Teaching a 4/4: office hours

When I was at Yale and friends were on the job market, every single person I knew considered a 4/4 teaching load—that is, four classes per semester, for a total of eight per academic year—to be a fate worse than death. In fact, most people I knew considered a 3/3 the outer limit of possible professorial sanity, but in itself still an unacceptably punishing load. Since I didn’t even know what a 4/4 was before being informed of its unmitigated misery, I simply assumed they were right. When I accepted a job—a gift from heaven (I do not exaggerate) that delivered what I can describe only as wholesale psychic and existential relief—and that job turned out to be a 4/4, my gratitude was total, but my one question was what the teaching load would mean: for weekly work hours, for work/life balance with young children, for research and publications.

I’m now halfway through my fifth year in that job; next fall I will submit my application for tenure and promotion (“T&P”). I’m here to say four things.

First, I love my job with all my heart; I pinch myself every morning that I get to do what I do. Second, a 4/4 load need not be a personal, professional, or scholarly death knell. Third, a 4/4 load does mean—unequivocally—that you are unable to do things that professors with a smaller load (not to mention other institutional helps) are able to do; there are tradeoffs, and they are unavoidable. Fourth, though, that does not mean your research and publications must be reduced to nil; it means you have to accept other tradeoffs in order to meet your writing goals.

In this post and two three more I’d like to write about what it’s been like for me in this position, what I’ve observed at an institutional and collegial level, and what I’ve learned in terms of achieving my own reading and publishing aims. Across all three posts I’d like to make clear both (a) how and why a 4/4 load can and does suck up so much time that many professors simply and sincerely are unable to do anything beyond teach and (b) how, at least in certain circumstances, it’s possible to make the time for research—or in any case how I’ve done it. In addition, I want to depict just how great the chasm is between teaching-heavy loads with high student-to-teacher ratios, on one hand, and teaching-light loads in institutional contexts that both demand and incentivize high research output, on the other.

In this post I want to offer a snapshot of a week in the life of a 4/4 prof: i.e., what the actual hour-by-hour breakdown is for a typical week in my life, balancing teaching, grading, office hours, committees, meetings, and writing, plus kids, family, church, and friends. Note well, at the outset, that I am presupposing a junior or mid-career faculty member with a young family; I’m not imagining a tenured veteran or empty-nester with retirement on the horizon (though at least some of what I write below would still apply to such a one). I’m writing, too, from and for a humanities perspective; much of what I say will include those in STEM disciplines, but some of it would have to be modified to fit their particular research, teaching, and publication habits (not least the role of lab work and an alternative paradigm of “what counts” for reading and writing—fewer books, in their case, and ten thousand more articles).

*

Let’s start with a 45-hour work week: 8:00am to 5:00pm, Monday through Friday. Now for anyone with young children, that’s already overly optimistic. My wife and I have four children aged three to nine, and we split drop-off and pick-up. So not only am I unable to get to work much before 8am, often I don’t get there until closer to 8:30 and sometimes later. (Timing is dependent on the cooperation of a three-year old, after all.) I also pick up my kids from elementary school at 3:15pm at least twice a week. So now we’re working realistically with about 40 hours—assuming no one is sick that week. (In the fall of 2019, out of 16 weeks of the semester, at least one of our children was sick at least one day in 12 different weeks.) Our home, university, daycare, and elementary school are all within something like a 2.5-mile radius, which means we have next to no commute—but many, many people do.

(When I read super-worker bricklayer’s-son Stanley Hauerwas write about arriving to his office at 5:30am every morning and leaving at 5:30pm every afternoon, I can only ask: Who’s doing pick-up and drop-off? That doesn’t imply injustice. Lots of stay-at-home parents as well as grandparents and nannies aid in such labor, and may do so either out of joy or with compensation. But it does mean, flat out, that a person who can be in his office 12 hours per day without worrying about childcare is in a different professional position than are those who must worry about childcare.)

At any rate, we are working with 40 hours now. Automatically, 12 of those hours are in the classroom. So now we’re down to 28 hours.

Let’s say it takes 90 minutes to prepare for every three hours of class time—which is likely an underestimate—and one hour to grade assignments and provide feedback for every three hours of class time. (We’re also assuming that there’s no G.A. to do menial tasks, though in my experience the estimates I’m using here include help from a G.A.) That’s 10 hours total, which means our available work hours are down to 18.

Now for email. Like all other white-collar work in the U.S., a professor’s inbox is a job unto itself: administrators, colleagues, folks from journals or conferences or other institutions, questions from students, etc. You also, you know, have to eat lunch. So let’s give 30 daily minutes to email and 30 daily minutes to lunch, for a total of five hours per week. Down to 13.

What about committees? Committee work fluctuates—four to seven hours this week, no hours for three weeks straight—but the longer you’re at an institution, the more the committees add up, at least in average terms. So let’s say at least one hour per week, though depending on the department and the person, not least if the person in question has administrative responsibilities (I do not, currently), it may be much more than that. Now we’re to 12.

But everyone has meetings to attend, whether they’re related to committees or not. So we’ll add one or two more meetings per week, each an hour. Down to 10.

(Such meetings might include, for example, mandatory chapel for a religious university such as mine and/or serving as sponsor for a student organization. I once led a voluntary weekly 30-minute “theology chapel” in which anyone could show up for an unguided discussion of twentieth-century theology. Or perhaps your campus, like mine, has a center for teaching and learning that hosts monthly reading groups. These commitments eat up hours, in other words, and the hours add up fast.)

What about students? At my institution we are mandated to have a minimum of seven hours in our office wherein we are available to students, preferably standing office hours rather than by appointment (though that’s been affected by Covid). I know professors who meet with students 5-10 hours per week. But let’s say personal time with students takes just two hours per week. Now we’re at eight.

So here we are. Having intentionally but severely underestimated the time usually allotted to students, emails, meetings, committees, grading, and course prep (for many professors, we’re already down to zero, or rather subzero: students, committees, grading, and prep all add up to another 10-20 hours, easily), we ostensibly have eight hours to work with—that is, assuming it’s not a week when 50 or 100 papers were just submitted, or one of the kids came down with a stomach bug, or a crisis dropped unannounced on the department, or what have you. Eight whole hours, maximum, assuming (also) that you don’t have a new course prep in the semester in question and (like me) you aren’t teaching four discrete courses but only two courses across four sections.

Let me stop and say: This sort of bean-counting isn’t meant to imply that the job is working the professor (me, or him, or her) to death; this isn’t sweatshop labor. The point of laying out the timeline is to make clear what’s left, if anything at all, for serious research and writing. I’m also imagining, for the sake of argument, that one’s time in the office is more or less uninterrupted: sustained, start-to-finish in-office work time. But naturally that’s a figment of this imaginative exercise. Most professors have knocks on the door, calls on the phone, texts on iMessage, and emails in the inbox—many of which are pressing or at least come with the expectation of a swift response—throughout the day in unexpected and inconvenient times. Moreover, class times are usually scattered around: a seminar in the morning, a lecture in the afternoon, that sort of thing. Not to mention that said classes are physically scattered across campus, too: it takes time, after all, to pack up one’s books and notes and trek across the commons to that other building, over there, the one you don’t work in but for some reason teach in.

All of which is to say: Those eight supposedly “free” hours are anything but. They don’t run reliably from 8:00am to 10:00am Monday through Thursday. They consist of random chunks of 20 or 30 minutes, spread throughout the days, adding up (if they do, which is rare) by week’s end.

And here’s the upshot. It takes hundreds upon hundreds (actually, thousands upon thousands) of hours to read the books and articles necessary to write the articles and books that one’s guild, and usually one’s chair and dean, expect out of a professor in order to be a “contributing member” of said guild, not to mention in order to earn tenure and promotion. When, pray tell, is a professor with a 4/4 load with a week’s allotment of hours as I’ve just laid them out supposed to find the time to do all that reading and writing?

In most cases, the time just is not there. In my experience, profs with a 4/4 simply do not do that reading and writing, and thus, quite understandably, do not produce the sort of scholarship expected of them (whether or not they wish they were able to do so). Or rather, if they need to do so in order to keep their job (i.e., to earn tenure by year seven), they do find the time, and you and I both know when they find it.

After hours.

But let me tell you about my week after hours. My kids get out of school at 3:15pm. My wife and I both work. We swap who does pick-up. Every day some child has something: speech path, piano, soccer, basketball, gymnastics. We all have church on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings and small group on Sunday evenings. (I work for a Christian university, mind you, which means they want me doing such things.) Whatever happens to be going on, those kids need a parent present, and that means, at least ordinarily, that no work is being done until they’re in bed: and the oldest has lights out at 9:00pm. We start every morning around 6:00am (showers, clothes, breakfast, backpacks, car—it takes a lot, as you may know yourself). So if I’m to get a decent amount of sleep, it’s bed by 11:00pm, if not sooner. That leaves about two hours each night between bedtime for kids and bedtime for adults. Even aside from cleaning the dishes, picking up toys and dirty clothes, preparing for the next day, packing lunches for the kids (that’s my job: 20 lunches per week, y’all!), my wife and I would, you know, like to catch up a bit. One of us might even occasionally grab drinks with a friend or go see a movie.

In the case of folks like us, then, there just do not exist reliable hours at night to make up work time. And I don’t, mostly. I usually leave work at work, unless that work is also pleasure (reading a book I want to read, writing a blog post [hello], etc.)—though the inbox is always staring me down, especially when a student sends an anxious email at 9:42pm.

The weekends are also largely off limits, except perhaps for an hour or two during nap time on Saturdays. If I want to be a co-parent—and I should, as should you if you have kids—since we’ve got four kids under 10 who need provision and care and love and time and the rest, then the weekend isn’t for work, it’s for family (and church and sports and friends and more: for life, in other words). That means, again, I’m generally not using weekends or nights on weekdays to “make up” for time I lack at work.

But I’m surely in the minority there. Most friends and colleagues I know, whether pre- or post-tenure, speak offhand all the time about “taking work home.” Most work 40-50 hours per week in the office and another 10-20 at home, between nights and weekends. The truth, however, is that most of that makeup work isn’t scholarship. It’s pouring into teaching, grading, and mentorship: the things that make a difference in students’ lives. That’s where all my numbers above really are underestimates, probably by a wide margin. Sometimes teachers are inefficient with their time. But at least as often they just love what they do, which is to say, they love their students and want them to flourish, to get their money’s worth, and then some, from their education.

And recall: I don’t write this to elicit pity for them. Being a professor is a great gig most of the time. It certainly is for me. No, the point is the question lingering over all this hour-mongering: When is the research supposed to happen? Research, let me remind you, that of necessity must be the fruit of hours upon hours of sustained contemplative and meticulous reading, annotation, note-taking, outlining, drafting, revising, submitting, revising again, and publishing.

When’s it supposed to happen then? It is fair to say that, for most 4/4 professors in most circumstances—even under the best conditions, with the best bosses, in the healthiest institutional contexts—the only honest answer is in the negative. That is, there just is no time for quality research for such persons.* And it’s best to recognize and admit that plain fact for what it is than to pretend otherwise.

*You say: Isn’t that what the summer is for? Well, yes and no. Summer is partly for vacation, as for anyone else. It’s also for teaching one or two summer courses, as most professors I know do. It’s also for reassessing and revisiting and regularly revising one’s existing semester classes. It’s also for preparing for that new course you’ve never taught before. It’s also for writing that grant you didn’t have time for during the semester. And also for finishing that committee work that piled up when finals arrived. But, yes, too, summer’s there for jumping into some research. Recall, though, that you’ve barely had time to read a book during the academic calendar, much less to stay on top of the avalanche of publications produced in the last year (or five) in your discipline. The remaining weeks of a summer might provide some time for catching up on the field. It is far from enough—on its own, laughably so—to produce a significant contribution to said field.