X-People

Perhaps you have heard the expression, "If you want something done, ask a busy person." Some people are able to get a lot done, and adding one or four more things to the list doesn't slow them down. Let's call this type of person Type W.

Then there are Type X people, and I am going to classify them, for the sake of discussion and Pseudo-Scientific Rigor, as Type X1 and Type X2. Type X people -- in general, with all other factors being equal -- don't get as much done as Type W people.

To explain the difference between X1 and X2, and to compare them with W people, I will use an academic example. I am not thinking of any particular person or people; this is a hypothetical situation. I am not (necessarily) talking about you.

Imagine 3 graduate students at similar stages of their academic program, with similar types of research and similar backgrounds and the same advisor. They are done taking classes and can focus on their research.

A Type W person would get a lot done whether they were funded by a research assistantship (RA), a teaching assistantship (TA), a fellowship, or whatever.

A Type X1 person would only make decent research progress if funded by an RA or fellowship. A TA would consume all of X1's time and energy, not because X1 is more devoted to teaching than W, but because X1 can only focus on one thing at a time.

A Type X2 person would get more done if partially funded by an RA or fellowship and partially by something requiring a bit of structured work -- for example, perhaps teaching one lab or discussion section, or perhaps doing some grading or other work like that. If funded entirely by an RA or fellowship, X2 wouldn't be able to deal effectively with the lack of structure and would waste a lot of time, making very slow progress, even if the advisor set specific goals.

Actually, I can think of one real example of W vs. X, and I have written about this before. Back in days of yore, my own graduate advisor gave an RA to another student instead of to me, saying that I would get a lot done even if I were a TA, whereas the other student would only get work done if an RA.

At the time, I felt like I was being punished for being a Type W person and the other student was being rewarded for being an X. Now, as a grad advisor doling out limited funds within the limited time frame of a grant, I can understand it better. I also want to mention that the other student in question was, and still is, my friend, and that I did not blame him for being an X-person.

Explanatory note about grad funding in my field: Many students are funded by a mixture of types of support over time; some RA, some TA, some fellowship. Advisors make decisions from year to year about the type of support for each student. If we requested 12 months of support for a student on a grant for the entire duration of the grant, the budget would explode, leaving no money for the actual research, so my colleagues and I typically ask for partial support, and make up the rest with TA or other sources of research support, or the student gets a fellowship, etc.

With that in mind, my question now is how (and whether) to distinguish between the X1's and the X2's.

I guess 'whether' is the more first-order question: In cases involving making choices for a particular grant/project, would you -- the advisor -- take into account work habits like the W vs. X scenarios described above when making decisions about support?

And if you do, would you make a distinction, like I did, between X1 and X2? Would you distinguish them by trial-and-error, or is there some magic formula you can use to predict (barring routine and unpredictable research setbacks) how cost effective someone will be? I think not, and I have mostly given up trying to guess.

My current strategy, which is not obviously better than anything else I have ever tried, is to accumulate as much grad support as possible, give students the benefit of the doubt as much as possible, distribute grad support in the way that makes the most sense for research and human resource priorities (what needs to get done when and by whom?), and hope for the best.

Nevertheless, when making some decisions and when trying to understand how people work best, I think it is useful to think about W vs. X, and more vs. less structure, and to explore ways to stretch grant funding to the maximum extent possible to cover as many students as possible for as long as possible. That is the goal. Would you also like to see me pull a rabbit out of a hat? Too bad, I can't do that either, and not just because I have no training or authorization for the use of magical animal subjects in research.

Dear Andrew Hacker?

This is my blog-reply to an e-mail I recently received from Andrew Hacker, one of the authors (with Claudia Dreifus) of Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids, and What We Can Do About It.

Dear Andrew Hacker,

You're welcome. Praising my ability to correctly spell names is setting the bar a bit low, but it's nice of you to say something positive.

I will now say something nice about your book: I agree with you about many issues. Examples:

There are too many mini-administrators, some (most?) are paid exorbitant salaries, and tuition is too high. I am concerned about the amenities arms-race that makes it a priority to have awesome fitness centers at a time when there is little money to provide adequate classrooms and other teaching facilities. I am troubled that so many "contingent" faculty, such as adjuncts, are paid so little, receive no benefits, and are not treated with respect. I think that post-tenure review should be routinely and consistently used to evaluate tenured professors, with consequences for those who are not doing their jobs well, particularly in teaching. There are outstanding students everywhere, no matter how lacking in 'prestige' the college or university.

We disagree, however, about the role of research in universities and colleges, and a few other issues (e.g., tenure). Comments from readers on yesterday's post have done a great job of addressing the researchers-as-teachers issue, including the role of graduate education in a university, so I will not focus much on that specific topic. Instead, I will explain why I did not like your book.

I did not like your book because it is little more than a string of unsupported anecdotes that justify your contempt for professors and your belief that most professors care little about teaching, don't even try to teach well, and try to teach as little as possible. Where are the data that support this?

In recent years, I have seen the teaching evaluations (student and peer evaluations) of every professor in my department and every faculty member being evaluated for tenure and promotion at a higher-level administrative unit in my university. The quality of teaching is very good, with only rare instances of poor teaching, even for the tenured professors. There is likely no general correlation between teaching skill and research success (on this we seem to agree), but I stand by my statement that teaching and research are not mutually exclusive, and are activities that can enhance each other.

I strongly believe that universities can do more to improve undergraduate teaching, and I see a strong positive trend in this direction, even as faculty are under increasing pressure to bring in more grants, publish more papers, and obtain more patents. Through my participation in searches at my own and at other universities, I have seen an emphasis on hiring faculty who will excel at both teaching and research.

In your e-mail to me, you mentioned that, as a social scientist and a journalist, you and your co-author need "evidence". When I read Higher Education?, I was hoping to see evidence for your conclusions and hypotheses. Instead, I saw anecdotes, such as one might find in a blog.

For example, your book starts with the story of a candidate who, in his interview for a faculty position, makes it clear that he is not interested in teaching and is only interested in research. The fact that he was not hired indicates to me that the system worked well, yet you used this anecdote to illustrate your hypothesis that professors don't care about teaching and try to do as little of it as possible.

Another reason I didn't like your book is because you distort facts to suit your purpose of showing how dysfunctional professors are. For example, you do not think that professors work very much. To show that faculty are overpaid slackers, you define "the basic academic workload" as "the number of hours when professors have to be at stated places at specified times." In your scheme, this includes only classroom teaching and posted office hours, and therefore professors at some universities make >$800/hour.

You have anticipated objections. In fact, you wrote that you "..can already hear anguished cries from the faculty club", and so you acknowledge that professors "..do something outside their classroom and office hours." Unfortunately, you are cynical about this something: "But the great bulk of it is less real than contrived: committees, department meetings, faculty senates, and yes, what they call their research.."

What exactly is your definition of "real"?

Yes, indeed, I do spend a lot of time on those other, possibly unreal somethings, in addition to what I call my research, including advising graduate students. You might think some of the committees are stupid (I do too) and that research should be a hobby for long weekends and summers (did you talk to any professors who run labs?), but you should count these hours in your calculations of how much professors make per hour.

Similarly, what is your evidence for your contention that professors don't work as much as they say they do? This seems to be it: "A story is told of a classroom where all the students were busy scribbling as the professor droned on. All, that is, but one, a young woman in the back row, who wrote down nary a word. How so? She had with her the notes that her mother had taken for that class during her own student days." That's the evidence? A possibly apocryphal story?

Another example: At one of the universities you visited, very few of the undergraduates you met had been to a professor's office "to discuss materials from a class". At another (Harvard), a student told you that it was "intimidating" to speak to professors, so students avoid going to speak with professors in their offices. And your point was what? As a professor and a scientist, I know better than to take what students say at face value. I need evidence that it is the fault of professors that students don't come to office hours for help when needed.

There are lots of other "interesting" ideas in your book: engineering is "vocational training", sabbaticals are "sojourns in Tuscany", mathematicians don't need tenure because what they do is not controversial.. the list goes on. I could also mention inconsistencies:

• big football programs are bad, but 3 of your 10 favorite schools are Mississippi, Notre Dame, and ASU;
• tenure forces universities to keep low-functioning professors, but tenure is a "feeble shield" that doesn't actually protect tenured professors from being fired;
• research doesn't enhance teaching because, for example "The information with which a mathematics research project deals is usually inaccessible to undergraduates." (ergo.. the same must be true for all academic disciplines?)

In the end, the book fails in its central thesis about how research is harming US colleges and universities because the authors do not objectively weigh the positive and negative effects of research on undergraduates. There are no data, there are no anecdotes, there are no interviews with undergraduates who have done research, either with an individual professor or as part of a larger research group. There is nothing in the book about the rise of Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) programs or about how principal investigators on grants are encouraged (by funding agencies) to include undergraduates in grant proposals to enhance the "broader impacts" of research.

Participating in a small research project as an undergraduate at a small liberal arts college changed my life and led me to an interesting and fulfilling career (despite the fact that I have never spent a sabbatical in Tuscany). Working with a professor who was a leading researcher in his field inspired me more than all my classes combined.

You do not have to take this anecdote at face value, especially not from an anonymous blogger, but I feel that you are attacking, perhaps from ignorance, one of the greatest strengths of our higher education system.

Sincerely,

FSP

Being There, Postdoctoral Edition

How much do you work? More than you want to? As much as you want to? Whatever your answer, do you get to decide or do you feel you have no choice, either because someone else is determining how much you work or because you are trying to meet certain expectations of productivity for your career stage and trajectory?

We could discuss whether professors work too much (to get tenure, to get promoted) or too little (for the amount they are paid, especially once tenured), or even whether graduate students work too much (according to them) or too little (according to their advisers). Those topics have been discussed here before.

But what about postdocs? Although some postdocs are funded by fellowships, many postdocs are supervised by and accountable to the professor (PI) who is paying their salary from a grant. There is likely to be a written contract setting out the salary for a year or more of the postdoctoral position, but other important things, like expectations of working hours/day and productivity, vary considerably from professor to professor.

There is, in theory, a framework that specifies the amount that graduate students work, and there is an administrative structure that oversees the education and training of graduate students. Whether or not those hours are reasonable (too much/too little) or enforced is another topic. Nevertheless, students are the responsibility not only of individual advisers but also of departments and other administrative units that deal with aspects of graduate education. There are graduate program advisers, deans, and so on.

It is more rare for there to be an administrative structure that oversees a university's postdoctoral researchers. Such things do exist; some universities do indeed have an Office of Postdoctoral Education or Affairs or Services or whatever. In some cases these are just 'resource centers' and in others they have some oversight role in the hiring practices and supervising of postdoctoral researchers.

Ideally, the postdoc and supervising professor(s) will discuss issues such as expectations and working hours and so on, perhaps even before the postdoc is hired. Does anyone want to guess as to how often these conversations occur in advance? In most cases? Rarely? I think my best guess would be closer to 'rarely' than 'often'.

So what do you do, then, if you are a postdoc and your faculty supervisor tells you, for example, that you must work at least n hours every day (including weekends), and n is a rather large number (say, 11-12 or so)? What if those hours are specified -- e.g. "Be in the lab/office every day from 8 AM to 8 PM or 9 AM to 8 PM" (or whatever suits the faculty supervisor best)?

This post is in response to an e-mail describing exactly such a scenario.

Maybe specified hours are OK with you and you were going to work those hours and more anyway. But what if you feel that you are getting a lot of work done but you want/need to leave the office at, say, 6 PM every day? Whether or not the postdoc is risking their future career by working less than their PI's preferences depends a lot on the attitude and philosophy of the professor.

I personally don't care what specific hours my postdocs work as long as they get some interesting and useful work done and are obviously making progress with their research. I would like to talk to them and otherwise communicate with them regularly, but they certainly don't have to work the exact same hours that I do.

Years ago, I had one postdoc who was an extreme morning person. I am an extreme nocturnal person. It was often the case that we overlapped for an hour or so in the middle of the night, just as I was finishing up working for the day and the postdoc was starting the day. This was very convenient and efficient when we were working on something together.

And as for how many hours someone should work: that varies depending on the working style and efficiency of each individual. Some people can get as much done in 8 hours as others can in 12 or more. It makes more sense to me to agree on some (reasonable) expectations as to what needs to get done by when. These are topics for continual discussion and reconsideration as a research project progresses in its typical non-linear fashion.

If you feel you are being forced to work unreasonable hours, in number or at specific times, I don't have any good advice except to gauge the flexibility/sanity level of the professor specifying these hours. Perhaps once you have established yourself as a good and hard worker, you can have a chat about a more flexible schedule. If you can continue to do excellent research and be available for communication (in person or electronically) for an acceptable number of hours each day, a reasonable person would let you work out your own schedule.

If the supervising faculty is inflexible, this is useful information to pass along to others contemplating working with this person, not as an undermining criticism, necessarily, but as information you may wish that you had had prior to accepting your position. And then, most likely, you probably need to just work those hours, do a great job, get a great job, and become an excellent mentor to your own postdocs and grad students, allowing them more flexibility than you were given.

Question: Have any of you readers made use of a university Office of Postdoctoral Stuff to deal with work-related issues such as working hours?

Levels of Work

One of my colleagues is currently immersed in a discussion with his graduate students about how much they should work on their research. This is of course a complex subject that dissatisfied faculty and tired students could discuss endlessly and unpleasantly.

I want to mention today just one aspect of the issue: ignoring for now all the other complexities of this topic, can/should a grad student scale their efforts depending on their career goal?

For example: One of my colleague's Ph.D. students maintains that he doesn't have to work as hard as some other students because his career goal is to get a faculty position at a small liberal arts college, not a research-intensive job at a university.

My colleague would be satisfied if this student worked a 40 hour week (i.e. much less than that of students with an intense research focus, but a reasonable amount) if the student used that time well; at present, the student works < size="3">. Note that specifying the number of hours worked is actually kind of meaningless. I've had students who were physically present in the department/lab for >> 40 hours/week and got nothing done, and other students who were extremely efficient and made excellent progress on their research during weekday daytime hours.

I mention this detail so that no one assumes that my colleagues is expecting this student to work every night and weekend (though he'd probably be fine with that). In this specific incident, the issue is that the student wants to work at a very leisurely pace because he thinks that is in line with his personal career goals, and, absent any specific agreement with the advisor that this schedule is acceptable owing to family/health/etc. considerations, I hope we can all agree that this is not OK.

My colleague is supporting the student on a grant. This doesn't mean that the student has to work 24/7 just because his salary, tuition, and benefits are being paid by his advisor's grant, but aside from the general issues about doing the work you are paid to do, there are additional questions and concerns that arise when a grant-funded student decides, one year into a project, to work at a leisurely pace (using this particular case as an example):

1. The grant would cover the academic career of a student working an efficient 40-hour workweek for several years but that will run out before a student working an inefficient and/or < 40-hour workweek completes the dissertation research. It's not as simple as saying "OK, well too bad for you" when the support runs out because presumably the research project has specific goals that should be accomplished if at all possible in the time frame of the grant. The student seems to think that the major factor controlling how much and how hard he works is his personal career goal, but he is funded to do a project that has a finite time frame. And hence point 2:

2. The leisure-track student is part of a research group. Each student and research scientist works on their own project, but as in many research groups, the projects are somewhat interconnected and the progress and success of each person and project affects the others. Unusually slow progress (by choice, not owing to an unpredicted and unavoidable obstacle) on a grant-funded project may negatively impact others.

Of course research is not so predictable that as long as you clock in your hours each week, you will get from point A to point B and write your papers and be done. It is not so simple (or boring), but in general, if you do work hard and think about what you are doing, you will get a result, even if it's not what you expected. Some people and projects need more time than others, and, within certain limits (i.e. the grant duration +/- a year or two), that's fine.

I think the particular student in question, if he ever finishes his Ph.D. and is fortunate enough to get the job he most desires, will be in for a shock when he finds out how hard professors at teaching-focused institutions work. This issue has been raised with him, but he went to a small college and thinks he knows well what his professors' jobs were like. Cushy! Summers off! Smart and adoring students!

There are differences in the experiences and lifestyles of professors at different types of educational institutions, but we all get our Ph.D.'s at research institutions and there are not separate degrees for those whose passion is for teaching and for those who want a significant research component in their job as a professor at a 4-year college or university. One can argue about whether that is a good thing or not, but I'm not going to today.

This is not to say that everyone has to work 80 hour weeks in grad school no matter what their personal situation and career goals, but when supported on a grant in the current system, you are committed to maintaining a certain level of productivity (loosely defined to include time spent thinking, pondering, wondering, and being constructively confused, not just cranking out data and papers) no matter what your post-Ph.D. career goal.

Position statement: I think that grad students can to some extent scale their efforts to their career goals if they so desire, but that being in a Ph.D. program and being paid by a grant to work a certain amount obligates one to put in a certain amount of effort and to make progress at a reasonable rate. Ideally, the definition of 'reasonable' can be mutually agreed upon by advisor and student (and this is why my colleague is currently having discussions with his student, to reach just such an agreement).

This post was of course written from the point of view of a PI on grants in the current system. In tomorrow's post: musings about the challenges of making the academic science/research culture (including aspects involving grants) more life-friendly (for lack of a better term).

Invertebrate Time

In the novel Netherland by Joseph O'Neill, the protagonist's wife and son move to London, leaving him in New York:

My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.

Although my situation is not so sad and dire -- my family is away on a short visit with the in-laws -- I can relate to the feeling of being adrift in time, lacking the usual spine of my days.

I suppose I could go shopping today, supposedly the biggest shopping day of the year, but I have gotten this far in my life without feeling the urge to get up before dawn and lurk in a mall parking lot so as to rush into a store when it opens and immediately fill a shopping cart with on-sale electronic devices. Instead, I will enjoy my quiet invertebrate time by writing and thinking at home and at the office.

I plan to spend much of the day in my office, working on an interesting paper and trying to make progress on a proposal. There might be one or two other colleagues around, and a few grad students and postdocs, but the corridors will be empty and dim. It can be very pleasant working in a peaceful department building for a day or three.

I find that on the rare occasions when I have time alone with no teaching, no meetings, and no family responsibilities, I immediately revert to the working-eating-sleeping schedule I followed in earlier, less evolved stages of my academic life. I work long hours, eat at random times, and stay up most of the night. This isn't so great as a long-term lifestyle, but when you only get to do this once or twice a year, it can be quite fun being temporarily invertebrate.

The other day, my husband wondered if, years from now, we would revert to our pre-child academic lifestyle once our daughter grows up and leaves home, or whether we won't be interested in working such long hours again. In our pre-child life, we knew which near-campus restaurants were open all night (or at least very late), and our cats never knew when to expect us home. Our felines and our future grad students probably hope that we will not adopt a 20/7 work schedule.

In the meantime, I am enjoying my few days of invertebrate time, and then will be happy to resume normal life, especially since the term is almost over.

Leisure Studies

Last weekend, amidst working on a couple of manuscripts and reviews etc. in the office and at home (not to mention doing some overtime thinking), I did some work around the house and garden. While I was rummaging in the garden, a neighbor stopped by to tell me that she works so hard during the week that she doesn't have the energy to work on her house/yard and it must be nice to have an easy job like mine.

I decided not to tackle the issue of whether or not I have an easy job. I just said Yes, it's a great job.

Her job could well be stressful, involve working with awful people, and/or require strict working hours that leave her exhausted on the weekend. My reply to her was therefore sincere. I do have a great job. She has no idea how much or how hard I work, but much of what I do I enjoy, so it could well be that her 40 hours/week in the office of a furniture store is more tiring than my 60+ hours/week in an academic job.

On this particular occasion with this particular neighbor, my goal was to end the conversation as soon as possible, but I was left with the feeling that I had somehow let the side down (← sports analogy!). I may even have reinforced her image of slacker professors leading a life of (smug) leisure.

If one's goal were to generate widespread admiration and respect for the professoriate, is it better to convey the impression that a faculty position:

- is a great job (for whatever reason; flexible hours, interesting work etc.) that leaves one some leisure time, or

- is such an extraordinarily taxing job requiring so many long hours of intense thinking that yard work becomes appealing?

What if both are true?

Think Work

Not long ago on a Monday, a colleague said to a group of his graduate students something like "I was thinking about this [research project] over the weekend, and had an idea about that problem we were discussing last week." A first year PhD student said, amazed "You work on weekends?".

Aside from the issue of whether it was wise of the PhD student to admit to his advisor that he doesn't even think about his research on weekends (the advisor's interpretation of the question, owing to the emphasis on the word work) or to imply that he is surprised that his advisor thinks about research on weekends (another possible interpretation, if the word you was the intended emphasis): Is thinking working?

Of course thinking is an important part of research, and research is our work, so thinking is working in that respect. I could be very wrong, but I think most people who work by choice in a research environment think about their research on weekends. Even if I spent an entire weekend (or week) doing nothing but recreational activities with my family and cats, it is not possible for me to not think about my research at all.

That doesn't mean I don't know how to 'leave work at the office' in some respects. I have no interest in discussing office politics at the dinner table, for example, and I certainly don't spend every waking hour thinking about work. But I can't imagine not thinking at all about my work (research, teaching, some of the more interesting aspects of professional service) outside of normal working hours, and I can't imagine not wanting to think about these things (i.e. I can't imagine wanting to not think about work).

If you're curious about something and are trying to figure something out, you think about it. That doesn't (necessarily) mean that you are an obsessed monomaniac workaholic, nor is your only other option to be a work-brain-turned-off-when-not-at-work person. I think that being so interested in your work that you want to think about it even when you don't 'have' to is simply a characteristic of someone who enjoys their work.

My response to the amazed student's question would have been similar to my colleague's: Even if I wanted to stop thinking about my work, I couldn't. And even if I could stop, I wouldn't want to.

Someone can get a PhD in Science without working (and thinking about) research 24/7, and you don't even have to feel that your PhD research is absolutely the most fascinating thing in the universe, but I would hope that there would be something about the subject that was interesting enough to think about now and then on the weekend.

About Time

Time is a perennial issue (<-- attempt at humor). How do we accomplish anything (or, at least, enough) in a job that could take infinite time, even if we didn't do anything else (e.g., spend time with other people, eat, sleep etc.)? The issue came up several times this week in the following ways: 1. I was, as usual, asked the oft-asked question: How many hours do you work/week?

2. A new assistant professor (with a minimal teaching and administrative load in his first year) asked: When do I get time for research?

3. A soon-to-graduate Ph.D. who already has a tenure-track position lined up asked: Now it gets easier because I can advise students who will do a lot of the work, right?

My answers to these questions, in reverse order to that listed above:

3. I don't know if it will get easier or not (it depends a lot on the person/situation), but it will not get easier for the reason stated.

2. You don't get time, you have to find time -- perhaps by an alchemical reaction that makes time out of non-time, but you have to find it somehow.

1. This is the most difficult question of the three to answer because I work a lot of random hours in addition to the standard work week. The short answer is: I work between 40-75 hours/week, but I rarely work 40 or 75 hours/week -- a 'typical' week, which probably doesn't exist, is somewhere in between.

At some point in my blog-past, I described our family system (instituted when the offspring appeared) in which I get 3 nights/week to do whatever I want (work, not work, do errands, sit in a cafe and compose haiku, make cat videos for posting on YouTube etc.), and my husband gets 3 nights/week to do whatever he wants (work). Also, if I so choose, I typically get some weekend time to work while my daughter is involved in various activities. Of course this system falls apart when one of us is traveling, but in general it works pretty well. If I need to, I can find a lot of extra time to get things done, or at least the 57 most essential things that need doing right away.

Grad-Time Continuum

How much grad students 'should' work (other than the 20 hours of teaching/research on which their salary is based), is one of those unanswerable questions that varies with the student and the research and whether the equipment gods are happy and so on. I've known and advised grad students who worked 9-5 (or 8-6), had a life/family, and did quite well. This is very rare; these people are super-efficient and have well-defined projects that don't rely on balky equipment and less efficient co-workers. Much more common are research projects that require some (to a lot) of night/weekend time. There are also many examples of students who tried to work 9-5, weren't super-efficient, and who flamed out because of their lack of progress with research.

With the exception of one of my current students, I work more hours than any of the others, and (with one other exception) this is OK with me. I have one student who works an insane amount because he wants to, but (with the one other exception) my other students have more of a balance between time at the department and time off campus. They are always telling me about concerts or crazy parties they went to, or a weekend trip they took, or a hike/bike-ride they went on, or a non-science book that they read, and I like hearing about their other interests. They are doing interesting and productive research and they know I am satisfied/happy with their work.

As for the one who isn't currently working much or well, we have an appointment to discuss the situation next week: is it a time-management problem, family/health etc. problem, lack of interest, lack of something else? I can deal with some of those in terms of adjusting the student's research program and/or my expectations. If it's a lack of interest or motivation, I want to know sooner rather than later.

How Many Hours Do Professors Work?

"How many hours do professors work" keeps showing up in the list of keywords used by people who find this blog, and it has come up in some comments before, but I don't think I have ever really addressed it directly. There is of course no single answer.

Even if I attempt to answer it for how many hours I work, the number varies a lot from day to day and week to week. In general, though, it's somewhere between 50-70 hours/week.

Here's how it adds up:

In a typical week, I work the usual hours during the work day. The working day starts for my husband and me after we take our daughter to school in the morning.

My daughter's school gets out at 4 pm, then she goes to an afterschool play program until 5:45 (except for the day she has piano lessons, when we retrieve her early -- if there's a faculty meeting, we flip a coin to see who stays at the meeting and who goes to piano lesson -- the loser stays at the meeting). She loves the afterschool play time. She used to only do it a few days a week and my husband and I would take turns leaving the office early, but this year she requested to go to it all 5 days. Apparently, attending part time was disruptive to her intricate and exciting social life.

So, I typically stay at the office until 5:30. Three nights/week, I work after dinner and after some family/evening time, and I typically work until midnight-1 a.m. That 'extra' 12-15 hours each week is when I get my writing/thinking done, as the days are typically consumed by meetings, advising, teaching, and so on.

If I need to, I also work a bit on weekends. This is a good time to get some work done in the lab, get ready for the week's teaching, do some grading, and so on. I work while my husband takes our daughter to swimming lessons etc.

Therefore, in a week in which neither my husband or I are traveling, I work somewhere between 50-70 hours. For most of that time, my daughter is either at school or asleep, so I don't feel like I'm sacrificing anything but my own sleep (and housework.. we have a house-cleaner who comes every few weeks). This schedule works well for my husband and me because we see each other at work every day and we have lunch together every day. Also, he has the same kind of schedule/life so we're both in it together.

Nothing But Time

Working at home just doesn't work for me -- it never has. I need to be in my office, surrounded by all my office stuff, without the home distractions of people and cats. I don't think this is any more virtuous than people who work successfully at home, though. The key thing is what you accomplish, wherever that may be. I have postdocs and students who prefer to work at their homes, and that's totally fine with me as long as we have enough time in the department when our schedules intersect, and as long as they are making progress in their research.

I was recently entertained when a colleague who NEVER comes to the department at night or on weekends, and seldom in the summer months either, stopped by the office one weekend to check his mailbox after one of his many vacations. He saw me coming out of my office, and was very surprised. He said "I didn't expect to see YOU here". So I said "Why not?" He had no response to my question. It occurred to me then that perhaps some people who 'work' at home (as opposed to the ones who really do) assume that no one else is working in the off hours either.

When I was a grad student, there were lots of grad students and postdocs working late at night and on weekends in the department. In my department now, it's the faculty and postdocs who are there at all hours, and we seldom see grad students at night and on weekends. I have always assumed that this means that the students are better at working at home than we older people who 'grew up' working in the office. And, without getting into the whole cat vs. dog issue, for some reason a large number of people in my research group have dogs, and these dogs require a lot of attention and company. This is fine with me -- I like both dogs and cats, although at present I only have cats at home. I have been strangely fascinated to watch two dog-owning but childless people in my research group juggle schedules that are much more complex than mine (a non-dog-owning mother of one). They love these dogs, of course, and the dogs are important for their emotional well-being, so we all just work around it, just as my students and postdocs have to deal with my occasional absences or erratic schedule when my daughter doesn't have school.

The 60 Hour Week

A recent op-ed essay in the NYT about the end of summer noted that most academics work a lot more than 40 hours a week, though we have somewhat erratic schedules and our work is not typically 8-5. I have some colleagues who are strictly 8-5ers, but am not one of them. I would have a hard time with a strict schedule, and with working so few hours. I added up my hours in a typical week, and easily got to 60+. Maybe I am less efficient than some of my colleagues, but even so, I wouldn't feel satisfied with working so little. It takes about 40 hours for teaching and administrative work each week, and then there's the research I want/need to get done. It doesn't really feel like it's so much time because the work is so varied, and much of it is interesting and fun.

That said, I am not looking forward to an upcoming faculty 'retreat'; i.e., an all-day faculty meeting on a weekend. Overall, I am fortunate that my department has very few evening/weekend activities that are not family-friendly. Some of my colleagues in other departments at this university have lots of such activities, and they are always torn between not going (possibly harming their standing in the department; stressful for tenure-track faculty) and going but having less time with their kids/spouses (+ the expense of baby-sitters). I don't have to deal with that much, but these retreats are different. Even if we could find an all-day babysitter who could come to our house as early as 8 a.m. on a weekend, it would probably cost about $100 for my husband and I to attend this retreat thing. I don't mean to be cheap, but the general idea of paying to go to an all-day faculty meeting is annoying. The previous chair refused to pay a student to babysit faculty offspring during these retreats because he says it wouldn't be 'fair' to those faculty without kids. I think that reason is bizarre. In the past, my husband and I have flipped a coin to see who goes and who doesn't (the loser of the coin toss attends the retreat).