Teaching a 4/4: tradeoffs
In the last post I laid out what a typical work week looks like in terms of one’s allotment of hours while teaching a 4/4 load at a university. In this post I want to compare that to institutional contexts on the other end of the spectrum. Such a comparison shows rather straightforwardly what sort of tradeoffs are involved, from an institutional perspective, when professors are asked to teach more or fewer courses; in this case, tradeoffs concerning quantity and quality of publication.
Before I do that, though, I want to talk about a different set of tradeoffs. These tradeoffs aren’t about what a university asks of you. They’re about what you ask of yourself, or rather, what you want for your life.
I got married midway through my senior year in college, and beginning in my PhD program my wife and I had four children in six years’ time: from the beginning of my second year in doctoral work to the beginning of my second year teaching as a professor. Being a husband and a father in one’s 20s and 30s while earning a doctorate then teaching at the university level is, shall we say, a different experience than doing those things while being a single person without children. The key word there is “different,” which isn’t (yet) a term of judgment. I know single people in doctoral programs who eventually dropped out due to listlessness and lethargy, and I know folks in a position similar to mine (spouse, young kids) who powered through for the simple reason that they were always on the clock and thus were forced to use their time wisely. So in and of itself the difference between the two stations in life doesn’t tell us which is “harder” or “easier” for the academic life.
Having said that, the fact is undeniable that a person who is neither a parent nor partnered has, in general, far fewer limits on her available time than a person who is both. I knew and still know people, both grad students and tenure-track (or tenured) profs, who work 12 hours a day in the office, most weekday evenings, and full days on the weekend. That’s 70-90 hours per week, if you’re counting. The work never stops. There’s always another book to read, another article to review, another draft to revise, another lecture to attend. Such persons are quite literally secular monks. But instead of ora et labora, it’s sola labora (or, I suppose, solus labor): work, work, work, all day, every day, world without end, amen.
Thus the “pure” academic life. No wonder the old Oxford dons were so often bachelors. No wonder the founders of the university were priests and monks!
The upshot is obvious. A scholar who has 70-90 hours available per week to devote to her scholarship, and who does thus devote it, is in an entirely different position than a scholar who does not, owing to the latter’s duties to her family (not to mention to her church, her neighbors, and so on). Whether or not it is wise or live-giving to work 12-15 hours per day every day of the week for months on end, it’s what many do, and are able to do, given their circumstances. And academics like myself who lack that monastic allotment of time can either accept the profound gap between us or kick against the goads. Phrased more sharply, we can pretend that we are equally disposed to produce equally superb scholarship, or we can decide not to deceive ourselves. I suggest we opt against self-deception.
I’m going to write in the fourth post in this series about the flip side of this acceptance: that there are opportunities, gifts, and blessings precisely for scholarly work that come from being a person with a family or from teaching a 4/4 (or both). But the prior condition of realizing those possibilities is the unqualified recognition that the lay life, as it were, pales in comparison to the monastic in terms of sheer hours in the day available for scholarship. Them’s the facts. And that’s before we get to differences between institutions.
But before exploring those differences, there’s an important point buried in these comparisons. That point we may phrase as a question: What do you want? Better put, what should you want? Rare is the happy workaholic academic. I can’t count the number of secular monastic super-scholars I know who are immiserated, depressed, joyless souls from top to toe. That’s not because they’ve resisted the call of the bourgeois life. It often is because they know nothing but The Work, and The Work doesn’t satisfy the heart.
Life is about tradeoffs, in other words, and being the most successful possible academic one can be will almost certainly demand that you give up something not only that you want, but that you should want, if you would be happy. I would like to be happy. That means I’m content with the choices that led me to where I am today. I’m glad I’m a married father of four teaching a 4/4 in a university setting that doesn’t suck my soul right out of my body. But I also refuse to lie to myself. I would likely be a “better” scholar, measured by output and erudition, if I lacked the many limits and duties my family places on my life. Would I trade the latter to gain the former? Never.
Besides, limits and duties are (not paradoxically, but given a certain set of assumptions, unexpectedly) the source and ground of true happiness. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you stop looking to cut them out of your life in order to serve the shapeshifting, exacting, and altogether death-dealing idols of Work.
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Okay. One set of academic tradeoffs concerns the family, or life beyond work more generally. Another is institutional context. Time to compare like with unlike.
Consider a standard course load for a professor at an Ivy League university. Such a person (pre- and post-tenure) teaches a 2/2, often to small cohorts of graduate students in seminar-style classes that meet once weekly; she further takes a mandatory year-long sabbatical every three or four years, precisely in order to produce the sort of scholarship expected of her, given her status as a tenure-track (or tenured) professor at Harvard or Yale or Princeton. She also regularly receives grants and scholarships from either within or without the university that fund course releases and external sabbaticals and visiting professorships: these in turn alleviate teaching and administrative responsibilities.
Now consider my own situation. I teach four courses a semester, some of which have 20-30 students, some of which have 50-60. (One semester I taught an overload, five courses, and I had about 220 students. We also had a newborn, our fourth child. That semester’s sort of hazy, now that I think of it . . .) These students are mostly gen-ed undergraduates, not tight cohorts of committed Master’s or doctoral students. Moreover, sabbaticals must be applied for and approved; they apply to one semester rather than a full academic year; and one becomes eligible to apply only after having received tenure, in one’s seventh or eighth year at the university.
One response to this comparison might be to suppose I’m comparing quality of situations. But I’m not. I’m deliriously happy in my job. And as I said above, I know a lot of miserable people in Ivy League institutions. Whether it’s the pressure to Be The Best, or the stifling atmosphere of competition and production, or the sword of Not Getting Tenure hanging over the necks of junior faculty, or the Byzantine institutional politics of the Ivies, or what have you, the amenities and affordances of teaching-light, research-heavy professorships are not there to make you happy (in fact, the effect may well be the opposite); they are there to get you to publish. Better: they’re there to make the institution that pays you look good. They’ve a prestigious reputation to uphold, after all.
So we’re not asking which institution is a better work environment. We’re comparing material conditions and incentives for producing high-quality research. And I trust you can see with your own eyes what’s staring us in the face: namely, that to ask professors with a 4/4 load to produce scholarship anywhere close to the level of professors at Ivy League institutions is downright absurd. Looking at the two institutional contexts side by side, we might be inclined to judge them two different jobs.
But the comparison need not be merely between a small Christian liberal arts school in west Texas and a comparatively ancient and ultra-rich Ivy League college in New England. Consider a friend of mine who works at a large R1 school a few hours down the road in Texas. Every fall he teaches one undergraduate course and one Master’s course. In the spring he teaches no classes at all. His primary job, though he is neither tenured nor a research professor nor does he hold an Endowed Chair in Something or Other, is to research and publish. And research and publish he does. All the dang day. You wouldn’t believe his output. Or maybe you would, since you know how little else he has to do with his time.
The point, at the risk of belaboring it, is not to compare apples and oranges as though they were the same fruit. It is to point out that the fruits we invariably compare in academia are apples and oranges. My friend plainly inhabits a different profession than I do. He is something like a patron-supported independent scholar, contingently connected to an institution that happens to be called a university, for which he occasionally teaches a class or two. I, on the other hand, am a workaday teacher of undergraduate college students who, when he can spare a minute, finds the time to read a book and even to scribble a little on the side.
My friend has a good life and a good job. I have a good life and a good job. But our equally good jobs are not the same job. They are both good, but they are different jobs. That’s the point.
And there’s no problem in that difference. The problem comes if and when, and only if and when, someone supposes that my friend’s job should be my job, too, while expecting me to continue doing my original job all the while. In a word, the problem comes if and when I’m expected to work two jobs instead of one—not least when, as I documented in the last post, that first job tends to spill over from the office into the evenings and weekends of life beyond work. After working 50-60 hours per week teaching a 4/4, where is such a person to find the time to add a second full-time job, which is to say, the job of producing first-rate academic scholarship?
I may sound as though I’m speaking in the first person here, but as I will share in the next post, I’m not describing my own situation. I’m fortunate to work in and for an institution that understands that no one teaching a 4/4 can be an Ivy League or research professor at the same time. Those to whom I report evaluate teaching, service, and collegiality first and scholarship second; everyone understands the pressures of teaching and grading and mentoring and sponsoring and the rest. The expectations, accordingly, are reasonable, which is why I’m grateful not only to work here but to be heading into the year of my T&P submission with little to no anxiety.
But so far as I can tell, among 4/4 profs at large I’m one of the fortunate few. I’m the lucky one. Not everyone works in a healthy, mutually supportive, non-dysfunctional—and Christian!—institution. And even in such institutions, the built-in expectations, pressures, and incentives can work against one flourishing and finding promotion rather than buoying and supporting one in that journey. “Punishing” and “brutal” are two words one often hears in conversations about such environments. There’s a reason folks are fleeing academe. Why not just work a boring nine-to-five with benefits and regular hours, without having to bring it home with you?
Most, I take it, are just trying to endure. That’s why I’m writing two more posts in this series. The imagined audience for the first post was graduate students and administrators wondering what it’s like to teach a 4/4; for this second post, administrators and trustees as well as fellow 4/4 teachers. The third and fourth posts, though, are together targeted directly at those friends and colleagues teaching a 4/4 (whether now or in the future), either at the beginning or in the middle of their tenures(!) in such positions, who are wondering how to make the time for research. Having cast a somewhat bleak or at least stark vision of the 4/4 life, I want to make good on the promise that it need not be the academic purgatory—or inferno—it’s so often made out to be. It’s possible to read and to write, to produce quality scholarship. It really is. But just as institutions make tradeoffs in what they offer faculty, given what those institutions want from their faculty, so in your own work and career, you have to be willing to make similar tradeoffs. It all depends on what you want.
