Teaching assignments

Anyone connected to university life – be they faculty, staff, or students – will tell you that the academic year has certain rhythms.  For that matter, so too does the academic “life”.  We don’t sit at a desk and do exactly the same thing every day, month after month, year after year.  There are ebbs and flows, and at the level of the annual cycle, more time is spent on particular activities in some parts of the year than in others.  This variation is of course one of the things which makes our days so interesting and enjoyable.  In the arc from November to March, one activity which always occupies a fair bit of time is the adjudication of applications for grants and awards, whether these be at the Faculty, university, national or international level.  In the last week this particular “season” was inaugurated by the annual meeting of the committee charged with the task of ranking the FASS applications for the university’s Research Achievement and Teaching Achievement awards. And next week a memo will go out to announce this year’s Faculty-level awards and the Marston LaFrance Research Fellowship. Very soon, many of us will be acting as referees for applicants to the SSHRC Insight Grant competition, and at the moment I am being deluged personally by requests to assess the work of scholars in Italy, part of a new research assessment exercise launched by the Italian government.  Complicating matters, every award or grant has its own unique rules.  For Carleton’s RAA and TAA competitions, for example, we need to consider both the track record of achievement and the specific project proposed, although there are no firm guidelines about their relevant weighting.

I recently had dinner with a friend and colleague from a Toronto-area university who was in town for the preliminary meeting of a committee that adjudicates one of this country’s most prestigious national research awards, and the subject of assessment criteria came up in our conversation.  In his view, other things being roughly equal, some preference should be given to those who devoted at least some of their time to teaching first- and second-year undergraduate students, and not merely senior undergraduates and graduates.  The reasoning was that such individuals make contributions that the latter group does not: they are the ones who engage students with the passion for their subject, ultimately producing those who will go on to write honours theses and pursue post-graduate studies, and in doing so they also generate the revenue which allows their more research-obsessed colleagues to actually have employment.  It is an interesting concept, and one for which I have much sympathy, although I know of no research award competition which has adopted this as a formal criterion.

One of the duties of deans at Carleton is to give final approval to all faculty teaching assignments, for the simple reason that department chairs and institute directors are in the CUASA bargaining unit, and consequently their decisions cannot be grieved.  This means that the final decision has to come from someone in “management”, although in practice I suspect that few deans make substantive changes to the teaching rosters which they receive.  But we do look at them, and it is always interesting to see certain patterns emerging.  Our practice at Carleton is to begin this annual exercise by asking faculty members what they would like to teach in the following year, and a genuine effort is made to accommodate those wishes.  There are certainly some faculty members who rarely if ever ask to teach below the fourth year, and indeed some would clearly prefer to teach only graduate students.  And then there are others who obviously enjoy the challenge of sparking the imagination of 18-year olds, and actually seek it out.  Which group makes a more substantial contribution to our institutional mission of teaching and research?  It is an interesting although possibly unfair question.

In my notional “ideal” university, all faculty members would do some teaching at all levels, and I must say that I am impressed with our Dept. of Political Science which has adopted a policy to require this balance.  I do worry about reaching a point at which most if not all lower-level undergraduate teaching is done by Contract Instructors, because regular faculty have opted to teach only at the higher level.  That would not be a healthy situation, nor is it fair to students.

November is also the “season” when academic units are beginning to make decisions about who will teach what in the next academic year.  We know that there will be more budget reductions in the immediate future, and this will likely mean some loss of our capacity to hire part-time faculty, for the simple reason that this is the only part of our budget which has any flexibility.  Chairs and directors in FASS have been asked to begin the process by ensuring that all required courses – in other words, courses that absolutely must be offered — are assigned to regular faculty.  I shall be curious to see how this plays out in practice.