<p>Standard teaching load at Iowa and Iowa State in the liberal arts is 2/2. Time spent is 45% research, 45% teaching, 10% service.</p>
<p>In business it is 2/2 also. The college of business has a ton of endowed ‘research chairs’. If you have one of those, the load becomes 1/2. Those research chairs typically provide the money for research as opposed to federal grants.</p>
<p>Business research is nothing like science research. I would say science profs work MUCH harder than biz profs who have it pretty cushy. Just try to find them in the office after 6 or on weekends. Ghost town. They get endowed chairs to pay them enough to come to Iowa.</p>
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<p>I am up past midnight every night at work on my manuscript/doing other research tasks for an hour or two before I damn near pass out. I spend the academic year working through the archival data (or whatever) that I gather during the summer–my institution gives me some support, but I then augment that with my own money. This pattern of work is not really the most effective for writing a book (nor is it my preferred style of research work–I prefer long, uninterrupted time), but my 1-2 hours/night is all I have time for after I teach my classes, support my students’ extracurriculars, do my service tasks, and work with my research/independent students. </p>
<p>I don’t know a single colleague of mine at this institution who has any time whatsoever. Some do more research, others do lots of service, and others do an inhuman amount of administrative work. Of course there’s always the stray genuinely lazy academic, but I learned long ago that most of the people in my profession who appear lazy are either doing research activity that isn’t visible or are simply burned out.</p>
<p>Another article…another thread. I “get it”. You do not like higher education and most of what goes with it.</p>
<p>Thumper, I love higher education, these were the best days of my life. But in order for young people to have the same experience I did, we must get control of costs. I am not blaming younger faculty, but the leadership in colleges MUST do a better job of addressing costs.</p>
<p>I draw a significant distinction between faculty being lazy and faculty not teaching enough. I’d agree with SLACfac that most tenure track faculty members are pushing all the time. </p>
<p>My concern is not that they’re lazy – it is that the reward system has shifted far too much towards research and away from teaching and community service.</p>
<p>At my current university, my advisor only gets partial support from the department (proportional to his teaching load). The rest of his salary is charged directly to our grants (which the department takes a huge chunk of anyway as overhead and indirect costs).</p>
<p>DH works constantly, educates his students, considers it part of his job to get them enthusiastic about the material and able to think and write effectively. Has advisees, plenty of committee work, peer support work, etc. Uses plenty of his own time for prep plus his own academic research, publication. He started, 20-some years ago with 6/year and is now at, yep, 6/year. </p>
<p>He’s luckier than some friends whose course loads were reduced- and salaries, correspondingly.</p>
<p>Kayf…I agree about the costs. My other post on this thread is about one poster who clearly hates current colleges and all practices that go with them. Thread after thread with articles posted about the perils of higher education. </p>
<p>My point…I understand and frankly don’t see it the same way. Yes, costs have spiraled out of control at many places. But there is MUCH that is really good about higher education in this country. AND there are affordable ways for almost all students to attend college.</p>
<p>Arabrab wrote:
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<p>You may have a point, but, if the award system really reflected the real-world worth of intellectual capital in today’s society, freshly minted Ph.ds would be drawing down the same (pre-bonus) salaries as an entry-level lawyer at a white-shoe firm, or an analyst at Goldman-Sachs. Americans still labor under the conceit that college and university professors should be recruited from the “best and brightest” among our youth, but the reality is that lucrative careers outside of academia have been luring them from the classroom for over a generation, now. The fact that so few other middle-class salaries have been able to rise with the productivity gains of the last decade only compounds the problem.</p>
<p>The question is, whether giving up a little on time spent in the classroom is marginally more cost-effective than raising the starting salaries for all TT faculty to $120,000 a year? I suspect that for most colleges, it is.</p>
<p>The paper has been retracted:</p>
<p>[Groups</a> Retract Paper That Criticized Faculty Workloads | Inside Higher Ed](<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/04/18/groups-retract-paper-criticized-faculty-workloads]Groups”>http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/04/18/groups-retract-paper-criticized-faculty-workloads)</p>
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<p>I applaud your intellectual honesty in pointing out the retraction, Beliavsky.</p>
<p>Me too. I like that about you.</p>
<p>Well done!</p>
<p>I’d gladly pay extra for smaller class loads so my student can get a little more attention.
$2,500 is very little compared to the price at an in state mid sized university & COA of a liberal arts college.</p>
<p>Thank you for posting the retraction article!</p>
<p>Can somebody explain to me how all of this “research” benefits society? I get that medical research, anything having to do with advancing scientific knowledge might be a great boon to society, even research on mental illness, sociology, etc. at times might be beneficial, but what percentage of the research done at these “research” universities really have any incremental benefit for the rest of us. I suspect that the great majority of all of these papers are read by maybe five people in the world. It was bell labs who brought us so many great inventions, and apple, etc, not the professors of the world, so far as I know anyway. And when it comes to the latest and greatest drugs, that is usually the work of private companies, not universities. How many more things can be said about Abraham Lincoln that hasn’t already been said or discovered?</p>
<p>Here’s an example of University Research for you:</p>
<p>PostgreSQL evolved from the Ingres project at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1982, the project leader, Michael Stonebraker, left Berkeley to make a proprietary version of Ingres.[10] He returned to Berkeley in 1985 and started a post-Ingres project to address the problems with contemporary database systems that had become increasingly clear during the early 1980s. The new project, POSTGRES, aimed to add the fewest features needed to completely support types.[12] These features included the ability to define types and to fully describe relationships – something used widely before but maintained entirely by the user. In Postgres, the database “understood” relationships, and could retrieve information in related tables in a natural way using rules. Postgres used many of the ideas of Ingres, but not its code.</p>
<p>Starting in 1986, the team published a number of papers describing the basis of the system, and by 1988 had a prototype version. The team released version 1 to a small number of users in June 1989, then version 2 with a re-written rules system in June 1990. Version 3, released in 1991, again re-wrote the rules system, and added support for multiple storage managers and an improved query engine. By 1993 the great number of users began to overwhelm the project with requests for support and features. After releasing version 4—primarily a cleanup—the project ended.</p>
<p>But open-source developers could obtain copies and develop the system further, because Berkeley had released Postgres under an MIT-style license. In 1994, Berkeley graduate students Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen replaced the Ingres-based QUEL query language interpreter with one for the SQL query language, creating Postgres95. The code was released on the web.</p>
<p>In July 1996, Marc Fournier at Hub.Org Networking Services provided the first non-university development server for the open-source development effort. Along with Bruce Momjian and Vadim B. Mikheev, work began to stabilize the code inherited from Berkeley. The first open-source version was released on August 1, 1996.</p>
<p>In 1996, the project was renamed to PostgreSQL to reflect its support for SQL. The first PostgreSQL release formed version 6.0 in January 1997. Since then, the software has been maintained by a group of database developers and volunteers around the world, coordinating via the Internet.</p>
<p>The PostgreSQL project continues to make major releases (approximately annually) and minor “bugfix” releases, all available under the same license. Code comes from contributions from proprietary vendors, support companies, and open-source programmers at large.</p>
<p>– Wikipedia</p>
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<p>There’s lots of research done at universities that get turned into actual products and probably lots more that doesn’t. But it advances science a little bit at a time.</p>
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<p>Those inventions were only built–could only be developed or conceived–after physics professors did basic research in Electricity and Magnetism and Quantum Physics and the structure of matter. Do you have a GPS system? It won’t work properly unless the engineers and designers account for general relativity effects.</p>
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<p>Universities are nonprofits that focus on basic research, which is then spun out for commercial development. If the university owns the patents, then those can be licensed to private companies for development.</p>
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<p>Rhetorical question, impossible to answer, yet I know that there are things we now know about Lincoln and civil war history that weren’t known when I was in grade school.</p>
<p>And Bell Labs developed all those cool technologies when it was funded by the monopoly profits of AT&T, who could afford to spend money on basic research because they were making so much more money charging monopoly prices for telephone service. Since the breakup of AT&T and the introduction of competition in telephone service the telephone companies spend essentially zero on basic research. Not that this is necessarily bad - it means that we get telephone service much less expensively. But if we as a society want basic research it essentially has to happen at colleges and universities.</p>