Why does it feel like I don’t have anytime for research as a CUNY full-time faculty member?
We’re contractually obligated for 21 teaching hours.
According to our contract 8 weeks of parental leave is the equivalent of 6 hours reassigned time.
8 x 40 (assuming a standard 40-hour work week) = 320 work hours
This means 21 teaching hours = 1120 actual hours or 28 weeks of a 40-hour work week.
Our semesters have 14 teaching weeks and 1 exam week.
This means there is just 40 hours a semester left over for service and research within each 15 week semester.
There are 52 weeks in a year. We are contractually only 9 month employees. Three-quarters of 52 is 39 weeks.
This means that CUNY is paying us for 11 weeks of research and service each academic year.
Our contract explicitly expects us to spend only 28% of our time on non-teaching duties. Or to average about 11 hours per week during our 9 months of employment.
Really?!
Yes. Let’s do the numbers another way to figure how much of this time is intended to be research, rather than service.
Lecturers are full time faculty with no research commitments, but service commitments. Their contractual obligation is 27 teaching hours. This strongly implies that 6 teaching hours is equivalent to the amount of research a full-time faculty in a professorial title is expected to produce each year.
We already saw that 6 teaching hours = 8 weeks of work.
That leave 3 weeks of work or 120 hours an academic year for service to the institution.
SO, if you spent 8% of your time on institutional service, 21% of your time doing research, and 72% of your time on teaching related activities this past academic year, congratulations! You worked to contract and fulfilled all your professional duties. Please feel free to include this as an addendum to your annual evaluation or tenure file.
It should have felt something like this:
Liv Mariah Yarrow 