Teaching a 4/4: publishing

This post is the third in a series on what it’s like to teach a 4/4 load as a university professor and, conditions permitting, how to flourish while doing so. I’ve laid out the allotment of office and home hours devoted to work by a typical 4/4 prof (tl;dr: 50-60 on average, to prep, teach, grade, mentor, sponsor, serve on committees, and reply to emails); I’ve explained why there are inevitable tradeoffs involved, both at the personal and familial and at the institutional level. For many 4/4 teachers, scholarship is next to impossible without transgressing what ought to be a hard and fast division between work life and home life.

Nevertheless. I promised in the opening post that, at least for some of us, at least in certain circumstances, scholarship remains possible even with a 4/4 load. Not that everyone wants that—many college instructors live exclusively to teach; they do the other stuff only when they must—but if you’re someone who does want it, but doesn’t know how to do it, or even whether it’s possible, I’m here to say that it is. In this post and the next one I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned, for whatever it’s worth.

I want to come at the question from two angles. The first is pure logistics: What habits, hacks, and strategies work to protect one’s time and to dedicate what remains of it to scholarship? The second is more philosophical: What does a 4/4 load mean for one’s scholarship—how, counterintuitively, might teaching outside of ultra-elite research-heavy contexts benefit one’s scholarship, providing opportunities and even gifts unavailable in those more superficially “research-friendly” contexts?

I’ll save the introspection for the next post. First comes tactics.

*

By way of beginning, permit me a Cal Newport moment. I owe you some mention of my bona fides, since I’m about to offer some advice. As I write it is Finals Week in the fall 2021 semester, which means it is exactly halfway through my fifth year teaching full-time as a tenure-track Assistant Professor: nine total semesters across four and a half years. Here’s what I’ve produced in that time (beginning summer 2017, when I arrived in Abilene, and counting only what I’ve written during that time, whether already published or currently scheduled for publication—i.e., I’m not counting anything I did before I arrived or that I’m contracted to do but have yet to get around to):

• one edited book;

• two authored books;

• five peer-reviewed journal articles;

• 28 essays (this sort of thing);

• 10 book reviews;

• six conference/paper presentations.

Not counting the presentations, the approximate word count of my writing output (also not counting this blog, I suppose) comes to about 400,000. That in turn comes to 7,500 or so per month, or ~1,800 per week, or (getting granular) just under 400 words per workday (assuming I’m not writing on Saturday or Sunday).

I should add, too, that during the time in question I received five grants (four internal to ACU, one external) and one award (for teaching). The total number of courses I’ve taught is 40: four per semester for nine semesters, plus one overload semester and three summer courses online.

That’s a lot, I know. You might be wondering, reasonably, whether the first two posts in this series were a bit of hot air, since I seemed to suggest that 4/4 profs don’t have time for anything else but being the best teachers they can be. And for many, that’s true. My first year here that was all I could handle, too. If I was in the office, I was prepping for class or grading assignments or meeting with students—full stop. But since then I’ve slowly found ways of creating and guarding the time necessary to do what I love and feel called to do: namely, read and write theology for both academic and popular audiences.

Here are some of the tricks I’ve learned to make sure I could do just that. Maybe they’ll help you as well.

1. Have a good boss.

Yes, granted, this one’s out of your control. But it might still be something of a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for finding time to publish. My chair understands that research is a top priority for me. For that reason he has worked to make my life as conducive as possible to reaching that goal, within the limits that both he and I work under. Five things in particular have been a lifesaver in this area, and my chair is the reason for all of them.

First: Teaching multiple sections of the same course. Instead of teaching four truly different classes in a semester, in other words, I teach two distinct courses, each of which is offered twice in the same semester, in two sections. I’m still in the classroom 12 hours a week, but I’m only preparing lesson plans for half that.

Second: Stacking sections back to back, at the same time every day. I teach every afternoon, Monday through Thursday, either 1:30–4:30 or 12:00-3:00. That kind of regularity is crucial for sectioning off the rest of my time into a single bundle, rather than in scattered bits and pieces throughout the day. Plus, stacking sections of the same course back to back means I’m able simply to press “repeat” on the same material, rather than having to artificially separate (in time and in my mind) what are identical class meetings.

Third: Keeping me off major committees, at least at first. My chair waited until my third year to put me on a committee that demanded real time from me; he waited until my fourth year to put me on a genuinely time-intensive committee. In truth I didn’t even know he was doing this until a year ago. Every faculty member has to do committee work, and rightly so, but that doesn’t mean you need to jump into the deep end your first or second year. Delaying my serious committee involvement until I got my sea legs under me made all the difference; at that point I had learned how to manage my time, and it wasn’t a burden when it came.

Fourth: Class size. Now, this one is more ambiguous by nature. During my first three years part of my load included large, lecture-heavy freshmen survey courses; since then I’ve taught exclusively upper-level electives that center on discussion, with class size capped at 25 or 30 students. I include this as a boon because it’s what I like to teach, and a satisfied me-as-teacher is unquestionably a productive me-as-writer. The through-line there is a straight one. But smaller classes are not necessarily less demanding than larger ones. In fact the latter are often easier and more convenient to grade: quizzes and exams, on top of PowerPoint-heavy firehose-lectures. Whereas the former usually involve loads of writing assignments, which call for extensive feedback and time-intensive grading. For me, though, the tradeoff is worth it, and my chair kindly permitted me to ease out of the bigger courses in order to take on the smaller ones I preferred.

Fifth: Get creative. My spring load entails four courses, but one of them is a week-long intensive the second week of January, before the semester starts. That opens up my daily and weekly time during the semester even more. Last spring I layered my remaining three semester-long classes back-to-back-to-back on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which meant I had zero teaching requirements on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I felt like a new man. It was a slog the other two days of the week, but it was worth it. I’ve even considered teaching a short course in May as well, following the end of the semester, which would cut down my spring semester-long courses to two. Every college and department has different ways of finagling these things. Look into it. Run it by the boss. Not only might she agree to it; she might think it’s a good idea.

2. Be an excellent teacher.

This bit of advice might sound odd or out of place, but it’s crucial. You will not succeed at publishing at a teaching-heavy institution if you aren’t doing your first job well. Put differently, you cannot allow yourself to think about research until you are satisfied that you are doing a quality job in the classroom. How do to that is a question for another day. But it’s a requirement for 4/4 profs. That’s what they pay you for, and if you’re not succeeding there, you’re in for a world of hurt.

3. Just say no.

This is the first and nonnegotiable rule for writing with a 4/4 load. You have to think of your job as consisting of two and only two things: teaching and research. Everything else—literally, everything else—is either tertiary or an obstacle in your path.

Professors receive requests, whether from students, colleagues, or administrators, every single day on the job. In my experience professors rarely say no to these requests. It is hard to decline an invitation, not least one that is flattering, or that seems to come from real need, or that might benefit one’s students or institution. Yet if your highest priority (after being a good teacher) is securing consistent and reliable time for research, you must be ruthless here. Say no to every ask. Every. Single. One. Just say no. Don’t speak at that event; don’t sponsor that organization; don’t attend that meeting; don’t join that book club; don’t register for that webinar; don’t foster that initiative; don’t explore that opportunity. Don’t do any of it. You can’t, not if you want to do meangingful scholarship. There are only so many hours in the day.

I have a standing agreement with my chair: I will do whatever he needs me to do; his wish is my command. But if it’s a request and not an order (a soft ask, not a hard one), the answer is no. Not because I’m not a team player—I am, or try to be—but because the articles and books won’t write themselves, and after teaching, they’re my priority.

Some departments and institutions welcome this sort of clear boundary-setting, and some don’t. Again, you need good, trustworthy bosses who say what they mean and mean what they say, and who value the scholarship you hope to produce. Doubtless much of the time the “just say no” approach has to be leavened with occasional yeses as well as rhetorical massaging; one can’t be front and center with it all the time. The strategy remains essential in any case. Your time won’t guard itself.

(Reality check: Do I actually do this? Do I follow my own advice, take my own medicine? To a large degree, yes, I do. But also no: At least twice a week the second half of this semester, for example, I had meetings with students who wanted to discuss their futures, their faith, or theological questions. Even in cases like these, though, I try to be strategic: I either meet first thing, at 8:00am sharp, so I can still guard a chunk of office time for work; or I meet in the late afternoon on a Friday, the better to get work done earlier in my one day with no classes. Besides meeting with and mentoring students, I’ve variously hosted twice-monthly theology discussion groups in my home, had students over for lunch after church, spoken at Honors events, that sort of thing. Sometimes you just have to say yes: whether the compulsion is internal or external, you find yourself nodding in reply. Just this week I was a liturgist in our music department’s annual Vespers service; before Covid hit, I now recall, I gave an invited lecture to a psychology class(!) on sexual minorities(!!) regarding sexual morality(!!!) from both philosophical and Christian perspectives(!!!!). (Those exclamation points should tell you how out of my depth I felt that day.) So no, the honest answer is that I don’t always and in every instance say no. But I try to as a rule, especially when the ask is purely optional and doesn’t seem urgent. And when I say yes, I do so knowing that it means a tradeoff with research; just as there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there’s no such thing in the academy as a yes to X without an accompanying no to Y. That’s life.)

4. Be disciplined with technology, especially email and LMS.

Your laptop is a black hole. When it is open—even when it is in the same room as you—your work time is inexorably sucked down into an abyss. The same goes for your smartphone, especially if it has your email on it. (Right this moment, take your email off your phone. That’s an order.) Our devices do not aid or enable our work as professors. Nine times out of town, they stand in the way.

If you are in the humanities like me, then it is fundamental that you gain the upper hand on your technology. In particular, you need long, long stretches of time in which neither your phone nor your laptop is close to hand, much less open or on. One little trick I do, when I’m in a good zone with research, is begin my day with reading. Specifically, I do not open my laptop, much less check my inbox, until lunch time or later. I arrive at my office; do my morning devotion; change chairs to sit elsewhere than my desk-and-laptop-writing-station; leave my laptop and phone out of reach, over there, on the far side of the office; open a book (or three), and read as long as I’m able to before other work demands necessitate putting it down.

Remember that computers are an innovation in the professor’s office. Not long ago—within living memory!—one’s office contained books, paper, and pens. It’s not weird to read for hours on end. That’s your job. Again: How are you supposed to write about what you’ve read, if you never read in the first place? Do the reading by making time for it, and make time for it by not letting your inbox (or Twitter, or Messages, or Canvas) control what you do, when you do it.

Speaking of Canvas, I’ve written elsewhere about foregoing a Learning Management System. That means, too, that I’m not umbilically connected to a device at all times. If your university or department will let you do it, try going LMS-free one semester as an experiment. For me, it’s meant one less thing to worry about, which in this case means one less digital box to check at all times of the day.

(Here’s a hack on top of a hack: How to preserve all that morning time for reading and/or writing so as to be able to stop just before class starts? Here’s what I do. One or two weeks before the semester begins, I prepare the first month’s worth of classes in toto: I outline the lectures, draft the discussions, print the quizzes, etc. Then I gather them together into their respective folders, so that all I need do on the day of teaching is open the folder and plug and play. I do the same thing, once that first month is behind me, every Friday in advance of the following week. That way, when the afternoon classes of Monday through Thursday arrive, I’m entirely prepared, and don’t have to do a lick of lesson prep or printing or other tasks the morning before I teach. When I’ve got this down to a science (and until this fall, when by voluntary choice I had a new course prep, I’d gotten into a good rhythm), then I can count on two to four or more hours in my office, leading up to teaching, that I can devote to reading or writing as I see fit.)

5. Carve out space and time for reading and writing free from interruption.

Related to the previous point, it is a necessity to have a physical space in which one can work for hours-long stretches with the reasonable expectation that no one will interrupt unless it is very important. For me, that’s my office—my happy place, which is to say, where my books are. For others that’s the library or a coffee shop, or home alone. The point is that you need that rare combination of quiet and sustained runs of sharp focus (what Newport calls “deep work”) for publications to materialize. Wherever and whenever that is—for me, it’s in my office, in the mornings, prior to inbox and lesson prep and printing and teaching—find it, make it the sun around which the rest of your work schedule orbits, and guard it with your life.

In a word: Practice being unavailable. It makes a world of difference.

6. Treat time off from semester teaching as a full-time research job.

I teach 32 weeks a year, including Finals Weeks. That leaves 20 weeks when I’m not teaching. I take off one week for Thanksgiving, two weeks for Christmas, one week for spring break, and two weeks during the summer. Already you, like me, should realize how fortunate a professor’s schedule is. That’s six weeks off out of 52! That’s a full month and a half! That’s European vacation levels! What’s to complain about?

Nothing, is the answer. Absolutely nothing. Remember, this post (this series of posts) is not about how hard the academic life is. It’s about how to make time for research while teaching a 4/4 load. And we already established that family life and personal happiness are more important than academic success; obviously I could choose to work, part- or full-time, during those weeks I take off. But should I? Not unless I have to.

Even taking six weeks off per year, that leaves 14 weeks in which I’m not teaching or spending time with my family. And do you know what I do during each and every one of those 14 weeks? Read and write. That’s it. I don’t lighten my summer schedule, unless childcare or other duties interpose themselves. No one’s checking in on me; no one’s asking me to come to the office. But I do. Every day I arrive at the office around 8:00am and every day I leave around 4:00pm, having read and written, read and written, read and written, until my brain hurt and my fingers ached.

In the first post I stuck up for profs using their summer hours well, though I admitted that we aren’t always the most efficient bunch. Here’s where I’ll speak directly to my fellow academics. You and I both know what a summer week can look like, especially a week when you’re “working.” It’s sort of a throwback to doctoral days. Slow to start, quick to finish, lots and lots of time on social media, or chasing down unimportant leads and tangent lines unrelated to research, or meeting with colleagues for long lunches, or just generally letting the hours slip by without doing much of substance at all. That’s fine, in itself. You’re not on the clock. But if your #1 goal is using what time you have to publish quality work, then it’s not fine. You are on the clock, even if that clock exists only inside your own head.

Treat your weeks not teaching as though your full-time job, for which you will be held accountable, is research, and act accordingly. Then see what happens after a few years.

Postscript: If your finances permit and your chair doesn’t mind, don’t teach summer courses. I taught three summers in a row then decided, in concert with my wife, to forego the extra money henceforth. The extra pay was nice, but it didn’t serve my goals. If I wanted to focus on publishing, even a three-week online class was a distraction; the time and attention it sucks from you is surprising.

7. Accept your limits while setting clear, achievable goals.

In the next post I’ll say more about the limits I have in mind. But for now the thing to acknowledge is that, even if you manufactured four hours per day for your scholarship—and that would be an astonishing amount during a four-class semester—that is a paltry number by comparison to the big leagues. It’s nothing compared to your grad school days. That many hours should get you in sight of reading an okay amount and even actually doing some writing. It is unlikely, however, to get you in sight of what you wish you could accomplish, that is, the kind of scholarly expectations to which you seek to hold yourself. At this point you have a choice to make. Either you can do the work you’re able to achieve in the time you have, or you can wish you had more time and never get anything out the door. It’s your call, but I suggest you opt for the first.

If you do, you need concrete goals. Is it one peer-reviewed article every 12-18 months? Is it two reviews per academic calendar? Is it a book by the time you go up for T&P? Is it a poster presentation (not my wheelhouse, mind you) every year at your guild’s annual conference? Is it a collaborative grant-funded venture that stretches over five years and yields two to four co-written articles? Whatever your goals, you need to identify them, write them down, and hold yourself to them, or at least to what you can control (i.e., writing and submitting the pieces; whether they’re accepted is up to someone else). As time goes by, you can adjust the reasonableness of your goals up or down, depending on your success. Don’t aim for the moon, but don’t let that be an excuse to do little more than keep staring at your own shuffling shoes, either. I’m willing to hazard that you’re capable of accomplishing more than you think, especially if you haven’t been able to publish much at all so far in your 4/4 teaching career.

But before turning in the next post to bigger-picture reflections on research and writing with a high teaching load, here’s one last all-important tip:

8. Type fast.

No joke, I sometimes think being a very fast typist is half the battle. It doesn’t hurt if you suffer from incurable logorrhea, as by now you know I do.