaching is a qualitative enterprise rather
than a quantitative one; it is therefore resistant to numerical evaluation. In short, the faculty are concerned
that this focus will have a negative impact upon teaching at the College. At worst, it could signal a
thorough change in the nature of the relationship between administration and faculty. To our knowledge,
never in the history of Ithaca College have departments been held accountable to a particular number of
credit hours, particularly when asked to sign a contract involving such numbers.
The precise implications of this change are unclear but are of concern to the faculty. If this is a temporary
focus on numbers merely during this experimental phase of shifting faculty workload, it would be of much
less concern than if it is a permanent change in the way departments are evaluated.
Our concerns about this focus on credit hours generated can be broken down as follows:
· a focus on numerical standards in general is of concern to many faculty. Learning is a dynamic and fluid
process, resistant to quantification. One of the attractions of Ithaca College to students is the fact that we
are not a "factory-style" institution. We are loath to see any changes that move us in that direction. Many of
the most important moments in a student's life at Ithaca College occur in small-size classes, and this focus
on quantity of students taught takes our attention off such qualitative and meaningful experiences.
· More particularly, this focus upon credit hours generated places a burden upon departments, which will
now operate under a heightened sense of economic or quantitative pressure. The necessity of living up to a
certain quantified number of credit hours generated provides a disincentive to participate in a range of
curricular innovations that add to the life of the college. With this quantitative focus, it is no longer in the
best interests of a department to do the following:
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participate in first-year seminars, honors courses, and interdisciplinary ventures - Both first-year
seminars and honors courses are small classes with released time associated with them. Even if
released courses are covered by part-time faculty, the small class sizes "take away from" the
number of credit hours that a faculty member might expect to "yield." More generally, innovation
can enrich the life of the College and the experience of students, and the College is particularly
interested in developing courses that cross disciplinary lines. But such cross-listed courses are
"expensive" in terms of credit hours generated - typically dividing students enrolled by the two
departments sponsoring the course. Like honors and first-year seminars, interdisciplinary courses
can force departments to take a hit in credit hours generated.
offer course sections at the unpopular 8am time slot - courses fill from 10am to 3pm, yielding
departments a maximum of credit hours generated. They do not at the 8am, 9am and other
unpopular times. Despite the fact that it is in the best interests of the school and College to have
departments offering classes at "off-peak" hours, this focus upon numbers means that it will be in
no department's self-interest to schedule at these times.
experiment with offerings - a focus upon numbers provides a disincentive to offer a department's
majors innovative and/or challenging courses. There would be, rather, an incentive to offer courses
on the basis of popularity - insuring courses will fill.
Of course we hope no department would make such choices, but it is disturbing to see how this interest in
credit hours generated applies this sort of pressure.
More generally, the focus on credit hours generated - and even the stress on differentiated workload since it
is framed in contracts and valuing/equating different part of our work as faculty - appears to "bleed the
Boyer model of its meaning" in the phrase of one respondent to the Senate's query, making it a numbingly
mechanical process. Ithaca College is interested in revisioning its faculty in light of the Boyer model, but it
is less than clear that the method we are using to achieve a shift in faculty teaching workload is consonant
with that goal.
III. We recommend that the administration take into account the recent bulge in enrollments when
evaluating the success of workload plans in Humanities and Sciences departments.
This interest in numbers is of particular concern at this moment, when the standard for a department's credit
hours generated is gauged by the last three years. These three years have seen an enrollment bulge at the
College, and departments have added seats to already-full sections of popular courses as well as scrambling
to find more sections to offer. That bulge is now subsiding and stabilizing, meaning that few departments
will easily reach the enrollments they have had in the last three years. This was a concern shared by every
H & S department that responded to the Senate's query.
The Humanities and Sciences Faculty Senate appreciates the administration's efforts to implement this
needed change in faculty workload and urges serious consideration of these recommendations.