We are all educators, although teaching loads vary widely. PUI faculty appear to typically carry 12 to 15 semester unit loads. For the uninitiated, this means 12 to 15 "contact hours" with students per week. Contact hours are not clock hours. I would say the typically lab hour is worth about 2/3 of a contact hour. The theory being that labs have less students and require less work than lectures. Undergraduate research students are worth very little in contact time. In my experience they count for nothing to 1/3 of a unit per student. MCU's appear to have about the about the same loads, although MS students will teach some of the labs and in some cases act as graders in the lecturers. MS research students count for about nothing to 1/2 a unit per student. This helps lighten the number of real contact and grading hours. At RO1s the teaching loads appear to be about 6 to 9 units per year. In all three cases faculty may "buy out" teaching time with grant funds that basically pay for lecturers to cover the teaching the tenure-track faculty would be doing. Since PUIs and MCUs have less ability to earn such funding many of these faculty carry most or all of their loads.
Contrary to what the folks who argue that faculty are overpaid and under worked might think, the job does not begin and end with a class bell (although few colleges have class bells these days). Of course there is class prep, writing and grading quizzes, problems sets, and exams. There is also "shared governance", known to faculty as "service". The public wants every dollar of tuition to be spent on education, so colleges and universities learned to play a game where faculty run the university through committees. This way the university could say almost all the money was going into the teaching faculty while the faculty must spend a fair amount of their time administrating the university. In modern times the administration of universities has been "professionalized" and administrations have grown at a far faster rate then faculty numbers, but committee work still fills too much of my week. Service demands appear to be about equal at PUIs, MCUs and RO1s.
Scholarly activity comes next with this being the major activity of many RO1 faculty. This includes writing research grants, writing papers and presenting your group's work, directing the research of your graduate students and postdocs. For the MCU and PUI faculty you can replace the postdocs with your own lab work. This takes considerable time from your day, but since postdocs are hard to find funding for and MS candidates typically know little more than BS students, you must train everyone and do the heavy lifting and hazardous chemistries in the lab yourself.
A hat PUI and MCU faculty wear that RO1 faculty generally don't wear is instrument technician. Generally there are no instrument technicians and little or no money for repairs so the faculty perform all upkeep and maintenance of lab equipment. Since instrument replacement funds are also minimal, if they exist at all, you can end up locked in the death spiral of instruments that the manufacturers stopped supporting some time ago. (In my career I have built GC's from salvage parts of three or four derelict instruments, I have change pistons on HPLCs, cleaned sources in GC-MS, gone into the electronic and pneumatic guts of various NMR's, rewired stirrers and hotplates, and fought with a number of different defunct software packages for which I had no documentation. Thus I escaped to an RO1 for my sabbatical.)
Lacking office support staff PUI and MCU faculty must take care of their own accounting and ordering. Since our stockrooms generally are only concerned with teaching labs, if you need it for research you need to get it yourself so ordering includes all items that might be needed to get any research done.
Lastly there is the unofficial service we all do. These things are expected but not actually listed in our paid activities. I would put in physiological and career counseling to lost and distraught students from lectures and in my research group. Outreach to high schools and incoming freshmen and transfer students, particularly to underrepresented groups with the goal of filling the STEM pipeline and keeping my department viable so we don't get our meager budget cut more. Department and university development efforts, by which we try to bring in money to support our students with scholarships and get money to replace our inadequate or nonexistent operating and expense budgets. There are more, which I will allow others to add.
There are many days when I look back to see what was accomplished and find that the most I can say is that I kept all the balls in the air. While juggling seven or eight things is impressive, in the end it does not make for forward progress. One of my very successful RO1 friends tells me that looking down on PUI and MCU faculty makes no sense, since most RO1 faculty would never be able to make a name for themselves under the same circumstances. Being able to focus on research enables the RO1 faculty to make the forward progress they do.
Some people call for a bifurcated system where faculty are split into either teaching or research groups. More on this in a future post.
T.S. Hall
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