A Day in the Life of Higher Ed

I'll have my monthly goal-setting post up tomorrow, but today is Higher Ed Awareness Day. You might be asking yourself why professors would need a day of awareness. Well, unfortunately, we don't really seem to do a very good job of explaining what we do the public and that can lead to at best uniformed and at worst dishonest attacks on our profession.

Last Sunday I returned home from my trip to Boston, where I gave two public lectures (which took me about 10 hours to write and prepare all told) and where I attended an academic conference in my field. Apart from the fact that I was eating crap food in airports, I was spending my Sunday in a pretty typical way: grading papers, reading in order to prepare my classes for the upcoming week, and responding to student emails. I don't usually mind working on Sundays because I love what I do, but it really pisses me off when someone claims that college professors work 30 hours a week and have 22 weeks of vacation or alternative employment during the year. As someone who has spent maybe 5 days without working (when I haven't been paid for about 25 more days that I have worked) since January 1, this really rubs me the wrong way.

Giving a Public Lecture

One of the things that I do enjoy about my job is that it provides me with relative flexibility. I'm in the classroom 12 hours a week (I teach three four-credit hour courses a semester) and have office hours for another 8-10 hours each week. This means that if I want to write lectures or work on my research or write committee meeting minutes or grade papers at home in my pjs or at a coffee shop I can. However, that absolutely does not mean that someone should assume that I am not working when I am not on campus or when I am not actually physically in the classroom. For every hour that I'm in the classroom, I probably spend 2-4 hours preparing. This can go down a bit when I've taught the class before, but it can also go up a bit for classes that I've never taught before. I'm not going to lie. I put a lot of time into my teaching. I love teaching, and I constantly experiment in order to try to improve. Every class that I have taught has been different - in format, in chemistry, in the kinds of assignments that I choose to have my students do (and that I then have to grade). Things that work well in a class of 20 do not in a class of 65 and vice versa. Grading is also a time consuming proposition. Depending on the length of the assignment, it might take me 20-60 minutes to grade a single essay. If I have a class of 50 students.... Well, you can see that I spend a lot of time marking papers. I don't just run some scantrons through a machine and call it a day.

Of course, teaching is not all that faculty do. We are higher educators. That means that we are trained experts in our field. I happen to be an expert in European and Atlantic World history from 1500-1800. (Not to be all snide about having a PhD. It just means that I have received specialized training that I spent close to a decade in school getting.) Most universities give their faculty members tenure and promote them based on their research (often read: publications and conference presentations) and their service to their institution and profession as well as their teaching. If I just spent 12 hours in the classroom, 8 hours in office hours, and 24 hours doing class prep, then I have already worked over forty hours in a given week. Let's say that I didn't have any assignments to grade that week and I had few visitors to my office hours so I was able to gain 6 hours by doing class prep while sitting in my campus office. Well, I still have worked close to 40 hours and not yet met any of the expectations that my institution has for me in the other categories on which I am evaluated. Throw in a committee meeting or two, a university event, a letter of recommendation to write for a student, and 8 hours spent on research and writing and bam! That is my typical week when there is no grading. When I have a stack of papers that comes in or during midterm season, I have to work even more if I want to make progress on research. During the summer, I don't actually get paid, but that is the time when I actually am able to devote most of my energies to my research, which I also love. Summers are also the time when academics who haven't taken on summer teaching are able to go to archives and libraries for their research, participate in workshops, and start preparing their classes for the upcoming year.

My work doesn't always start at 8 or 9am and it almost never ends at 5pm. It isn't bounded by Mondays and Fridays. I don't punch a time clock, but if I did no one would be able to accuse me of only working 30 hours a week. I'll be tweeting my day today as I go using the hashtag #dayofhighered so that you can get a sense of what a pretty typical day in the life of one faculty member in the Humanities/Social Sciences looks like.

I don't make assumptions that the occupations of others are easy. Please don't make those assumptions about mine. I realize that I'm probably preaching to the choir here, as many of you who read my blog are fellow academics. I also know that many of you who read my blog and are not academics are aware that I work hard and sometimes long hours. So I'll step off my soap box now and just say that if you had a professor or educator who inspired you or made a difference in your life, let them know. Because appreciation is even better than awareness.