In response to my post yesterday considering some of the difficulties in restaffing a course when its professor falls ill, Leigh commented:
Sometimes nothing can be done. Last winter I had to cancel my evolution course, which doubles as a laboratory in the philosophy of science, because of a serious illness. (I had already given the course in the fall; I voluntarily added the winter one because the fall course was doubly oversubscribed.) Fortunately this happened just after the course started, so the students were minimally lurchified. The course is quite idiosyncratic, with no actual lectures after the first class, and there just isn’t anyone who could have taken it over.
My first thought was, “I would love to take that course!” My next thought was that Leigh raises another key issue that makes it challenging to reassign a course to a different faculty member, even if you have lead time: our syllabi, teaching styles, and skill sets are not fully interchangeable. This is a fact that rears its head not just when a department is making course schedule, but when that course schedule needs to be remade on account of faculty work other than teaching.
At my university, the courses we are teaching in the spring semester are assigned (and scheduled, including the room assignments) pretty early in the fall semester. Each department’s master schedule of how many sections of each course will be offered each semester is worked out even farther ahead, in an effort to ensure the department’s majors can actually take the courses they need to graduate.
However, in these parts there are opportunities for faculty members to apply for “release time” — basically relieving you from teaching one of your assigned classes (or more, depending on the program offering the release) — to pursue other projects like research, administrative work, participating in a “faculty in residence” program, and so forth. How you get the time is that the program providing the release gives your department the funds to hire someone to teach one of those courses you were originally assigned to teach.
Release time can be a wonderful thing for the faculty member who pretty much needs to get that research done anyway but suddenly gets to do it with 40 fewer students writing her papers that need grading. Nevertheless, practically, release time can create some headaches. One issue is that calls to apply for release time usually go out in the middle of the term (after the next term’s courses have already been scheduled) and notifications of who has been awarded a release sometimes don’t happen until the very end of the semester. (Today is our last day of classes. I’m still waiting to hear on one for which I applied for spring semester.) This means that you can’t offer the replacement teaching slot as a firm offer (rather than a possibility) until ridiculously close to the term it would start.
The other issue, which is closely related, is that not all of our courses can be taught by a generic member of our academic discipline, even one who is a really good teacher. For example, I’d be hopeless trying to teach a course on aesthetics or Latin American philosophy. Most of my colleagues would be similarly at sea trying to take over my “Ethics in Science” course, and almost as many would be over their heads teaching “Philosophy of Science”. Yet, given my areas of expertise and the department’s and the university’s curricular needs, most of what I teach is “Ethics in Science” and “Philosophy of Science”. I teach these courses regularly because I’m one of the people in my department who can teach them. Many of our upper level courses are staffed this way, taught by the people who have the expertise to teach them — people who, on account of that expertise, end up teaching them regularly.
When someone with specialized expertise whose teaching assignments are linked to that expertise gets release time, restaffing those courses is non-trivial. (Restaffing them with six weeks’ worth of lead time is even harder.) But the reality is that most departments (especially philosophy departments) can’t afford enough overlap in specialization to have a “spare” faculty member in every area they cover in their curriculum.
Still, a department doesn’t (or shouldn’t) want to forbid faculty who are the only ones playing their zones in the course offerings from applying for course releases. Doing so might provide perverse incentives for faculty to “specialize” in teaching courses that lots of other faculty in the department can and do teach (which for us would mean intro to philosophy, logic and critical thinking, and business and professional ethics) and to avoid teaching anything else that might add breadth to the department’s offerings. As well, giving the faculty member who is the only one who can teach X no option but to teach X every single year (or semester) might leave that faculty member burnt out on teaching X, or even casting a wistful eye (and CV) at institutions where release time is more abundant and departments are more supportive of their faculty members’ efforts to secure it.
If release time could be divvied up before course schedules were set, this wouldn’t be such a problem. I don’t know if this is an inherent problem with the sources of funding for programs offering course releases, or if it’s because the people calling for proposals and then awarding the release time are at a remove from the realities of course scheduling and staffing. Probably there’s some of each.
Requests for release time, sabbatical leave, etc. are always considered in light of the good of the university. Such requests do occasionally get turned down or negotiated if there is too much negative impact on department function.
Interesting. I know at my undergrad, release time was mostly just allowed for intro classes (say, introductory biology). Those classes were then frequently taught by adjuncts. In the bio department, this went pretty smooth because there was already a set lab curriculum and lecture topics that must be covered in the two-course intro sequence. Even if you had different profs, you did all the same labs and had little deviation in lecture. The only difference was the format of the tests, but I could still study for the tests with classmates in a different prof’s section.