Time managment proves a challenge for busy scholars

Deborah Temkin Contributing Editor

While students may complain about the amount of time spent in class and on schoolwork, many are unaware of the amount of time professors must devote to the College. Between preparing, grading and holding class, serving on committees, completing their required research and being available for student advisees, professors often feel like they have little time for their lives beyond Main Gate.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Leonard Nevarez, and Associate Professor of Sociology Pinar Batur have teamed together with the Mellon Foundation to study how professors spend their time, and to determine how the College can best help them make their time more productive.

“Everyone has two regulated periods of time. We have to sleep, we have to eat. That’s one side of the spectrum. Then we have to work, we have our obligations, that’s the other. It’s the time in between that we’re interested in,” said Nevarez.

Terming this period “discretionary time,” Nevarez explained that it is a true burden on professors to stay productive during this time. “It’s the time to read a book not for class, but to stay on top of the literature, to stay on top of your research,” he said. “You can’t be so stressed out and waste that time on stress.”

Yet Nevarez argued that being a professor is inherently stressful. “It is not so much that faculty can’t handle the bulk hours,” he said. “It’s just that everything is so broken up and scattered, it’s hard for people to shift gears and they get distracted.”

On campus, most faculty devote the majority of their time and energy to teaching. Every full-time professor is required to dedicate the equivalent of five courses, whether through teaching or through other positions held in the College, over the course of the year. Nevarez said that teaching at Vassar is especially hard due to the high level of interaction with students. “I did some teaching at a big university and would have lecture classes of about 400 students. That was easy. All I did was plan a 75-minute lesson and I was done; there were teaching assisitants to do the grading and the discussions. Here, you overplan, trying to expect any turn in the discussion.”

The five course requirement varies from professor to professor. Like other higher-ed institutions, Vassar offers professors buy-outs (opportunities to drop a course but still receive their salary) for such things as chairing departments, serving on specific committees, maternity/paternity leave, and other initiatives. The number of tenured faculty receiving these buy-outs is of great concern to many administrators, and contributed to the discussion on class cuts last year. According to Nevarez, administrators were concerned with the number of full professors receiving class buy-outs and the number of adjunct needed to cover those courses.

Professors, however, are required to do much more than their courses and buy-outs. To maintain their positions, they must also pursue personal research, serve on faculty committees, and advise students. “The main time-consuming thing about advising is the JYA letters of recommendation and those for graduates. Students don’t realize how long those actually take,” said Nevarez.

Outside of the campus gates, professors are most worried about family concerns. Nevarez, who himself is expecting a child in the coming month, spoke of the difficulty for professors, to juggle work and child care. “It’s a continuing trend since the 1990s for there to be a conflict between work and family,” said Nevarez. “Professors really need to establish this balance and it is often hard for them.”

According to Nevarez, the Mellon Foundation study focuses on these times outside of campus and will be used to help professors understand and use their time more efficiently. The study results should be released in the comng month.