Teaching Load Reduction Proposal

For QEPC consideration

June 2005

Aim: To reduce the faculty contact hours to bring HSC into alignment with peer and aspirant colleges. This load reduction would allow faculty members to provide more efficient services to students.

Background: HSC has a faculty-teaching load of 7 courses per year. Science teachers count labs as equivalent to lecture courses. According to a survey I completed last fall, a 7-course load is higher than virtually all of our peer and aspirant institutions (although I am missing date on several colleges). Many fear that our teaching load reduces our ability to hire the most qualified faculty members on the market. Also, our high teaching load makes it difficult for faculty members to help students on individual projects, participate in necessary College committees, or, some claim, perform scholarly work. Even with our current higher teaching load we have one of the lowest student-to-faculty ratios among our peer and aspirant colleges. Specifically, using the last available published data, Hampden-Sydney’s student-to-faculty ratio was 10, 20% lower than the average (12.2) of our peer list and almost exactly matching our aspirant college’s student-to-faculty ratio. The reason that we have a fine student-to-faculty ratio in spite of a heavy teaching load arises from our attempts to keep class size small; we do not have large introductory sections as is found at virtually all our peer and aspirant institutions. Also, the fact that HSC has retained a substantial core curriculum demands that the faculty devote much effort to lower level courses.

In discussing this popular faculty load reduction proposal I would like to frame my analysis using the SACS Assessment criteria for the Quality Enhancement Plan given to us at a SACS meeting last academic year (see attached). Briefly, the assessment criteria for acceptability of the QEP demands that the institution have: 1) a focused plan, 2) the capability to carry out the plan, 3) a method for assessing the progress of the plan, and 4) broad based involvement of the community.

Potential Quality Enhancement Plan Item—Faculty teaching load reduction to a 6-course load.

Part 1. Focus of the Plan

1) Has the institution provided a clear and concise description of the critical issues(s) to be addressed? I believe that the critical issue here is clear and concise—reduce the teaching load to 6 courses per year. If we go to some variant of this plan, such as a 6-6-7 load, we can make the description just as clear and concise. The challenge will be to persuasively document why moving to a 6-course load is desirable, what issues are we addressing, and what tangible benefits will accrue.

2) Has the institution described the relationship between the focus of the plan and student learning? Most believe that movement to a 6-course teaching load would increase our attractiveness to potential faculty members and would enhance the ability of our faculty to devote time to non-classroom instructional duties. I believe that it would be reasonably easy to justify this move as benefiting the College and enhancing student learning. With a 7-course load, far out of alignment with peer and aspirant institutions, we face formidable challenges in competing in the market for the most desirable faculty members. Don’t we need excellent faculty members for good student learning? Further, with a 7-course load our faculty lacks sufficient time to devote to supervising student independent study and research, performing committee work that benefits students and faculty alike, or doing scholarly activity that would enhance the skills of our faculty members. A 6-course load would free up our faculty members to more productively spend their time (or so the argument goes). Benefits to students would be mostly indirect but relatively clear.

3) Has the institution provided relevant and appropriate goals and objectives to improve student learning? I believe it would be easy to establish goals for this plan. By such and such date we hire x number of new faculty members. However, the objectives for directly seeing improved student learning would be a challenge. Might we expect increased numbers of independent studies or research projects? Would the number of outside activities supervised by faculty members increase (Model OAS, Model UN, science research conferences, etc.)? Would our publication count increase? How would we measure improved committee service? I see a challenge coming up with the clear and strong linkage of load reduction with improved student learning—not impossible, just a challenge.

4) Has the institution provided a comprehensive and clear analysis of the crucial importance of the Plan for improving the learning environment? The linkage of the reduction of teaching load to improved student learning would be a challenge owing to the indirect and anecdotal nature of the evidence. I’ve heard stories from various search committee chairs of the astonishment shown by prospective candidates when the department chair outlines HSC’s teaching load. However, in the past several years we have had few instances of losing excellent candidates for a stated reason that our teaching load was too high. In fact, this year we got the top candidates in four of our searches, number two in one, and we closed the search in a third tenure-track search. Thus, we lack clear evidence that our recruiting is suffering from our teaching load. Moreover, our last load reduction, from an 8-course load to a 7-course load, was touted as providing more time for faculty members to devote to focus one-on-one student/faculty collaboration. From what I heard about this transition this increase in student/faculty interaction never happened. In fact, it appeared that the reverse happened as faculty members reduced their loads by dropping their participation in all-college programs (Rhetoric or Western Man). This item would be a challenge to write.

5) Has the institution identified the benefits to be derived from the QEP? I think we could easily document one benefit—our faculty would be happier with a lower teaching load. Documenting improved faculty recruiting would be a major challenge since our fears of losing out on potential excellent faculty members are vague impressions or anecdotes. Most research shows that more and better student interaction in class leads to better learning; reducing the teaching load will, presumably, increase student/faculty interaction. Would we be able to show that faculty members now spend more time with students in one-on-one interactions; that would be a tough issue to study? Would a teaching load reduction lead to more professor-supervised student research; that might be easier to document as we could just count the number of honors or other summer projects. Nevertheless, documenting these benefits would be a challenge.

Part 2. Institutional Capability for the Initiation and Continuation of the Plan

1. Has the institution provided a time line for implementing and completing the QEP? I believe that this issue is trivial. Whether we select immediate, phased teaching load reduction, or some other variant we can prepare a time line for that. We merely state that we will hire x number of new faculty members each year until we have reached our goal.

2. Has the institution assigned qualified individuals to administer and oversee its improvement? I also believe that this issue is trivial. We already have the mechanisms in place for recruiting and evaluating faculty members. However, we would have to have faculty cooperation in insuring that the time released from direct classroom duties will go towards other duties that benefit student learning. This may be a challenge.

3. Has the institution provided evidence of sufficient financial and physical resources to implement, sustain, and complete the QEP? This is the major challenge for this proposal. Depending on the exact nature of the plan (whether it is immediate load reduction or phased in some way) HSC has to come up with sufficient financial and physical resources. Let me discuss the financial and physical resource implications of immediate load reduction as the most extreme case. Any other variant of this basic plan would be cheaper, one-way or the other. Attached you will find an analysis of how many faculty members we would have to hire if we immediately went to a 6-course load (I did this analysis in November 2004). I figure that we would have to hire around 16 new faculty members. Dave Pelland did a similar analysis more recently and also determined that we needed to add about 16 faculty members. How much would adding 16 new faculty cost? Multiplying 16 faculty members by the overall cost of a new faculty member (salary + benefits) would lead to an immediate need to increase the faculty salary budget by about $900,000+. In addition to these initial salary costs we have to consider the hiring costs that, this year, averaged about $4,000 for each search. If we were to phase this load reduction over five years we would have to add about $12,000 more to our recruiting budget each year. Each additional faculty member will also want his or her allocation of faculty travel at $1,000 each and a chance to have summer research money. Thus, the initial costs of hiring 16 new faculty members, whether hired in one year or spread over five years, would easily add $1,000,000 to our budget. In out years, when these initial hires are promoted, the costs would rise substantially. Now turn to the other major resource issue—physical resources. Would we need new classrooms? Unlikely since we would be merely reshuffling the current total class load among more faculty members. Where will we house 16 new faculty members? As of today we have every single office occupied on campus with three offices double occupied. I am fairly confident that we may be able to get three-five new offices in the next two years but do not know where we can come up with 16 new offices. Would we have to allocate money to build a faculty office building at the cost of several million dollars? One additional resource issue should be mentioned. If we were to go to a 6-course load keeping our student enrollment constant, we would lower our student-to-faculty ratio to about 9.3. A student-to-faculty ratio of 9.3 would place us in the company of the very best (read richest) colleges in the country. I suspect this issue would be a touchy political issue with the President and the Trustees. The financial and physical resources challenges for this proposal are daunting. Even if we opt to pull back on the plan by going to some variant, we will still find significant financial and physical resources demands. A 6-6-7 load arrangement (6 courses in years one and two and 7 courses in the third year) would demand at least 10 new faculty members at approximately $600,000 additional in salary + benefits plus 10 new offices. Going to a 6-7-7 load arrangement would only demand about $300,000 additional in salary + benefits and 5 or 6 new offices. However, keep in mind that going to a very modest load reduction, like 6-7-7, would provide only marginal classroom release time and may not provide many tangible student learning benefits. (Would we be able to measure anything?)

4. Has the institution identified relevant internal and external measures to evaluate the Plan? We do have a few relevant internal and external measures. Internally we can measure the number of faculty members on the reduced teaching load. We could measure whether independent studies and student research participation has increased. We could measure whether we get our first choices of our prospective faculty members. Externally, we might be able to use data from NSSE to monitor enhanced student interaction with faculty members (although it will be hard to detect a signal in generally very positive NSSE results).

5. Has the institution identified an internal system for evaluating the QEP and monitoring its progress? No, we have not done that but could assign that chore to the Assessment Committee along with help from the Dean’s Office and Institutional Research.

6. Has the institution described how the results of the evaluation of the QEP will be used to improve student learning? No, we have not done this but I think it is possible.

Part 4. Broad Based Involvement of the Community

1. Has      the institution described the methods used for the development of the      QEP? In response to this criterion we will merely      describe how we went about formulating the plan.
2. Has      the institution demonstrated that all aspects of its community—faculty,      staff, students, board members, and administrators—were involved in the      development of the QEP? We must intentionally spread this planning      process to include staff members and students. I believe that we have sufficient faculty members at      this time, although we will have to widen the discussion in due      course. We will have trustee      participation when we present this topic to the board at several Board of      Trustee meetings. We also      have two or three administrators currently on the committee. Thus, we do not have sufficiently      broad participation now, so we must extend the base in the next year to      include all constituencies.

Conclusions

This proposal for an item in the QEP has immediate and strong appeal to the faculty. However, it has some serious challenges, not the least being the great resource demands and out ability to persuasively show how faculty teaching load reduction will lead to enhanced student learning.