Voices: A new higher education policy will be devastating for Utah educators like me

Utah’s higher education system has undergone radical changes over the past few years, but none promises to do more damage to educators, education and students than the Utah System of Higher Education’s R485, which requires research and regional universities to draft a new workload policy that establishes the institutional average teaching workload as 24 credit hour equivalents each year, or 12 credits each semester, and that also “. . . assure[s] that workloads are equitably distributed.”

How workloads will change will likely vary among universities, but what will not vary are the negative and, in some cases, catastrophic consequences USHE’s policy will have on higher education.

Despite the University of Utah’s assurance that “equitable distribution of teaching and service is a core purpose of workload policies,” the policy targets career-line faculty who, in addition to teaching the majority of classes and working with the vast majority of students, are objectively one of — if not the most — overworked, underpaid and exploited groups on campus.

Permit me to use my own professional experience as an example of what “equity” looks like in the College of Humanities and, more broadly, at the U.

Like many of my career-line colleagues, I am contracted to teach a 3/3 load, which means I teach three classes in the fall and three classes in the spring. Assuming each class has 27 students, a 3/3 load equals 162 students per year. According to my current contract, 80% of my time is for teaching and the remaining 20% is for service to my department, college and university. Even without the service requirement, a 3/3 load is already a full-time job according to any reasonable definition. Add the service requirement — not to mention research and scholarship, which many career-line faculty do, even though they are not required to — and the career-line faculty’s full time equivalency starts looking more like 120% instead of 100%.

Keep in mind that I am also a full-time professor/lecturer and I have worked at the U. for more than 20 years. Most career-line and, for that matter, tenure-line faculty are grossly underpaid, but I still think readers would be surprised to learn that many career-line faculty in the College of Humanities, regardless of rank, make under $60,000 a year, while some of our counterparts in business enjoy six-figure salaries for the same 3/3 load. In fact, the only way many of my colleagues and I have managed to make ends meet is by teaching overload classes, which changes my workload from six classes a year to as many as 10, and I still make less than an assistant professor/lecturer in Business, Engineering and Honors. Of course, these pay disparities are between colleges, but the disparities exist within colleges as well, including my own.

Does this sound like equity? It gets worse.

I do not know a single career-line faculty member who, already maxed out by their current 3/3 workload, wants to teach any more than they have to, but being able to teach extra classes, and thereby supplement our income by almost $20,000 per year, has meant the difference between saving money, helping pay our kids’ tuition, managing medical bills and, at one time, affording a home. If the university adopts R485, however, the new baseline for 100% full time equivalency for career-line faculty will be a 4/4 load, which means that those two extra classes will not be compensated. Thus the option — I would call it an absolute necessity — to supplement one’s pay will no longer exist unless one is willing to teach a 5/5 load.

For comparison, tenure-line faculty usually teach a 2/2 load. Does what effectively amounts to a $20,000 pay cut, coupled with a 40% increase in workload, sound like equity? Is this the “social value of the humanities” in action?

It doesn’t take “higher order” thinking or an office in the Park Building to see how this is going to play out. I have been teaching between eight and 10 classes a year for the past 15 years, and every time I pick up extra classes, I tell myself, “Never again.” But I do it anyway, because I can’t make a living otherwise. At least under the 3/3 model, I was being compensated for my extra labor.

This is economic devastation, to be sure, but it is also psychological and moral devastation. In my experience, people don’t come back from that.

USHE and the university are fooling themselves if they think that these changes are going to have anything other than catastrophic consequences for faculty and students alike.

We will see what happens. In the meantime, I suggest administrators stop using words like “equity” when discussing R485 and workload policies for career line faculty. I’m not buying it.

Maximilian Werner is a professor/lecturer in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah.

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