Unit Policy
Title
School of Government: Policy on Faculty Workload
Introduction
Purpose
This policy has several main goals:
- To comply with the workload policies of the UNC System and of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (“UNC-Chapel Hill” or “University”).
- To ensure that UNC-Chapel Hill School of Government (“School”) faculty are working in ways that meet the needs of students, public officials, and other stakeholders.
- To facilitate transparency and accountability about our performance.
- To establish clear and equitable expectations and guidelines about the distribution of work among faculty members.
- To recognize all the kinds of work that faculty do, including those that are hard to measure.
- To improve the Dean’s ability to assess faculty workload and productivity, manage and supervise faculty, and understand areas of need.
Scope
This policy applies to all School faculty, including tenured, tenure-track, variable-track, and fixed-term faculty. Tenured faculty members and all faculty members appointed for longer than one year and who are full-time must have a workload plan. Faculty members appointed for one year or less or less than full-time may have a workload plan if required by the Dean. Faculty members with administrative responsibilities should have a workload plan unless the administrative responsibilities occupy substantially all of the faculty member’s time.
The School may publish internal guidelines to help faculty members understand and implement this policy.
Policy
Policy Statement
Important Principles
School faculty members do many kinds of work, some of which are different from the work that is typical in other academic units. For example, many School faculty members focus more on teaching and advising public officials than on teaching and advising degree-seeking students.
The composition of a faculty member’s workload will vary over time. Some variations may be predictable. For example, a new faculty member may spend more time developing expertise and less time teaching. Some variations may be unpredictable, as public official demands and changes to the law and practice of government may not map neatly onto an annual planning cycle. Planning and measuring workloads have real benefits. However, they should not become unduly burdensome or overly restrict academic freedom.
Faculty Workloads
UNC System Policy 400.3.4 requires that the School “assign duties to teaching, research/creative activity, and service on a percentage basis totaling 100%.” It also requires the School to “[c]reate a standardized amount of teaching, research/creative activity, and service work for each appointment type.”
Accordingly, the School provides the following standard percentage profiles for each appointment type:
- Tenured and tenure-track: 40% teaching, 40% research, 20% service;
- Fixed term (teaching): 80% teaching, 0% research, 20% service;
- Fixed term (research): 0% teaching, 80% research, 20% service; and
- Variable track: same as fixed-term, unless and until the faculty member converts to tenure-track.
Teaching
This policy treats three main types of activity as “teaching”:
- Courses/classes personally taught,
- Courses/classes administered, and
- Advising.
Each of these categories is discussed further below.
Courses/Classes Personally Taught
When a faculty member teaches a course or class, the faculty member’s work includes not only the teaching time itself but also related activities, including preparation, course management, talking with students/participants before and after class, grading (if the class is graded), travel (if the class is not on campus), and the like. All of this work is valuable, necessary, and contributes to the faculty member’s teaching effort.
Courses/Classes Planned and Administered
Many faculty members plan or administer courses, classes, or conferences where they personally teach only part of the content or, sometimes, teach none. This planning and administration work is an important part of teaching and creates substantial value for participants. The amount of time spent planning and administering a course, class, or conference may vary with the size of the event, the location of the event, the number of presenters, and other factors. All the time spent planning and administering courses, classes, and conferences contributes to a faculty member’s teaching effort.
Advising
School faculty members often conceptualize advising as a form of service. However, short-term advising is generally classified as teaching in this policy. That is because advising is similar to the work faculty members in other academic units perform during office hours, in independent study courses, and when mentoring students. Some advising work, including but not necessarily limited to longer-term projects culminating in reports or other writings, might best be classified as research. Faculty members may indicate in their workload plans the share of their advising that is most appropriately treated as research.
The amount of time spent on advising varies among faculty members, depending on each faculty member’s area of expertise, the size of the faculty member’s public official audience, the stage of the faculty member’s career, and many other factors. Faculty members track their advising in the Faculty Advising Log.
Aggregating the Categories
The sum of a faculty member’s percentage effort spent on courses/classes personally taught, courses/classes planned or administered, and advising should approximately equal the percentage effort allocated to teaching in the faculty member’s workload plan.
Research
The UNC-Chapel Hill Faculty Workload Policy recognizes that “discovering, disseminating, and applying knowledge and professional expertise” is an important part of faculty work. This includes translational and applied scholarship. The policy notes that faculty “write articles, books, monographs, and grant proposals . . . edit scholarly journals,” and more. At the School, faculty also produce podcasts, write blog posts, compile compendia of case law, produce project reports, and generate many other forms of scholarship. Scholarship in any form, so long as it is of excellent quality and furthers the mission of the School, is part of a faculty member’s research responsibilities. As discussed above, advising/consulting work may constitute a form of research.
Providing concrete benchmarks for research productivity is difficult because no two publications – or, more generally, vehicles for disseminating knowledge – are alike. They vary in length, complexity, originality, format, degree of collaboration, the nature of the research and data collection that supports them, and the process through which they are published or produced.
Reviewing previous promotion materials and consultation with experienced faculty members suggest that many successful tenure-track faculty members produce at least one (and often several) article, monograph, or book chapter each year and shorter or less formal pieces, such as blog posts or conference papers, more frequently. Many successful tenure-track faculty members also produce larger or more comprehensive works, such as books or extensive online publications, at some point in their careers.
Although the type and number of publications may vary among faculty members, tenure-track faculty members should constantly conduct research and produce scholarship. There should be no long “gaps” lapses (i.e., periods longer than 4-5 months) where a faculty member dedicating 40% of their time to research makes little or no progress in this area.
Many fixed-term (teaching) faculty also engage in research. This work is not part of their standard profile and is not required by their appointments, but it may be valuable to the faculty member, public officials, and others. If a fixed term (teaching) faculty member decides that engaging in research would be beneficial, the faculty member should discuss this with their Faculty Advisory Committee and should include any planned research activity in the faculty member’s workload plan to be approved by the Dean.
Faculty Development Assignments and professional development activities often fall under research and may be part of a faculty member’s research effort. However, some Faculty Development Assignments and professional development activities may be better counted towards another category, and faculty members should attribute them appropriately.
Service
For purposes of this policy, service includes the following major categories:
- Service to the School, such as serving on a School committee or an ARP committee or organizing an event;
- Service to the University, such as involvement in a University project or service on the Faculty Council; and
- External service, such as serving on a journal editorial board or participating in a bar association committee.
As noted above, short-term advising of public officials is treated as teaching for purposes of this policy. Other faculty activities that School faculty might sometimes describe as service, such as working closely with a unit of government on an extended project that culminates in a report, would be best described as research for purposes of this policy.
It is impossible to enumerate all the possible ways a faculty member may engage in service work. Service includes activities that are hard to measure and that are part of the collective responsibility to be good citizens of the School, such as attending candidate interviews and participating in School-wide or division-based events.
Administration
The Dean may assign some faculty members administrative responsibilities, including associate and assistant deans, division directors, and directors and faculty leads of entrepreneurial initiatives. These faculty members have a fourth component in their profiles, with the remaining components being reduced proportionally. The size of the administrative component is determined in consultation with the Dean. For example, a division director who is a tenured faculty member and who is expected to spend 25% of their time on administration would have the following profile:
- 25% administrative, 30% teaching, 30% research, 15% service.
Faculty members not in the above categories with more limited administrative responsibilities – for example, a faculty member who oversees a certification program for public officials – should record and be credited for their work in one of the three principal categories of work, typically service.
Faculty Workload Plans
Creating Faculty Workload Plans
Each faculty member must create a workload plan for each academic year. The workload plan specifies the teaching, research, and service activities the faculty member intends to undertake and will comprise the appropriate percentages of the faculty member’s workload. Appendix A is a template for creating a workload plan.
Faculty members with Faculty Advisory Committees should meet with their committees in May of each year to establish a proposed workload plan for the coming academic year. This will be the first of the two annual meetings required by the School’s APT policy. By the end of May, when the faculty member and the Faculty Advisory Committee are satisfied with the proposed workload plan, the faculty member should send the workload plan to the Dean.
Faculty members without Faculty Advisory Committees should develop their proposed workload plans in May of each year and send them to the Dean as described above.
Approving Faculty Workload Plans
In or around June of each year, the Dean will meet with each faculty member to review, adjust as needed, and approve each faculty member’s workload plan. This meeting will be combined with the annual evaluation meeting described in the next section of this policy.
Annual Evaluation Process
Faculty members with Faculty Advisory Committees should meet with their committees approximately halfway through the academic year to assess the faculty member’s progress against the approved workload plan. This will be the second of the two annual meetings the School’s APT policy requires.
In or around June of each year, the Dean will meet with each faculty member to evaluate the faculty member's performance considering the faculty member’s workload plan. As noted above, this meeting will be combined with the annual meeting to approve the faculty member’s workload plan for the coming year.
As noted above, the exact composition of a faculty member’s workload is hard to predict, and the specific activities a faculty member carries out during a year may vary from the ones proposed in the faculty member’s workload plan. In general, submitting a revised workload plan is unnecessary due to any variation from the faculty member’s original plan. Instead, the faculty member should document the duties actually performed in the Faculty Activity Report and be prepared to explain the variation to the Dean at the annual meeting.
Faculty Success Plans
Faculty success plans are described in the UNC-Chapel Hill Faculty Workload Policy, which the School will follow. If the faculty member is not meeting one or more agreed-upon performance goals, the School must implement a personalized, supportive plan to help the faculty member excel. The Dean will be responsible for approving any faculty success plan and monitoring a faculty member’s progress against a plan.
Monitoring and Reporting on Faculty Workloads
The School will participate in the monitoring and reporting processes required by the UNC-Chapel Hill Faculty Workload Policy and implemented by the University.
Related Requirements
External Regulations
Unit Policies, Standards, and Procedures
Contact Information
Primary Contact
Name: Jeff Welty
Title: Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs
Telephone: (919) 445-1082
Email: welty@sog.unc.edu