Assistant professor of English Michael Griffith works six days a week during the school year and five days a week in the summers when he doesn't teach. The work is so satisfying that the hours don't bother him, but people who criticize the academic schedule are "ill-informed," he says.

photo/Andrew Higley

No matter how captivating the play or opera is at the College-Conservatory of Music, the dean still looks forward to sneaking down to the scene shop during intermission to see what professor Steve Waxler and his students are up to late at night. While one show is strutting its best under the stage lights, two or three others are in the production area, many of them covered with sawdust or wet paint.

"It will be 9:30 at night," Dean Douglas Lowry says, "and Steve is in the shop with six or eight students eating Chinese food, and in the middle of the table is some gizmo for a special effect they're working on. He's discussing what's wrong with it, how you could make it work, what's going to happen if it screws up in a performance. He is someone whom I would call an around-the-clock person."

The truth is: UC is replete with around-the-clock faculty, working on and off campus at all hours of the night and weekends.

"Many science faculty are working in their laboratories at midnight," says Karen Gould, former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, who recently accepted a provost position in California. "For those of us who are night owls, we often find that quite a few faculty members answer e-mail messages at midnight.

"The age of the Internet has catapulted the notion of a 24-7 faculty member to the nth degree," she admits, but she also notes that the academicians were never ones with structured schedules. "The academic life has always been a life of books, reflection, laboratories and places where faculty members go even after no one else is there."

That's not the impression one would get by giving faculty workloads a cursory glance: summers off, Christmas breaks, spring breaks, teaching only two or three classes during the academic year and keeping occasional office hours. It all looks pretty attractive.

National surveys, however, indicate that the average university faculty member works 50 hours a week. And although schedules change during the summer, they don't go away.

"Too often, the public labors under the misconception that university faculty work only those hours when they're in a classroom," says Michael Griffith, assistant professor of English and comparative literature. "But I work six days a week, all-day long, 33 weeks a year."

Before anyone gets too excited over his 33-week calendar, let it be noted that he was talking about a school year's three 10-week quarters and three weeks of breaks. Summers are another matter. "I'm in the office 9 to 5 every day, all summer, and I come in every Saturday," he adds.

The hours are actually worse than that, says Roger Daniels, an emeritus professor of history who retired in 2002. "It is not just a 9-to-5 job. Teaching is almost a 24/7 proposition if you do it properly. If I could get my hands around the neck of the person who first started defining a teacher's workload as classroom hours, I'd strangle them," he says.

Nevertheless, no one is complaining. Griffith does take a vacation, and the summer schedule is his favorite. That's when he gets to write -- full time, all summer.

"As faculty, we get to do what we care about doing," he says. "I'm a fiction writer. UC gives me the opportunity to do my teaching and still write. It's a good gig. Most appreciate that and do their work conscientiously."

English-lit colleague, associate professor James Schiff agrees. "The truth of the matter is that while I did travel with my family last summer, I generally worked full weeks when I was out of town." He also spent the summer reading four PhD dissertations and attending those defenses, preparing budgets and speaker programs for the upcoming school year, meeting with students and writing recommendation letters, trying to keep up with new readings in his field and, in his spare time, writing reviews and essays, editing a book and serving as a peer review reader for journals.

"While my colleagues and I probably haven't worked quite as hard as my old investment banker friends in New York City, I'd wager we've put in as many or more hours this summer than most American workers." he says. "For whatever reason, though, while the public is quick to point out that teachers supposedly don't work an entire year, no one ever accuses the college basketball coach -- and I'm a big fan of college basketball -- of only working from December to March, or of working only four hours a week, the time two basketball games consume."

1 2 3 4 NEXT