<p>^^Those same students could be “educated” at a Cal State at a fraction of the cost. It costs hundreds of millions to build a new University…</p>
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<p>And very, very few want to attend Merced… Those who matriculate often transfer out.</p>
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<p>Or at an existing UC. Riverside and Santa Cruz have trouble filling their freshman classes. They could have put the Merced kids there.</p>
<p>I am sorry, but it might be time for some cost cutting and efficiencies. Many years ago, academic salaries were low. Now they have gotten out of hand. It is common for faculty members to teach 3 courses as a full workload. That is 9 “contact” hours/week. I am sorry but I work that much in one day, everyday. Senior faculty often have the best courses, do less, and have graduate assistants to help with teaching and other functions. Many also routinely teach less than the 9 hours/week. The salaries and benefits for these few hours of work/week and a work year of only 32 weeks have gotten really high. It is past time for a 8% or even 18% reduction.</p>
<p>^^This assumes that only teaching counts as “work” for a UC professor. As is endlessly pointed out by the LAC fans on the LAC vs University threads, research university professors spend a great deal of their time and energy conducting research. That’s why they are called “research universities.” And the UCs are research powerhouses.</p>
<p>When I was in grad school at a UC my professor worked extremely hard. And this is how he spent his time: writing grant proposals, working in the lab, writing grant proposals, teaching, writing grant proposals, analyzing data and proposing new experiments, writing grant proposals, serving on department and school committees, writing grant proposals, writing manuscripts for publication, writing grant proposals, preparing and giving talks at national and international conferences, and writing grant proposals.</p>
<p>edad, the UC professors I know regularly work at least 50-60 hour weeks through the entire year. coureur summed it up pretty well. Threre is a LOT of time spent writing grant proposals, in order to get money which helps run the university. A substantial percentage of the money that comes in from a grant is “taxed” by the university as overhead. That’s SOP in many (most?) academic institutions. More and more, people I know are putting in grants and are coming up empty-handed. Or, their program is approved by a research facility to use the facility’s resources, but no funds are awarded. </p>
<p>The 3 courses = 9 contact hours doesn’t mean only 9 work hours. There are some professors who dial it in on their 3 courses, but plenty more who are spending a great deal of time preparing for lecture, updating their presentations, working with students at office hours, preparing and grading assignments and tests, the whole megillah.</p>
<p>The idea that 9 hours in the classroom means a 9-hour workweek is just profoundly wrong. Each hour in the classroom requires at least 1 hour of preparation by an experienced professor, probably 2-3 hours for a less-experienced junior faculty member. And that doesn’t count the time required to design and plan the course, construct the syllabus, develop exercises, assignments, and exams, grade assignments and exams, meet with students during or outside office hours, and keep up with literature in the field, a necessary predicate for the course to have any contemporary relevance. Not to mention time for one’s own research—which in many fields is the essential prerequisite for paying one’s salary. Not to mention time spent on faculty committees, faculty meetings, and miscellaneous administrative assignments–the unglamorous drudge work that is rarely appreciated outside the academy, but is essential to make the institution run.</p>
<p>It surely is possible to get more classroom teaching hours out of each faculty member in the UC system. But the cost will be devastating. UC salaries are already low relative to those of their major competitors. Slashing salaries while increasing the teaching load may achieve short-term “efficiencies” but at the price of driving away many of the top faculty, and placing the UCs at an enormous competitive disadvantage in both the entry-level and lateral markets going forward. It’s a quick path to mediocrity, and I’m surprised Mark Yudof would plan to go there. But maybe he feels he has no choice.</p>
<p>^^ I second the observations above about contact hours and point to one aspect that hasn’t been commented on, which is the idea that professors have graduate students to grade the papers, meet with students, etc. Supervising graduate students is a great deal of work, as one works alongside them to design courses that they will be able to teach on their own, sooner rather than later, including the use of new technology, online. Supervising grad students also involves applying for grants and teaching them to do likewise, and helping them to design their own research. All of the complex management aspects of supervising any adult are involved in supervising grad students.</p>
<p>As someone who did grad work at UC, I’m really sad to see how California schools have in general slipped. It’s all about the budget and the tyranny of the minority, specific to California, as other posters have pointed out. That California spends twice as much on prisons as on education, for example.</p>
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<p>Yes, it is absolutely horrible. But the powers-that-be (i.e., Legislators) have been seeking mediocrity for a long time. Instead of ensuring that Cal and UCLA are the world-standards for public education, we instead pump up the other campuses, and slowly starve the big two. Moreover, when the Dean of Boalt Hall requested a tuition increase to make a top 10 law school even more competitive, he was turned down flat. Nope, not allowed to charge more for Boalt than we charge for Hastings.</p>
<p>You guys are making my dried up heart bleed, well, almost. Do we hire university staff to teach? Well then they should teach. Not just 9 hours/week or less, often much less. No I am not impressed with the amount of time it takes to prepare for those contact hours. I have done my share of teaching and I woud easily say and hour or two of prep for each contact hour is reasonable. So that means working maybe 27 hours/week for only 32 weeks of the year. That sounds like a pretty cushy job. …Then there is research which apparently begins with the endless and monumental task of writing grant proposals. Well, is there anything more useless than writing a grant proposal? The whole process of research funding and research performance needs to be reviewed. Let us not somehow confuse this problem with teaching efficiency. Let us also get past “publish or perish.” The scientific journals are more than filled with rehashed garbage that seems to be motivated by the number of research publications rather than any advancement of knowledge. Yup, we have a sick, sick academic society and complaining about pay does not even come close to addressing the magnitude of the problem.</p>
<p>I’ve helped write research grant proposals… It’s worthy work, as is our research (violence and abuse prevention and intervention for a vulnerable population)… or is that not important? Also, my PI is a full-time researcher (no teaching, minimal service), but she still is wonderful mentor to her RAs (mostly grad students–I’m the lone undergrad). She gives us loads of opportunities for publication, presentations, analysis, design, etc., and research is key to getting in grad school or getting an academic job outside of grad school. She and one of her collaborators are chief contributors to one of the RA’s thesis, and she’s on my thesis committee as well. She’s a wonderful mentor, and if you think, she’s not worth anything because she doesn’t teach, well, that’s kind of offense (and fwiw, her salarly is entirely funded through soft money–she only receives benefits and vacation time through the university). I think good teaching is important, of course, but so is research. Some of our research really does change lives.</p>
<p>Personally, I think research and teaching should be two separate jobs, period. Full-time researchers are wonderful; they have no obligation to teach, and any mentorship is just a bonus.</p>
<p>I don’t think anybody who discovers new knowledge should teach it. He/She should keep the new knowledge a secret.</p>
<p>But PhDs are trained to research–that’s essentially what a PhD is–a research degree. Some may choose to teach, practice (in clinical/counseling/school psychology), or a mix of all three, but all PhDs are trained researchers. Plus, if faculty couldn’t research, how would grad and undergraduate students ever get trained in research, especially at LACs? Plus, as RAs, we contribute to project–if we get awarded authorship, we contribute significantly.</p>
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<p>Sort of, among other things. Remember we are talking about UCs here, not LACs. When research universities hire they sometimes mention teaching as one of the duties, but the ad will usually go to great lengths in describing what sort of <em>researcher</em> they are looking for to fill a professorship.</p>
<p>Here look for yourself. These are the current classified ads for professors in the journal Science. Some mention teaching, but all of them are clearly primarily focused on the research:</p>
<p>[Job</a> Search Results](<a href=“Science Careers | jobs | Choose from 989 live job openings”>Science Careers | jobs | Choose from 989 live job openings)</p>
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<p>Yes, attempting to run a research program, or an academic department, or a university without adequate funding. That’s pretty useless. And in the modern world the bulk of this research funding comes from granting agencies. It’s a simple fact of modern academic life. </p>
<p>You can rail against the current system if you wish, but advocating a total overthrow of the modern university-based research model so that professors can spend more time teaching is both shortsighted and unrealistic. It ain’t gonna happen.</p>
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UCs hire professors to do much more than just teaching undergraduates. The professors are evaluated based on their teaching (graduate and undergraduate students), research/publication, and service to the university. Unlike the UCs, professors at CSUs and CCs have less research responsibility but much heavier teaching load. </p>
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With the exception of pure mathematics, no research is possible these days without some significant level of funding. And besides research, external research grants also fund the education of most graduate students (tuition and stipend) in science and engineering at UCs. Without professors constantly churning out grant proposals, the research universities like Cal/UCLA would be more like Cal State Fresno. Would you rather have you kids educated at Cal/UCLA or Cal State East Bay (Hayward)/Long Beach? Cal receives more than $600 million research funding a year because of this “useless” grant writing, which is more than the total fund provided directly by the state or the total of student tuition and fees.</p>
<p>Can you even imagine the level of competition to get a research grant? At NIH, often only 1 in 10 research proposals is funded and at NSF, the odds can be as low as 1 in 20. If you believe a faculty position at a research university is some kind of 9 hr/wk cushy job, think again.</p>
<p>^^^
Ditto.</p>
<p>This year and next California is subsidized by federal aid to the states. What will happen to the UCs when this teat dries up? The UCs haven’t even begun to live within their means.
I wouldn’t want to be a Californian seeking higher education in the next decade or so.
The gravy train is done for those making a living off the system.</p>
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<p>edad,</p>
<p>You completely misapprehend the nature of the academic enterprise. “Do we hire university staff to teach?” No. Certainly not exclusively. At most major research universities, faculty (not “staff” which generally refers to non-faculty employees) are hired to do several things. Teaching is one of them, but only one. I’d say on average teaching is expected to be about one-third of the job, which is typically defined to embrace three major components: teaching, research, and service. So if teaching takes 27 hours a week and it’s one-third of the job, you’d expect the full job to take 78 hours a week. Now you’re right, teaching isn’t typically a year-round activity; research can and usually does predominate in the summer, so on average it’s probably more like a 55- to 60-hour-a-week job for those who take it seriously.</p>
<p>You might think this is wrong-headed----that we don’t need research and that academic institutions can run themselves without all the work faculty put into it under the rubric of “service,” and therefore that teaching should be the only part of the job that counts. There are some schools where that’s the ethos. They’re called community colleges. Some are fourth-tier or unranked public universities. Some are obscure private colleges. All are known, perhaps uncharitably, as “diploma mills.” They’re generally not known for the quality of their faculty, nor for the quality of their students, nor, frankly, for the quality of the degree their students earn. The best and brightest faculty want to do their own research and contribute to the advance of human knowledge. That’s what they’re trained for. That, by and large, is what attracted them to academia in the first place. Shut down research opportunities and you’ll lose all your best faculty in no time at all. You’ll also lose a huge part of your funding base if you’re a major research university, because it’s the hundreds of millions of dollars in externally-generated research grants that pays a large part of the bills and a substantial fraction of the salaries of all that top academic talent in the first place. You’ll also quickly lose your top students, because the best students want to study with the best faculty, not a bunch of third-rate grinders.</p>
<p>Harvard could decide tomorrow to ban all faculty research and require all faculty to spend 15-20 hours a week in the classroom. You know what would happen? Next year, half the faculty would be gone, and each year for the next five years you’d see the loss of half of the remaining original faculty. Oh, sure, they’d easily find replacements, people eager to teach without what they perceive to be the “burden” of doing research; there are a million people like that at community colleges and third-and-fourth tier colleges and universities, but the school’s reputation in the academic community would go into a free-fall and within five years Harvard would no longer be in the top 100 universities in the nation. They’d also lose about a billion dollars a year in research funding. They’d also see alumni giving dry up as the reputation of the institution shrinks. They could do that. But they won’t, because it would be really, really stupid and counterproductive, and they try to avoid doing things like that.</p>
<p>Edad: </p>
<p>How much do you think UC professors make, and what do you think salary levels should be?</p>