I was just reading a post by Reluctant Muse
http://opensalon.com/blog/reluctant_muse
and, in particular the comments to that it reminded me of an issue that always seems to come up. People just have no idea what a college or university professor does for a living.
The first misconception, if you have a Ph.D., is that people think you are a medical doctor. Family reunions are always fun = Uncle Al wants me to phone his friend who 'has this growth' to tell him how he should treat it. All sympathies to your friend Uncle Al, but he should start by going to a doctor! Yes, I am a doctor, but not that kind of doctor. Then what good are you? He asks in his own charming way.
Indeed, what good am I? Hard question to answer if you think about it.
The second and most common misconception is that we teach class. Well, we do; teach class that is, but frankly it is way down on our list of responsibilities. In my particular position, I teach less than most. In an average year, I have maybe 30 hours in the classroom. This year, I have one. Yes, one hour of teaching the whole year. Some years it's 50. But 50 is not much if you think about a 'real' classroom teacher. A high school teacher is probably in class 6 hours a day, five days a week. They do my 30 hours in a week! Even give the 2 or so hours it take to prepare for each classroom hour, and the couple of hours of office hours per week, this is not a big teaching load. I'd estimate that the average university professor teaches 40 or 50 hours a year.
So what do professors actually do with their time, if they are not teaching? It depends on what kind of professor they are. If they are English professors, classics, writing, history professors, they do library research and they write. They write books and papers. They stay at the forefront of knowledge in their field to advance the state of humanities knowledge and yes, to be the expert for their students. Math professors do proofs. Science professors do scientific reasearch. Professors write papers. They write grants. They serve on University committees. They administer a research laboratory, they conduct clinical trials, they train graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, they organize a creative writing program, they serve on admissions committees, they write letters of recommendation, review other people's papers, review other people's grant applications....... well, teaching is way down the list.
The reason this came up was that Reluctant Muse was asking advice about dealing with a student with mental health problems in one of her classes. Some of her commentators were taking her to task for not being more sympathetic, more equipped, and more willing to spend more of her time helping the student with this problem. I was just trying to put this into the perspective that while we do care, we are given only a small amount of time to devote to teaching. Of the 3000ish + hours that many of us university professors spend at our jobs in a year (thats 60-70 hours/week), only 50 out of 3000 of those are alloted to us for teaching. Throw a student mental health problem at us - we are not unsympathetic, we are overwhelmed and unequipped to deal with it.
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Comments
I suppose it depends. It depends on what kind of college or university one works at. The teaching loads will be different, for example, at a liberal arts college vs a R1 research university. It depends on whether one works at an undergraduate campus or a professional school (e.g. Medical, Law, Dental school etc.). It depends on whether one is in the sciences or humanities. It does depend somewhat on rank, but not always in the way one might think. I'm in the biological sciences, and I don't know any of my colleagues that spend 200 hours a year in the classroom. Not even close. I also don't doubt that you and others do. Even so, it is less than I believe most in the public think it is. Even at 200 hours, assuming a quarter system and that you work 8 hours/day (I'll bet you work way more than that!), you are in the classroom only 16% of available time.
I take your point that there is time spent outside the classroom on prep, consultation and committee work. I counted 2 prephours/classroom hour. Even so, for me that's only 150 hours in a heavy year. I don't count committee time - because I was counting actual teaching, but maybe also because in my experience, 10 minutes of useful work gets done for every hour spent in committee - so I'd place it more in the 'waste of time' category. I didn't count outside-of-class time with graduate students. Of course, they are learning things, but I tend to think of them more as junior colleagues, and so the the time spent with them is more like co-working. Besides if I was going to count that as teaching time, do I then have to subtract the time that I am learning from them?
So I hold by my thesis: that professors spend more time doing other stuff than they do teaching. I certainly do. Way more.
Just as an aside - in my department, Assistant Professors actually teach less. They are promoted based mostly on their research accomplishments and publications, so they are given a 'break' to have more time for research.
Re-reading my post, I'd also like to clarify one thing. When I said that teaching was 'way down the list' for me, I was speaking strictly as a matter of time spent. I actually love teaching - it's one of my favorite parts of my job.
It has its insanities. The way research is counted is pretty odd, many times. We don't have any way of estimating the value of research, so administrations end up just counting publications. Being aware of the limitations of this approach, my institution (along with others) is trying to create a global ranking of journals, so that a higher-ranked journal will count for more than a lower-ranked one. Between disciplines, however, these comparisons are totally meaningless. In the UK, they're trying to institutionalize the notion of "impact factor," but that idea only has meaning in a discipline that has a clearly defined "cutting edge."
Still, you know, it's still possible to compromise, do research that you yourself thinks has meaning, and game the system as best you can so as to also make the system recognize what you do. What do you want? It's a system, and systems work on fictions.
Similarly with teaching, only somewhat less so. That is, these systems make somewhat more sense, and sometimes recognize good work for what it is.
Committees? Varies a lot. Sometimes you can really have a positive impact on the way things work by pushing things patiently on a committee. If a committee is time-consuming because members of the committee have legitimate differences of perspective (as between disciplines), that's all right. It's worth the time as long as everyone has goodwill, and that isn't really rare. It's when formal requirements do not correspond to concrete needs that the whole process gets frustrating.
That's my perspective anyway. I do work in Hong Kong, though my experience of universities in Canada, the US and other places does not suggest to me that they are much different.