Nice Work If You Can Get It: professorial productivity at UC-Boulder

Michael Selzer: “NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT!”: What UC Boulder Professors Do, and what they are paid for doing it.

NICE WORK

IF YOU CAN

GET IT

What the professors at UC-Boulder

really do, and what they are

paid for doing it.

A statistical analysis with comments

by Michael Selzer, PhD

Colorado Springs

([email protected])

v1.4 Apr.2014


SAMPLE & METHODS

The sample comprises the entire tenured and tenure-track (“tatt”) faculty of 17 departments of the

University of Colorado, Boulder, that were selected more or less randomly. Eight departments are in

the humanities, four in the social sciences, and five in the sciences, and they were drawn from three

of the university’s schools or colleges. The sample is equivalent to 34.1% of the entire Boulder tatt

faculty.

Rank No. of

professors (total=363)

Percentage of sample

Percentage of total tatt

faculty (n=1066)

Full 158 43.5 41.5

Associate 129 35.4 33.3

Assistant 76 21.1 25.2

Most of the data used in this analysis were found on official UC-Boulder websites, which include

many professors’ websites or links to them (Sources for each statistic are identified in endnotes.).

The bibliographies some professors post are not always reliable. Some have not been updated for

years; others claim that works are “forthcoming” even though no further record of them is found

anywhere else. I have therefore used Google Scholar to identify professors’ publications as well as

to count citations of them. I have not limited myself to “peer-reviewed” publications. Chapters

contributed to academic books and trade books that seem “serious” but have almost certainly not

been peer-reviewed are included in the count, as are citations of them.

The data on UC-Boulder’s websites do not allow one to know why a professor does not teach, or

teaches even fewer courses than average. Some of these professors may be administrators who are

department members; some may have bought a lighter load through research grants or be enjoying

sabbatical leave; illness and favoritism may also be factors. No matter how little they teach, though,

all are members of the faculty, drawing salaries and enjoying benefits that culminate in generous

lifelong pensions and medical coverage. The fact that they are not teaching does not mean that they

could not and should not be teaching. (Some are identified as research professors; I do not count

them.)

Some analyses of faculty productivity count the number of students a professor has in class. I find

the amount of time spent teaching a more significant measure. I also deprecate the convention of

evaluating a professor’s research by the amount of money obtained to fund it. The frequency with

which a publication is cited by other scholars seems a more useful measure of quality, even though it

does not allow one to distinguish favorable from unfavorable citations.

The data I have drawn on are not always as unambiguous as one might hope. I am reasonably

confident however that my compilations of them are reliable to within a few percentage points.

-- Michael Selzer


$103,513 average salary (excluding benefits)

of UC-Boulder professors, 2012-2013 academic year.i

DISCUSSION: The distribution of professors by rank and salary at UC-Boulder is very

top-heavy. 42% of the faculty are full professors, with an average salary of $127,372; 33%

are associate professors with an average salary of $91,915; and 25% are assistant

professors with an average salary of $79,555. These salaries are substantially higher than

the national average. Average salaries (excluding benefits) in 2013-4 for faculty at all

American “research” universities are: full professor, $119,265; assoc., $87,731; asst. $76,

061.ii

According to collegetuitioncompare.com (4/5/2014) 37.1% of all professors nationally

are full professors, vs. 42% at Boulder. The national average salary of a full professor,

$102,060, is only 81% that of the average full professor at Boulder.


2.95 average per capita weekly class hours of CU-Boulder professors iii

DISCUSSION: The academic year at Boulder comprises two 15-week semesters, so that

the average professor spends 88.5 hours a year teaching in class. Data on office hours were

available for only two departments (78 professors) and averaged 2.94 hours per week. If

that is typical of the entire campus, total teaching time, in class and in conference, averages

5.89 hours/week or 176.7 hours/year.

There is an inverse relationship between rank (and pay) and amount of time spent in class.

Full professors have a substantially smaller teaching load (143 minutes/week) than

associate professors (195 minutes/week) and assistant professors (206 minutes/week).

At CU-Boulder teaching performance is “measured in number of class hours, and office

hours”. Many professors nevertheless claim that they spend far more hours preparing for

classes and grading exams than they do in the classroom itself. In general however a

professor who must devote long hours to preparing for a class probably does not know

enough to be teaching it (all the more so if this is a class that he or she teaches repeatedly).


32.2

percentage of CU-Boulder professors who did

not teach in 2012-2013 academic year iv


73.0

percentage of CU-Boulder full professors who taught less than

the average associate professor in 2012-2013 academic year v

DISCUSSION: 73% of full professors in the sample spend an average of 66% less time in

class than the average associate professors. This 66% represents $2.62 million of these full

professors’ salaries, and by extension nearly $8 million for the whole Boulder tenure and

tenure-track faculty. The expenditure of this large sum on full professors brings no added

value to the university or its students. Only the professors themselves benefit by it.


0.48

average per capita number of annual scholarly publications

(articles & books) by CU-Boulder professors during the years 2008-2013 vi

DISCUSSION: mean annual publications for the six-year period: assistants: 0.16; associates: 1.00; full:1.3.


29.2

percentage of CU-Boulder professors whose publications received

1 or fewer citations during the entire six-year period 2008-2013 vii

DISCUSSION: The frequency with which published scholarly works are cited by other

scholars in their scholarly publications is used at CU-Boulder, and in many other

universities too, as a measure of quality. 75% of the Boulder professors received four or

fewer citations a year during the 2008-2013 period. 22% of the professors (one-quarter of

them full professors) received no citations during this period. 5% of the faculty averaged

98 citations a year and account for 40% of the citations garnered by Boulder professors

during the period.


59.0

percentage of full professors at CU-Boulder whose publications

from 2008 to 2013 matched or were lower than the quantity

and quality of the average associate professor’s publications.

DISCUSSION: 62.9% of full professors produced no more publications than the average

associate professor; 55.1% of full professors received no more citations than the average

associate professor.

These professors – taking them as 59% of the entire body of full professors – are paid

(before benefits) $9,254,277 more than they would receive as associate professors.


1.51 number of administrators per faculty member at CU-Boulder viii

DISCUSSION: Defined by the university as 20% of a professor’s productivity, “service”

refers to participation in the administration of the university as a whole, its components,

or in scholarly organizations. Although service is valued at an annual average of $20,702

per professor, no data are available (or, apparently, compiled) to show the amount of

time professors spend engaged in it; what tasks they perform; whether they perform

them for CU-Boulder or for outside scholarly organizations; and how effectively they

perform them. Anecdotal evidence suggests that few professors take their “service”

obligation very seriously: as David Rubenstein writes in “Fat City” (see appendix)

“Committee meetings were tedious but, except for the few good departmental citizens,

most of us were able to avoid undue burdens”.

Wasteful though it is, the administrator:faculty ratio at Boulder is significantly better than

the national average which, according to collegetuitioncompare.com (4/5/2014), is 2.52:1.


IN SUM:

The data show that:

Most professors spend very little time teaching.

Most professors publish very little research.

Most of the research professors publish is regarded as

inconsequential by their colleagues.

Full professors are paid much more than associate professors but

the productivity in terms of both teaching and publication of most

of them is no greater than that of the average associate professor.

The ratio of administrators to instructors is very high.

Recommendations:

Only the very small number of professors who are recognized as

bona fide scholars should receive resources for research.

The great majority of faculty should not be required to produce

research. They should be designated as instructors.

Instructors (in this sense) should work, as teachers, for the same

40-hour week and 48-week year that most Americans work.

Faculty should be promoted only if it can be shown that their

achievements match those of the top 25% in the rank above them.

The resources devoted to administration (including the 20%

“service” requirement for professors) should be drastically

lowered.


Appendix

Fat City Thank you, Illinois taxpayers, for my cushy life.

• BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN

THE WEEKLY STANDARD MAY 30, 2011, VOL. 16, NO. 35

After 34 years of teaching sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I recently retired at age

64 at 80 percent of my pay for life. This calculation was based on a salary spiked by summer

teaching, and since I no longer pay into the retirement fund, I now receive significantly more than

when I “worked.” But that’s not all: There’s a generous health insurance plan, a guaranteed 3 percent

annual cost of living increase, and a few other perquisites. Having overinvested in my retirement

annuity, I received a fat refund and—when it rains, it pours—another for unused sick leave. I was

also offered the opportunity to teach as an emeritus for three years, receiving $8,000 per course,

double the pay for adjuncts, which works out to over $200 an hour. Another going-away present was

summer pay, one ninth of my salary, with no teaching obligation.

I haven’t done the math but I suspect that, given a normal life span, these benefits nearly doubled my

salary. And in Illinois these benefits are constitutionally guaranteed, up there with freedom of religion

and speech.

Why do I put “worked” in quotation marks? Because my main task as a university professor was self-

cultivation: reading and writing about topics that interested me. Maybe this counts as work. But here I

am today—like many of my retired colleagues—doing pretty much what I have done since the day I

began graduate school, albeit with less intensity.

Before retiring, I carried a teaching load of two courses per semester: six hours of lecture a week. I

usually scheduled classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays: The rest of the week was mine. Colleagues

who pursued grants taught less, some rarely seeing a classroom. The gaps this left in the department’s

course offerings were filled by adjuncts, hired with little scrutiny and subject to little supervision, and

paid little.

Sometimes my teaching began at 9:30 a.m., but this was hardship duty. A night owl, I preferred to

start my courses at 11 or 12. With an hour or so in my office to see an occasional student, I was at the

(free) gym by 4 p.m. Department heads sometimes pleaded with faculty to alter their schedules to suit

departmental needs, but rarely. Because most professors insist on selected hours, to avoid rush hour

and to retain days at home, universities must build extra classroom space that stands empty much of

the day.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/author/david-rubinstein


The occasional seminars were opportunities for professors to kick back and let graduate students do

the talking. Committee meetings were tedious but, except for the few good departmental citizens,

most of us were able to avoid undue burdens.

Another perquisite of the job was a remarkable degree of personal freedom. Some professors came to

class unshaven, wearing T-shirts and jeans. One of the deans scolded the faculty for looking like

urban guerrillas. He was ridiculed as an authoritarian prig.

This schedule held for 30 weeks of the year, leaving free three months in summer, a month in

December, and a week in spring, plus all the usual holidays. Every six years, there was sabbatical

leave: a semester off at full pay to do research, which sometimes actually got done.

Most faculty attended academic conferences at taxpayer expense. Some of these were serious events,

but always allowed ample time for schmoozing and sightseeing. A group of professors who shared

my interests applied for a grant to fund a conference at Lake Como. It was denied because we had

failed to include any women and so we settled for an all-expenses-paid week at Cambridge, England.

The grandest prize of all is, of course, tenure. The tenured live in a different world than ordinary

mortals, a world in which fears of unemployment are banished, futures can be confidently planned,

and retirement is secure.

All of this at a university without union representation!

To be fair, the first years of a newly hired assistant professor can be harrowing. Writing lecture notes

to cover a semester takes effort. But soon I had abundant material which could be reused indefinitely

and took maybe 20 minutes of review before class. Adding new material required hardly more effort

than the time to read what I would have read anyway.

The only really arduous part of teaching was grading exams and papers. But for most of my classes I

had teaching assistants to do this, graduate students who usually knew little more about the topic than

the undergraduates.

My colleagues, to their credit, promoted me to full professor knowing my ideological heterodoxy. I

fear that a young Ph.D. looking for work today who challenged the increasingly rigid political

orthodoxies would have a hard time. But the discipline of sociology is so ideologically

homogenous—a herd, as Harold Rosenberg put it, of independent minds—that this problem is rare.

Universities cherish diversity in everything except where it counts most: ideas.


FOOTNOTES

i Source: colorado.edu/pba/facstaff/facsal/2012-2013/displayAas.htm. Average salary has increased 5.29%

from 2008-2013; and by 40% over the rate of inflation since 1998. The benefits a professor receives in

addition to salary include pensions, medical plans, fully-paid sabbatical years, travel and research

grants, student research- and teaching-assistants. The value of these benefits for Boulder professors

has not been disclosed by UC. Presumably it is close to the national average for benefits for full-time

faculty at U.S. public universities which, in the 2010-11 year stood at $21,744. This represents an

increase of about 55% over the course of ten years: see nces.ed.gov, 2012 Digest Tables, Table 304.

ii Inside Higher Education, Mar. 17, 2014, reporting the annual survey of salaries by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. iii Sources: colorado.edu department websites, and course-schedule database isiscs.prod.

cu.edu/psc/csprod/ employee/hrms/ c/scc_admin_ovrd) stdnt.class_search.gblfedauth?& The document,

“Teaching loads of tenured and tenure track faculty” (colorado.edu/pba/facstaff/report.pdf p.19) states

that the professors taught an average of 1.2 courses in the 2004-5 year; unfortunately, this seems to

be the only available analysis of teaching loads at Boulder. In 2009 Boulder’s College of Engineering

and Applied Science declared “The standard teaching expectation for research-active, tenured and

tenure-track faculty is three courses” per academic year (colorado.edu/engineering/ sites/default

/files/teaching-loads-guidelines-4-14-09.pdf). Taking the typical course of 2.5 hours a week, these

statements imply averages of 3 hours (2004-5 year study) and 3.75 (engineering school) hours a week

– close to the average of my data; the average of one engineering department in my data is 3.45

hours.

According to the Center for College Affordability (”25 Ways to Reduce the Cost of College”, 2010)

teaching loads at U.S. research universities fell 42% in the 16 years from 1988 to 2004.

iv Sources as fn. 2 above. Of the full-time equivalent of 726 professors (two semesters) in the sample,

234 did not teach a class.

v Sources: colorado.edu/pba/facstaff/facsal/2012-2013/displayAas.htm; faculty lists in colorado.edu

department websites; and course-schedule database isiscs.prod. cu.edu/psc/csprod/ employee/hrms/

c/scc_admin_ovrd) stdnt.class_search.gblfedauth?&

vi Sources: department websites and Google Scholar. The number of publications is pro-rated to

reflect multiple co-authors of a work. 8% of the sample had no publications during the six-year

period. CU-Boulder weighs “research, measured in terms of scholarly papers and books a professor

has published and the number of times those publications have been cited by other scholars in their

published works” as 40% of a professor’s productivity. (For citation statistics see next page.)

http://www.colorado.edu/engineering/sites/default/files/teaching-loads-guidelines-4-14-09.pdf

http://www.colorado.edu/engineering/sites/default/files/teaching-loads-guidelines-4-14-09.pdf


vii Source: Google Scholar. When a work had more than one author citations were pro-rated to

reflect this. For example, an author with three co-authors would be credited with 0.25 of any

citations of that work.

viii There are presently 2168 full administrators and 1966 full-time faculty (1066 of them tenured or on

tenure tracks) at CU-Boulder: (colorado.edu /pba/perfmeas/1038_AIDU_2013_NFI_Report.pdf ). By one

count (colorado.edu/pba/facstaff/ report.pdf), 12% of the professors themselves are more or less full-time

administrators (they may teach an occasional course). To their number must be added the equivalent

of another 213 full-time equivalent administrators derived from the 20% “service” time of the

tenured or tenure-track professors (other faculty are not required to perform “service”). There are

thus 2641 full-time equivalent administrators and 1753 full-time equivalent faculty. Any uncertainty

about these calculations can be blamed on the less than straightforward way in which budget

categories are defined by CU.

Nice Work If You Can Get It: professorial productivity at UC-Boulder

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