Faculty workload and governance

Workload has been a contentious issue at UMass since I first got involved with the union. When I first arrived at UMass, the union did not much concern itself with non-tenure system faculty. There weren't very many and the Union was focused primarily on trying to make sure there wouldn't be very many more. When it became clear that we were becoming a substantial part of the faculty, the leadership had the vision to actually begin organizing us and advocating for our interests. That's how I got involved.

One of our first concerns was workload. There have always been disparities of workload among departments, but some departments were more unequal than others. In particular, some were hiring non-tenure system faculty to teach an excessive number of courses (as many as five -- or even more) and still calling them part time (less than 1.0 FTE). One of our first achievements was to establish a floor: We established that a 3-credit course would represent no less than 0.25 FTE. Some in the University saw this as license to begin routinely hiring non-tenure track faculty with a 4/4 load (four 3-credit courses each semester). And, with the recent switch to 4-credit Gen Ed classes, some in the administration would now like for non-tenure-system faculty to routinely teach four 4-credit classes per semester.

This all assumes that a faculty member does nothing but teach. If you're teaching four classes, that's your full-time job. If you're paid only for teaching full time, you don't have any opportunity to engage in either scholarship or service. Or faculty governance. I don't think that's a good idea either for the faculty member or for the University.

An engaged faculty must be involved in governance. For shared governance to have any meaning, all faculty ought to be able to serve on some committees, like the Personnel Committee, which oversees all of the personnel actions in the departments. Or the Faculty Senate, which has primary responsibility for academic affairs. Creating dis-empowered contingent faculty benefits no-one. It's not good for the faculty member to be so disconnected from the life of the University, but it's also not good for the University. We need engaged scholars that are invested in the life of the University -- not just freeway faculty.

In the last round of bargaining, I made this case to the administration and was unsuccessful in making any headway. Bargaining is about to start again and I'm hopeful that this time we might get some kind of agreement that as a 3-credit class is 0.25 FTE then a full-time faculty member must teach less than 4/4 in order to devote some part of their professional effort toward governance.