Starting next fall, full-time faculty and instructional academic staff at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee will need to teach at least one course per semester and a minimum of 12 credit hours each school year. Employees at the other state universities face higher requirements.
The Board of Regents, which oversees the UW system, has until next month to propose additional guidelines and exceptions to the requirements. A legislative committee would then need to approve the plans by the end of January.
That second step could pose an issue, though, in light of recent Wisconsin Supreme Court rulings on the powers of legislative committees, said Derek Clinger, senior counsel with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
UW system leaders have worked for weeks to draft a teaching workload policy that reflects the different ways faculty and staff educate students on top of research and other responsibilities.
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The new requirements will “create a lot of extra work in a system that already works fairly well,” added Barret Elward, an instrument engineer at UW-Madison and co-president of the United Faculty & Academic Staff union on campus.
“People are doing incredible work … and people are already overworked,” Elward said.
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Lawmakers adopted the teaching workloads and transfer requirements “to make sure students come first,” said Republican Rep. Mark Born, who co-chairs the Legislature’s influential budget-writing committee.
“UW system attendees and their families are paying higher tuition every year, and they deserve to have professors teaching them, not buried in administrative work or political activism,” Born said. “If faculty are truly focused on educating students, then these policies shouldn’t be a problem. Accountability shouldn’t be controversial.”
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Mnookin said she spent late nights researching how other states approach the issue. Faculty with a 100% teaching load at Ohio State University, a fellow Big Ten school, generally teach 24 credit hours between the fall and spring semesters, according to a spokesperson.
“However, faculty also carry workload in research and service, and the expectations vary based on faculty type and college,” the Ohio State spokesperson said in an email.