Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 12, 1993 TAG: 9309120331
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PHILIP WALZER FOR THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The University of Virginia has the lightest average teaching load for full-time faculty, just under two courses a semester, or less than six hours a week. Considering classroom time alone, that means the typical UVa faculty member, making $52,800 and teaching 28 weeks a year, gets more than $300 for every hour in the lecture hall.
"Good Lord!" said Gov. Douglas Wilder. "The pure data does surprise me . . . This is it?"
In an investigation of eight schools, two others, Virginia Tech and the College of William and Mary, had faculty members averaging fewer than two and one-half courses a semester, or fewer than five a year. Old Dominion University faculty taught only slightly more classes - nearly two and two-thirds, or eight hours a week.
Data were collected for the biology, English, history, math and sociology departments. The averages probably overestimate overall teaching loads because they don't include engineering departments, which often have the lowest teaching loads, or faculty on leave.
"If I were a taxpayer in Virginia, I would be outraged," said Martin Anderson, a professor at the Hoover Institution in California and author of "Impostors in the Temple," a critique of academia. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that some of the universities are shirking their responsibilities."
State funding cuts have not reversed the move away from teaching, once the mission of American universities. A few decades ago, faculty routinely taught four, sometimes five classes a semester. Now James Madison University Vice President Bethany S. Oberst can accurately boast of JMU's "very high teaching load," a bit above three classes.
What counts today is research - getting that paper into a journal, winning that six-digit National Science Foundation grant, publishing that book. That's what makes a university's reputation and gets faculty big raises and tenure.
"It's a vanishing breed, the teacher, like the streetcar," said David Rubinstein, an assistant professor of management at Tech. "This is all madness; it's crazy what we're doing. Our students fall second in line, if that. Maybe third or fourth."
For Rubinstein, they came first. He taught hundreds in huge lectures and learned hundreds of names. He spent hours answering questions. Last year, he won Tech's Sporn Award for excellence in introductory courses. But he wrote only "two minor articles." Last year, he was denied tenure.
Now, striving to find a job, Rubinstein finds himself thinking: "I misdirected my time. When a student asked me something, I responded."
Defenders of modern teaching loads say research attracts needed dollars and helps professors stay current and teach better. They also point out that faculty spend time advising and answering questions for students.
A lot of research time directly benefits students, professors say. "There is teaching going on in your lab that isn't counted," said Emilie Rissman, an associate professor of biology at UVa.
Rissman taught one course and team-taught another last year. But she estimates she spent 10 hours a week overseeing the three graduate students in her lab. She usually has a handful of undergraduates, too.
"Would it be better for me to teach a lecture to 200 students and only a handful of them would ever come to my office?" she said. "This hands-on stuff is the way the university develops a personal feel to it."
Some Virginia students, paying among the nation's highest fees, say professors are inaccessible - and they blame research. "They would be in labs doing a lot of research and hard to get hold of," said UVa senior Steve Hanlin. "They had posted office hours and you would go there and they wouldn't be there. Sometimes they would leave a note, sometimes they wouldn't."
Even schools like JMU, which boasts of focusing on undergraduates, expect and provide time for faculty research. Only one state-supported university in the survey, Norfolk State, came close to recent history's four-course load.
That's the problem, say even critics sympathetic to the value of research. Society relies on professors to uncover a medical cure, a new strategy to fight poverty.
"Research is not an evil practice," said Arthur Levine, education professor at Harvard, "but one of the things we've got to ask is: How much can we afford? You have UVa and William and Mary. How many more do you need in Virginia doing major research?"
The two schools with the highest course loads in the survey, more than double UVa's numbers, were Virginia Wesleyan College, a private liberal arts school in Virginia Beach, and Central Virginia Community College in Lynchburg.
Steven Emmanuel doesn't mind the heavy load. That's why he joined Wesleyan last year. His first job teaching philosophy was at the University of California at Riverside, where research was what counted. "The chairman told me that I had the best teaching evaluations he had ever seen, but he made it clear to me that it didn't matter."
Charles W. Bostian, the Clayton Ayre professor of electrical engineering at Tech who earns $94,200 and teaches two courses a year, said: "I wouldn't stay if I were teaching three courses a year. It would be like high school."
At each university surveyed, those making the most taught the least. At Old Dominion, full-time faculty earning between $60,000 and $80,000 taught 2.1 classes in the spring. Faculty getting less than $35,000 taught 3.0 - almost 50 percent more.
Even with state funding down, few schools keep close tabs on how much time faculty spend on research or teaching. The numbers in this story were calculated from faculty course schedules, which most schools said took dozens of hours to compile. But in every case except for the community college, even those lists had errors, such as courses with zero students and a professor teaching 12 sections one semester.
Research defenders say their work brings millions to the university, paying for lab equipment and salaries. David C. Martens, a Tech agriculture professor, recently showed off the fringe benefits of his $70,000 in annual grants: Shakers and centrifuges, water purifiers, furnaces, beakers - all free.
"If you say don't do research anymore, you'd be cutting off millions," said Gerald V. Gibbs, a distinguished professor of geological science at Tech, which gets $125 million a year in federal grants.
But critics say financial benefits are vastly overstated. "I don't think a strong case can be made that research money keeps the university going," said Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. "That money is targeted for specialized programs and tends very rarely to be the source of funding for the general budget."
At UVa, one-quarter of the $485 million annual budget comes from research aid. But $60 million, nearly half the grant money, goes to the medical school. Twenty million more goes to engineering and computer science. Only $27 million, less than a quarter, goes to the College of Arts and Sciences, where most undergraduates are enrolled.
A common defense of research is that it sharpens teaching quality. "Someone who's not actively involved in research isn't bringing the most up-to-date information to the students," said Robert D. Holsworth, VCU political science chairman.
Kenneth Feldman, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, didn't find the link. He reviewed nearly 40 studies comparing research productivity and teaching evaluations of professors. He found "a very, very small correlation - practically nothing . . . When you look at the research, it doesn't show they're much related."
Virginian-Pilot staff writer Tom Boyer assisted in the analysis of data for this story.
Memo: ***CORRECTION***