Standard teaching loads & 1-time bonuses for over-achievers
A new method of weighing the work of UNC system professors was adopted by the Board of Governors.
Under the system, each academic department will develop standard teaching loads and reports will be made annually concerning whether faculty members met the standard. The board also authorized chancellors to give one-time cash stipends to professors who teach above their department's standard load.
"Our intent is to see that due account is taken of each faculty member's contribution to the teaching mission of the institution," said Ellen Newbold, chair of the Committee on Educational Planning, Policies and Programs, in presenting the proposal to the board.
The workload monitoring system was mandated by the General Assembly and grew out of work in the past few months on a proposed accountability system that would be used to measure the performance of UNC system schools and their faculty members.
The board deferred consideration of other elements of the accountability system to give campuses and General Administration officials time to work on its details.
Newbold said an important element of the new faculty workload monitoring system was recognizing that the work of university professors involved far more than the time spent in a classroom.
She also said it was important where decisions concerning establishment of workloads were made.
"It is the board's belief that teaching loads are best managed at the department and school level and not the system or state level," she said.
Setting standards
The report outlined what the board generally expected to be minimum standard annual courseloads. Those ranged from four courses at the Research I universities--Carolina and N.C. State--to eight courses at Baccalaureate II universities.
It said in some cases accreditation requirements may require departments to have lower standard courseloads.
Each department will develop standard loads, subject to approval by the chancellor. Each spring, departmental chairs will draft reports on how many faculty members met, exceeded or fell short of the standard load. The reports will outline the reasons why faculty members were allowed to teach less than the standard load.
In assigning faculty courseloads, department heads must take into account time needed by faculty members in course preparation, research and service assignments, the report said.
"This strategy is designed to underscore the responsibility of department heads and deans for managing faculty workloads in general and not just faculty teaching loads," Newbold said.
In a Thursday meeting of the educational planning committee, Peter Petschauer, chair of the UNC system's Faculty Assembly, said he was pleased the final report address faculty concerns relating to recognition of teaching done outside the classroom.
"Now this looks like something the faculty can live with," he said.
The new system will go into effect beginning with the 1996-97 academic year, Gary Barnes, the General Administration official who led the study, told the educational planning committee last week.
The departmental reports will be made available to other departments, both within the campus and with other UNC system schools, so that comparisons could be made.
Besides authorizing chancellors to give one-time cash stipends, the board also encouraged department heads and deans to experiment with new methods of rewarding overload teaching.
But, the board's report said faculty members should be discouraged from teaching more than 12 hours per semester because of the negative impact on quality.
"We are concerned that faculty be rewarded both for the quantity and even more for the quality of teaching," Newbold said.
Taking more time
The board voted to take another year to consider the remaining components of a draft accountability system that would be designed to measure the performance of universities against a wide range of indicators.
During the next year, the campuses will be asked to establish several improvement strategies and related performance indicators, Barnes said.
Barnes said consideration of an accountability system needed a great deal of further study and coordination with elements of a new state government budgeting system. UNC system officials will complete work later this year on a new set of performance-based budget indicators, he said. Those measures could become part of an accountability system, he said.
Barnes also said other states that had adopted accountability systems for their universities now were backing away from them because they were unwieldy or had gone unfunded.
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