Balanced Workload (2011 Strategic Plan)

Set an appropriate student/faculty ratio and calculate it to represent a professor’s Hampshire responsibilities, including classroom teaching, divisional exams, and advising. We also need to set a similar ratio of students to staff to recognize the impact of academic support staff upon faculty workload and the student experience. Finally, we should revisit and better implement the recommendations of the Workload Task Force conducted five years ago.

Comments
Please include your thoughts on the importance of the initiative, how to frame the issue, things that may be missing, and any additional comments here (you can do so by logging into Hampedia and clicking edit):


 * Chris Perry (CS): This is a very important initiative, but I would reorder/reframe it. While I ultimately think that identifying and moving towards an ideal student/fac ratio is important, I believe it is more important to address the inequities that emerge from how we run our academic program. Otherwise, the ratio will continue to vary greatly in practice no matter what the institutional average is. As an organization interested in equitable salary models and sustainability, common sense argues that we must all try to distribute the work of the academic program as evenly as we can.

This is hard to do, but there are immediate things that should improve our situation (see below). Whether or not these measures fix the unevenness, we should also consider obliging faculty to serve on at least some exams and teach to at least a minimum number of students (by way of our contracts and/or the reappointment/promotion processs). To my knowledge, faculty are not currently required to work with any students at all, yet we require 2 Hampshire faculty members on each Division II and III committee, we require students in Division I to complete courses, and so on.

Once we can reign in the distribution of work to be closer to the mean, then we can actually say that the student/faculty ratio is a good measure of what's really going on at Hampshire and spend our energies adjusting that value accordingly.

Aforementioned immediate action items, to be folded into the initiative or not:

Enact a "20/20" capping plan to address concerns at the high end of the spectrum: 


 * 1) Cap all courses at 20 students per faculty member. 
 * 2) Do not allow faculty to sign on to more than 20 active committees (D2 and D3) at any given time. 

This will very likely require buying adjunct-taught courses and hiring one or more full-time examiner faculty members (two things that complement each other fairly well).

Institute annual academic program planning sessions (run by the school deans, or DOF, or area coordinators, or ?) to assist at the low end: 


 * 1) Assign faculty returning from year-long sabbitical/leave a minimum number of exams. 
 * 2) Identify courses that consistently serve low numbers of students and help those faculty develop courses that will attract more students.


 * Chelsee Bergen, student - In respect to Chris Perry's commentary (which looks quite practical) I would only like to note that while I can't speak to workload of professors and staff, to cap all courses at 20 students per faculty, while theoretically ideal, could ultimately be detrimental to students.
 * I also support Chris's amendment, but I disagree with Chelsee--in most cases, I think it's detrimental to student participation to be in a class with more than 20 students. I'd like to amend the amendment, though, and suggest that, in certain other cases (usually introductory-level classes that will be more lecture-based than most Hampshire classes), an exception might be filed to the cap on 20 students per class. Ellen Green
 * On the issue of capping classes at 20 - while that sounds ideal, I question whether we can do that and still offer enough seats where they are wanted. If we cap at 20, we either need more classes that students actually want to take, or more support for non-course academics (independent studies, learning activities, etc.) Yes, classes that are much larger than 20 are generally not as good, but it's also a problem when students can't take any of the classes we want - a problem that we still have now, even with all of the overenrolling that goes on. I would love it if virtually every class at Hampshire was capped at 20; I just don't know that it will be feasible over the next couple years. Alynda Wood
 * I don't think capping classes is feasible. I do think that advising should be taken as a more serious part of a professor's workload, and that professors who are sought after for their advising should be recognized for the workload that creates for them. I'm basically doing an independant study every semester, and a majority of the burden for supervising that will fall on my comittee. Perhaps professor's pay should in part be based on how many students they advise? Gaines Blasdel F10
 * This is a very important issue that definitely needs to be adressed. In response to Chris Perry's suggestions, I have some concerns about the idea of having a minimum number of committees for faculty members.  It is up to students to choose their committees, and I think it is very important that students have that choice.  It's part of the self-directed education that makes Hampshire so unique.  And in Div III especially, having the right committee (in terms of both areas of study and personality/work style) can make a big impact in terms of students' success.  I worry that having a minimum number of committees for faculty members would infringe on students' ability to choose their committees, especially when there is already a shortage of potential members for many areas of study.  Rebecca Thomas, F'07
 * Chris Perry has spent more time than just about anyone on these issues, and his ideas should be taken seriously. I would hope that with deans' approval, though, occasionally faculty could take on more students, either in class or on divisional committees, if the need were shown. This should happen with approval to prevent faculty from putting themselves in positions in which they cannot adequately provide students what they need and deserve. Sue Darlington (CSI).
 * I'd like to emphasize an aspect not yet heavily focused on in the comments: addressing the lower end. Some professors consistently have lower exam loads and some courses have significantly fewer students. Hampshire is run in such a family-like fashion that we do not hold professors as accountable as we should, when it comes to issues such as this. A minimum number of committees should not punish students by forcing them to work with undesirable faculty; it should weed out those undesirable faculty so that we can have more FTEs that students really want to work with. - Ananda Valenzuela