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The 40:40:20
All things can be measured, especially your working life. The Secret Lecturer offers some satirical, and possibly sage, advice in an excerpt from the anonymously authored book, An Insider’ s Guide to Working in a Modern University.
By the Secret Lecturer
If you work at a modern university, you will be required to complete a Workload document. This should be constructed with your input at the start of each academic year, but in reality your head of department will throw it together in secret sometime after the first semester has started( Week 3 is the modal value).
Workloads are typically separated into three parts: teaching, research and administration. These parts are each allocated a percentage weighting, such that your role might be described as 40:40:20, or something similar. This means that 40 per cent of your time( or two days per week) will be spent teaching, 40 per cent( two days) doing research and 20 per cent( one day) on admin. In no way does this reflect any form of reality. A more accurate role description would be 80:0:40. Research is what you do at weekends, once you have caught up on your teaching and admin backlogs. Alternatively, research is something your students do, and you try to take credit for.
The Workload calculations are based on a series of assumptions about( a) how many working hours there are in a year, and( b) how long it really takes( according to your manager at least) to get a job done. For example, let’ s assume you have 5 weeks of holiday( universities are good on holidays!), so that means you work 47 weeks per year. The working day is about 7.25 hours, so the Workload assumes that you are working for 47( weeks) x 5( days per week) x 7.25 hours = 1703.75 hours per year. This figure is then used to calculate the hours you should be involved in each task, such as 40 per cent of 1703.75 = 681.5 hours of teaching.
That almost sounds logical. It’ s what happens next that causes all the heartache. Let’ s assume you are going to teach 681.5 hours per year. Given that the typical university semester is 13 weeks long, and there are( surprise, surprise) two semesters, then there are 26 teaching weeks. This means that in an average insemester week, you could be asked to do just over 26 hours of teaching( i. e. 681.5 / 26).
Fortunately, attempts at some universities to actually implement that particular interpretation of Workload logic have largely disappeared, although a few still remain. In such cases the senior staff at the university will defend the Workload by pointing out that there is no teaching for 21 weeks of the year, or that the average teaching hours per week across the year( i. e. 47 weeks, or 52 if they are really devious) are only 14.5 hours. At this point the senior staff will compare these hours to those worked by a school teacher, to show how utterly unreasonable staff are to complain about being made to do even the smallest amounts of work.
Confronted with staff complaining that“ lectures don’ t write themselves”, other universities have made allowances for preparation time, and each actual hour of standing in front of students( i. e.“ face-toface teaching”) is given some associated preparation hours on the Workload calculations. This means that one hour of teaching will be allocated a few hours of preparation time, say three extra Workload hours.
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