Do you have any idea how many hours a week the average college teacher actually spends in class with students?A total of 9.8 hours, according to various surveys. That's right—an amount of time slightly greater than the workday of most Americans. And the average is inflated by the schedules of community college teachers who spend 15 to 16 hours a week in the classroom. What makes these astonishing figures especially noteworthy right now is the handwringing in one state after another over constraints on the budgets for higher education and the difficulty of holding the line on tuitions ...So how does a professor use the remainder of his workweek? ...Half the full-time faculty say they spend no more than four hours a week on research and scholarly writing. As a corollary, 45% of the nation's entire professoriate had no professional writings accepted or published during a given two-year period ...Few grow rich, but most earn between $40,000 and $70,000 for their nine-month year. Average faculty salaries range from $32,420 for assistant professors at baccalaureate colleges to $66,780 for full professors at doctoral-level universities ...It is time to revisit the issue of research and publication. Even at private four-year colleges only 6% of the faculty members had at least five professional writings accepted or published during a given two-year period. About half the faculty at four-year institutions and more than 90% at two-year community colleges said in a survey by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that their interests lie primarily in teaching, not research, that teaching should be the main criterion for promotion.
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