That higher education in America is in a time of transition has become a truism. Colleges and universities anticipate enormous increases in the number of students during the next decade, as the children that comprise the "baby boom echo" reach college age. Estimates of 445,000 new students in California by the year 2006, and an additional 228,000 in North Carolina merely hint at the enormity of the increase, which is fueled not only by an expansion in the number of college-aged people, but also a growing belief that a college education has become a necessity in today's information-based economy. Add to this trend a growing demand for adult retraining, and the American university finds itself at the center of an expansion rivaled only by that which followed the passage of the G. I. Bill. Of course, such increases cost money &emdash; public money &emdash; and lots of it. And therein lies the source of Katrina A. Meyer's Faculty Workload Studies: Perspectives, Needs, and Future Directions, volume 26 number 1 of the ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report series.
Meyer, the director of distance learning and technology for the University and Community College System of Nevada, notes that the number of faculty workload studies seems to be on the rise nationwide, and in the first chapter she explains the multiple reasons why. As tuition costs have skyrocketed during the past ten to fifteen years, outstripping the Consumer Price Index by 20% from 1982 &emdash; 1995, taxpayers experiencing "sticker shock" have become increasingly vocal about their inability to pay for a college education, and about the quality of their education once they have enrolled. Business leaders have also gotten into the act, complaining about college graduates they have hired whose abilities they consider lacking. This inevitably has drawn the attention of politicians, who also have seen higher education take an ever-expanding chunk of the tax pie. Since 80% to 90% of many universities' budgets is spent on personnel, according to Meyer, the obvious place to look for ways to cut the budget is by increasing faculty productivity. Meyer quotes William M. Plater, who wrote that "universities and colleges must become more effective managers of resources and redeploy faculty and staff time to meet needs more efficiently at higher levels of quality. [As] most other resources are fixed, faculty and staff time is the only resource that can be changed significantly to improve performance. Time," he concludes, "becomes our most fungible resource." (27)
Nevertheless, workload studies have consistently found that faculty work long hours, averaging between forty-seven and fifty-seven hours per week depending on the type of institution. The question is: working on what? To the chagrin of many legislators, the answer all-too-often is not "teaching." Faculty who average between 6.6 and 13.0 hours per week in the classroom, and while preparation adds considerably to this amount, this often does not seem sufficient to those who are attempting to provide an education at a reasonable cost for a growing population of students, many of whom come from lower-income families. Of course, much of the remaining time in the faculty workweek is devoted to research, which traditionally has been emphasized as necessary for prestige and advancement in academia. Meyer does not go into great detail about the controversy concerning teaching and research, but she does note that it lies at the center of discussions of faculty workload. The general public and the business community, and therefore the politicians who represent them, believe that the primary focus of the faculty should be teaching; the faculty, meanwhile, hold fast to the belief that research is at least as important as teaching, and has created a reward system that emphasizes publication. The pressures being put on academic institutions today will only widen this disparity in expectations, and Meyer believes it must be confronted soon if fiscal disaster is to be averted.
Meyer concludes her monograph with a chapter of what she calls "useful solutions." These run the gamut from clarifying curricula and mission (Meyer believes an overemphasis on research at universities that are not doctoral or research institutions can be attributed to "mission drift," for instance), to realizing the potential of technology and distance education, and realigning rewards for research and teaching. Meyer is decidedly market-oriented in her suggestions, and many readers may bristle at the idea that education largely exists to prepare people for the workforce or that it can be evaluated according to balance sheet logic. Nevertheless, her ideas are clear-eyed and practical, and expressed in a plain, no-nonsense style that would make this book accessible and useful to educators and non-educators alike.
At eighty-three pages, Faculty Workload Studies is dense, packed with graphs and studies and lists, and at the same time it is a bit too compressed to examine problems and possible solutions with much thoroughness. It might be read most beneficially in conjunction with a longer, more wide-ranging discussion of the future of higher education (I would recommend Zachary Karabell's recent What's College For?: The Struggle to Define American Higher Education as a particularly interesting companion piece). Meyer has provided a balanced discussion of the whys and wherefores of the faculty workload debate that serves as a useful primer for those who wish to make an educated contribution to deliberations.
Scott E. Walters,
UNC-Asheville