Casualizing Academic Research

One of the most interesting phenomena at my institution over the last decade is the shift of research from a vital component of our academic life to a casual complement to our work as teachers. On the one hand, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Teaching should be a priority for most university faculty and for many is is the most engaging, challenging, and rewarding parts of our job.

At the same time, I’ve been fascinated by the confluence of factors that contributed to the marginalization of research at least in the humanities (and in our program in particular, but I suspect this is something that can be generalized across our campus).

When I first started at my institution it was common for faculty to have a 40/40/20 contract where we dedicated 40% of our time to both research and teaching and 20% of our time to service. Since we taught 5 classes per year in our usual load, that meant each class was worth 8% of our contract time. A few years ago, our deanery requested that we increase the value of each class to 10%. This shifted our contract to 50/30/20 and weighted our contracted time slightly more toward teaching. At the time, this seemed like a fair representation of our energy and maybe even aligned our contract more accurately with our reality. 

More recently still, we were asked to add 10% to our teaching contract for advising of various forms. This seemed like an aspirational change to our contract, especially since our majors have never really embraced advising as part of their academic life. At the same time, we were asked to limit our service load in our contract to 10%. This was a weird request, in part, because many of our service loads increased as a result of retirements and buy outs across campus. The result was that many people ended up adding additional service, which our deanery generally approved. My contract, then, looked like this: 60/15/25. 60% teaching was largely mandated and the 25% service was my 10% typical service load plus editing North Dakota Quarterly (10%) and being the graduate director for our legacy graduate program (5%). Most recently, I was told that I should add 5% to my contract if I’m preparing a new class. This shifted my teaching this semester to 65% and left me with a measly 10% dedicated to research. While my contract is a bit exceptional in its emphasis on service, even our typical departmental contract produces a research load closer to 20% than to 40%. This means that our contract time dedicated to research is often cut in half from what it was a few years ago.

To be clear, some of this has to do with the existing funding model at our institution that funds faculty salaries from separate pools of money allocated to teaching, research, and service. Shifting some salary costs from the research pot to the teaching pot (and from the percent of the university’s budget funded from grants and state research funding to funding more closely tied to enrollment numbers and tuition dollars) makes sense from a financial standpoint.

I also want to argue that it makes sense from a political standpoint.  

At the same time that this change is taking place at my institution (and I expect nationally), there are growing rumbling from the state legislature about what we can and can’t teach in our classrooms. This appears to be the long tail of the CRT controversy, some vague strategy to suppress “wokeness,” or a less tropical imitation of Florida’s commitment to exert political pressure on the higher education classroom. Whatever the reason, our legislators have made it clear that they want a say in what happens both in our institutions and in our classrooms.

Of course, our classroom teaching is likely to remain the most visible and exposed place for faculty, but it is unlikely to be the place where faculty views are the most controversial or provocative. For many (if not most) faculty, our research outputs reflect our perspectives on controversial topics and align with our ideological and intellectual commitments. Managing faculty in the classroom is relatively easier than managing our research which often appears in technical publications destined for specialized audiences. That said, politically problematic research can be a significant challenge for an institution which seeks to protect (at least notionally) intellectual and academic freedom as well as to manage its own political stakes. Moreover, the benefit of humanities research to the institution is rather minimal in that it is unlikely to generate significant income through grants or produce the kinds of outputs that are quantifiable in an easily monetized way. In short, research in the humanities present potential exposure and minimal benefit.

By reducing the percentage of our contract allocated to research, the university has created a potential way to distance themselves from controversial research outputs especially produced by humanities faculty at minimal cost. After all, faculty are welcome to advance controversial views (or even, you know, widely accepted views) on their own time and in their own name. Could reducing the percentage of a contract dedicated to research serve as a long-game strategy to reduce the university’s exposure to controversial research?

One of the most interesting aspects of this shift away from supporting humanities research is that the institution still expects us to produce research for promotion and merit raises at roughly the same level as before our contracts skewed away from research outputs. In other words, there is a growing disconnect between contract hours dedicated to research and expected outcomes. More of our research, then, has to be done off contract. 

In other words, administrative procedures are nudging us to draw on the “undercommons” of the university as an institution. We’re being asked to produce research outputs without contracted compensation which offers us freedom to align our goals with our personal commitment. At the same time, it ensures that the university as a politically exposed institution can maintain some distance from work that may be taking place “off contract”.

Perhaps I’m being conspiratorial here. More likely what I’m describing is a happy (for my institution), but unexpected (and probably mildly implausible) side effect of changing budget practices at my institution. Whatever the goals of these policies, they do shift more and more research from the category of contracted work to broader the category of professional life and reveal the muddled boundary of work/life balance in academia.