New reporting system would better explain faculty activities

IOWA CITY - A new reporting system on how faculty spend their time will help better communicate to legislators, state regents and taxpayers what faculty do, a University of Iowa official said Tuesday.

Officials from the UI, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa are working on an update to the biennial Faculty Activities Report to the state Board of Regents, UI Associate Provost Tom Rice said Tuesday during the Faculty Council meeting.

The current survey of a random sample of faculty asks where they do their work and for how many hours, but has no detail about the types of activities faculty spend their time on, Rice said. The draft version of the new questionnaire asks faculty how many hours they spend every day, including weekends, on specific listed activities, such as classroom teaching and preparation, grading, developing new courses, writing and preparing grants, public presentations and attending conferences.

It will allow university leaders and faculty to put forth a much more powerful defense of what faculty do and how they spend their time when the issue arises with state legislators or others, as it has in the past, Rice said.

“We have not done our homework in educating our ultimate bosses, which is the people of Iowa, in what we do,” Rice said. “It's a much richer account. We find it to be extremely useful data.”

Next year is the earliest the new reporting system would be in place, Rice said. The final version still needs approval from the three universities and the regents office.

Officials also hope to make the report annual rather than biennial, and prepare it as a more lively annual report with photos and personal stories of faculty members, Rice said.

Faculty Council member Jeff Cox, a history professor, said he has some concern that the survey could be a slippery slope, and that some faculty may see it as sending the wrong message about productivity. Faculty don't punch a time clock with set hours, Cox said; they are more like farmers than factory workers when it comes to schedules.

“If you start treating faculty like factory workers instead of farmers, it might start damaging” their output, Cox said.

But other Faculty Council members said they welcome the chance to more fully explain how they spend their time and to gather data that shows they are working on grading, research and classroom planning on the evenings and weekends, too.

“This could capture that,” Jody Murph, associate professor of general pediatrics, said.