A 4/4 load is already common for many faculty members at teaching-focused institutions, such as regional public colleges. So is a 2/2 load at research institutions.
But Michael DeCesare, a senior program officer at the national American Association of University Professors, said state-mandated minimum course loads are at odds with AAUP standards, which recommend that faculty “participate fully in the determination of workload policy.”
Teaching requirements are best decided by individual colleges and departments, as they are in the UW system currently, since expectations vary widely among different types of staff, said Christa Olson, an English professor and chair of the English department at UW-Madison.
The budget’s “one-size-fits-all approach” applies equally to professors who focus on teaching as it does to employees in its extension program, who primarily do community outreach, Olson said.
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While those mandates were not adopted, university officials tried to push back by improving transparency about how much faculty members work. Now the UW system publishes a database of thousands of instructors that details how many credit hours they teach, broken up by group and individual instruction.
Other state legislatures have previously discussed increasing faculty workloads, but the proposals haven’t come to fruition.