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Art, research keep many prominent educators out of classrooms
(Virginian-Pilot, The (Norfolk, VA) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) May 7--On its Web site, George Mason University advertises its dozen Robinson professors as "outstanding scholars who are dedicated to undergraduate teaching."
The requirements for the job: teaching two classes per semester, or six hours a week.
That's the going workload for some of Virginia's top-name professors, including Julian Bond , a leading civil rights activist at the University of Virginia, and Nikki Giovanni , a poet at Virginia Tech.
"I really don't know what I would have said if they had said three courses," said Roger Wilkins , a Robinson professor who is an author and a former assistant U.S. attorney general.
Plenty of people would have said no, said Peter Stearns , the provost at GMU. "We're not going to get top faculty with teaching loads way different from the market standards."
Still, the teaching loads of prominent professors vary widely, depending on their stature, subject and the school that employs them, according to a Virginian-Pilot review of the classroom schedules of 25 notable faculty members at the state's public institutions. Most are paid more than $100,000 a year.
Larry Sabato , the oft-quoted political scientist at U.Va., and James Robertson , a leading Civil War historian at Tech, each taught three classes this school year.
Adolphus Hailstork , an internationally renowned composer, teaches one class per year at Old Dominion University and provides individual one-hour-a-week lessons to four students each semester.
Hailstork premiered a work last month in Washington; another will debut in Cincinnati in mid-May .
"His productivity seems to be at an all-time high," said Dennis Zeisler , chairman of ODU's music department. "Maybe it's his ability to get out of teaching so many hours a week."
Claudia Emerson , who is on leave from the University of Mary Washington, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry last month . She will return to the school's standard load of four classes a semester in the fall.
"I have never had the luxury of a light teaching load in order to write," she said.
Bond's and Giovanni's two-class-per-semester schedules mirror the standard load at U.Va. and Tech, which consider themselves research universities. ODU averages three . Community colleges, which don't require research, have the heaviest classroom demands: five or six courses per semester.
Big schools aren't the only ones reducing teaching time to make way for research.
In the past decade , the College of William and Mary went from a three-course schedule per semester, known as a 3-3 , to a 3-2 , which allows faculty to teach two classes in the second semester. Christopher Newport hopes to move from a 4-4, with professors teaching four classes each semester, to a 4-3 in a few years. "Without a doubt, it will make us more competitive," CNU provost Richard Summerville said.
Patrick Callan , president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education , a think tank based in California, questions the trend toward lighter teaching loads.
It has contributed to rising college costs, he said, by requiring schools to hire more professors and hasn't led to much more quality research.
"I also think: Do we always want to go after the person who we have to attract by telling them they don't have to teach?" Callan asked.
Karl Schoenbach , the Batten endowed chair of bioelectric engineering at ODU, was one of two professors among those surveyed who did not teach classes in 2005-06 .
He co-taught a bioelectrics class in the fall , but he has not taught his own class since 2004 , when he won an outstanding teaching award from his engineering department. The division of his time, he said, reflects "where I can serve the university best."
Schoenbach serves as director of the Reidy Research Center for Bioelectrics , a joint initiative with Eastern Virginia Medical School . He also is at work on several research projects, some of which have won millions of dollars in federal grants. In one, his team killed cancer cells in mice using high-voltage bursts of electricity.
"Teaching," Schoenbach said, "comes in many colors." Like other faculty, he emphasized the time he spends with students outside the classroom.
"When I have time, I walk through the labs and talk to them," he said. "That's where knowledge is really transferred."
The other professor without classes was John Fenn , an 88 -year-old chemist at Virginia Commonwealth University who won the Nobel Prize in 2002 . He has worked part time since joining VCU in 1994 and is paid entirely by grants.
On the other hand, some professors, including Marilyn Miller , a forensic scientist at VCU, and James Childress , an ethicist at U.Va., taught more than was required.
This year, Childress taught eight courses -- two met one hour a week -- including "Just War and Pacifism" and "Business and Society."
"I'm not sure there's anything virtuous about it," he said. "For me, these relate well to what I'd like to see happen at this institution: building ethics into a variety of programs."
"The public doesn't understand what we do," said Melvin Patrick Ely , a historian at W&M. Ely, who teaches a 2-2 load, says he works 65 hours "on a good week." About two-thirds , he said, is devoted to students, whether preparing for classes or supervising four doctoral candidates.
"If it weren't for summers," he said, "we wouldn't publish anything." Likewise, Giovanni, the poet at Tech, and Sheri Reynolds , a novelist who taught five classes this year at ODU, say they have to write during the summer.
A federal study last year , based on the responses of 26,000 professors, found that faculty at all types of colleges reported working at least 49 hours a week. Even at research universities, they said they spent most of their time teaching.
What types of students -- and how many -- differ.
Of the 25 professors' workloads, George Hoffer , a transportation researcher at VCU, reached the most students this school year: 588 . Hoffer taught three lectures of microeconomics and one of macroeconomics.
Reynolds mostly taught writing workshops and averaged 22 students per course. "These classes are so writing-intensive," she said. "We have to keep the numbers low, so we can go deep with the students' work."
Another novelist, Alan Cheuse , teaches only graduate students in George Mason's writing program. "That's where I feel my duty lies," he said.
Harry Dorn , who created a new type of carbon molecule at Tech in 1999 , taught a 200 -student introductory chemistry lecture last fall .
"Even though it's general chemistry," he said, "one of those kids can knock you off the wall with a question you never thought about. It's the strangest thing: They can come in with no preparation and see insights I never thought of."
Callan, the analyst, and Hoffer, the VCU economist, say research counts far more than teaching at big schools. "There's no question," Hoffer said, "that for tenure and promotion, research is No. 1. Everything else is far below."
Administrators at larger schools say they weigh both factors equally. It's not a zero-sum game, said Edward Ayers , a U.Va. dean who has won research awards and still teaches a Southern history class. "Excellence in one," Ayers said, "tends to breed excellence in another."
Professors say their research often gets a boost from undergrads. Ely, the W&M historian, incorporated the ideas of a dozen students in his book "Israel on the Appomattox," which won the prestigious Bancroft Prize, and thanked them in the footnotes and acknowledgments.
In turn, professors say, students and schools benefit from their ties to the researchers, including the big stars.
Walter Williams teaches one economics course per semester at George Mason. But his affiliation is usually mentioned in his syndicated newspaper columns -- or when he substitutes for Rush Limbaugh on the radio. "That gives the university a lot of exposure," Williams said.
At ODU, Hailstork provides "a great role model for our kids," Zeisler said. "He's a living composer who has published and performed."
Hailstork left Norfolk State in 2000 for ODU, which provided him a higher salary, $136,189, and a much lighter course load . He was teaching five classes a semester at NSU.
Joseph Hall , an NSU chemist, will drop down to two courses in the fall to make time for federally funded research on a male contraceptive. But he worries that more faculty, who usually teach four classes a semester, will follow Hailstork to other schools.
"Norfolk State has to recognize that it must move into the mainstream, like other institutions," Hall said.
"The fact is that we have heavy workloads," said Elsie Barnes , vice president for academic affairs. "I would love to reduce them, but we do not have the resources to do that."
At U.Va., junior T.J. Clemons of Chesapeake had two of the biggest names -- Bond and Sabato -- as professors. He came away both disappointed and impressed.
Bond, he said, stuck mostly with the textbook, offering few reminiscences. Bond did note that his personal highlight in the 1963 March on Washington was handing a Coke to Sammy Davis Jr.
Both professors, however, were accessible outside the classroom, Clemons said. "I can send Larry Sabato an e-mail now," he said, "and I can probably have a response in five minutes." Plus, Clemons gets instant bragging rights.
"It's nice to come back home and talk to my friends who go to other universities and say, 'I'm in a class with Julian Bond.' "
Reach Philip Walzer at (757) 222-5105 or phil.walzer@pilotonline.com.
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