SICK AND TIRED: A CASE STUDY OF FACULTY WORKLOAD AND HEALTH

Birch Moonwomon, Sonoma State University

Summary. While it is common knowledge that faculty workload on the SSU campus is excessive, and one notes, too, that many faculty members experience health problems, there is no collection of narrative and description of the experience of work overload, ill health, and their relationship. This is a case study of workload and health within a department. This report uses material from interviews with eight faculty members who tell their experiences of overload, illness and injury, and the effects on morale, curricula, and teaching and research effectiveness. Interviewees interpret their labor situation according to their understanding of SSU’s administrative structure and ethos.

Faculty members assert that

· excessive workload both causes and exacerbates illness and injury.

· overload and illness adversely affect one’s own work; the work and well being of colleagues; and the department’s programs.

· institutionalized overload harms academic freedom and job security.

· the SSU administration has reshaped itself, inappropriately, in the corporate mold.

· the SSU administration is distanced from, undervalues, and exploits faculty work.

· SSU budgeting wrongly prioritizes spending, as seen in lack of support for programs, little hiring of new faculty, and focus on building projects.

· the policy of “targets” harms the students and the curricula.

· tenure faculty overwork is related to lecturer faculty underemployment.

· exhausted and ill faculty members will leave SSU.

· faculty must take collective action for improved working conditions.

Over the 17 years during which the eight interviewed department members have been at the University, tenure faculty have been over-burdened; lecturer faculty have been insecure. Interviewees report that the excessive workload demands simply cannot be met, that they always feel they should be doing more than one task at once, and that work-life is increasingly and intolerably fragmented into multiple tasks. Also, some work is undocumented and unpaid for. Teaching preparation and innovation suffers, catalog and scheduling work become triage events, and time goes unnecessarily into assessments. Committee work is onerous; service learning courses are taken on as overloads. Tenure faculty find no time for scholarship in the academic year. Some work goes uncompensated because it is invisible. Faculty members believe that they and administrators do not truly share a common mission.

The work of the eight faculty members should amount to 6 FTEF; it amounts to 9 FTEF.

Department members each came to the University in good health. All report some health compromises, four having non-trivial conditions. Physical health difficulties include the development or relapse into chronic illnesses. Interviewees report serious fatigue and problems with pain management. Emotional health, too, has suffered. Department members report such things as depression and ongoing insomnia. Interviewees feel pressure to perform at overload level in spite of compromised health The demands of the job cause or exacerbate illness. Interviewees historicize the department as a place where employment brings about sickness or death. They report that an illness of one has impact on all. Because hirings—both tenure-track and lecturer—have been curtailed, there are too few persons to pick up the work of a sick colleague, so increased workload and more illness result.

Department members situate their experiences of work overload and its relation to health problems within a University structure that they see as based on a corporate model inappropriate for university campuses. Interviewees characterize an administrator type, someone lacking in both investment in the campus and dedication to education, whose distance from faculty work-life encourages the devaluation and exploitation of the faculty. Administrators themselves may not be able to refuse the business model, however; and deans have become powerless to advocate for faculty. Respondents criticize the policy of “targets” for course enrollments and describe the damage to programs. They claim that budget allocations show wrong prioritizing: while money does not flow for instruction and professional development, money is provided for building projects. In particular, funding has been lost for faculty hiring, so tenure-track lines within the department have decreased; at the same time, lecturers are underemployed, so FTEF goes down. Clearly, excessive workload must follow from the budget decisions made.

Why do faculty members cooperate? Faculty members overcompensate in their work because they feel judged as second-rate. Faculty also cooperate to save the quality of instruction and to try to salvage threatened programs. Junior and lecturer faculty are further pressured by the probationary and contingent natures of their employments. Three of the four interviewed tenure faculty are considering leaving the University. Several faculty members urge group resistance, such as working-to-rule (a forty-hour workweek) and going on strike.

Table of contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Faculty experience of workload and health 3

2.1. Workload 7

2.1.1. Sense of work overload 7

2.1.2. Hours of work 13

2.2. Health 15

2.2.1. Changes in physical health 17

2.2.2. Changes in emotional health 20

2.2.3. Effects of compromised health on academic duties 22

3. Corporate model: standardization and exploitation 28

3.1. Under new management 30

3.1.1. The New Administrator 31

3.1.2. Effective powerlessness 33

3.2. Resource flow 35

3.2.1. Targets 35

3.2.2. Budget priorities 38

3.2.3. Faculty body: too few members doing too much 41

3.3. Subjection 46

4. What is to be done? 50

4.1. Tenure faculty exodus: retention problem 50

4.2. Resistance 55

5. Conclusion 56

Appendix 58

Notes 58

SICK AND TIRED: A CASE STUDY OF FACULTY WORKLOAD AND HEALTH

Birch Moonwomon, Sonoma State University

“I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Fannie Lou Hamer

1. introduction.

What is the relation of faculty workload at Sonoma State University to faculty health, physical and mental? It is clear to anyone who participates in faculty conversations on the campus that tenure¹ and lecturer faculty members generally experience their workload as excessive. Faculty work overload has become the common sense of the campus; and it is understood that staff have a similar overload. But how, really, do faculty members experience themselves as burdened, person by person? There are also signs of too much ill health among faculty and staff. It is my impression that this is another item of common sense knowledge. I hear about illness and injury and their effects on the injured persons and their colleagues. But how, really, do faculty members experience illness and injury? If there is a work overload, and if there is a notable amount of ill health among faculty, it is reasonable to suspect a relationship between them. One can suppose that the first, if not causing the second, would at least exacerbate it; and that the second would make functioning with the first even more difficult, for oneself and one’s colleagues. But what is the connection as articulated by faculty, person by person?

For our campus, and perhaps for interested parties outside, a close look at the specifics of workload and health problems has the potential to alter assumptions, provide ways of thinking about and naming what is going on, and, in general, affect the discourses in the University concerning workload and health. Change in consciousness might then influence actions seeking to mitigate the situation.

This report describes workload and health as members of a Sonoma State University department talk about them. It presents a case study; that is, it is a study of certain phenomena within a particular context, a department’s faculty. The objects of study are faculty members’ expressions of their experiences of workload and health problems, including the relations between these two and their felt effect on the department. Interview conversations took place one-on-one, but an accumulation of perspectives from individuals should uncover, in a bottom-up way, the department body’s experience of workload and health and the effect on department functioning.

Here are the results of the qualitative study conducted through open-ended ethnographic-style interviews with 8 of the10 faculty members of a department. Each interview was an hour to an hour and a half long, with the exception of a somewhat shorter conversation with a very recently arrived member of the department. The interview plan had several questions (see Appendix), including what the interviewee did daily in a mid-semester workweek, what the state of that person’s health was, what the consequences were of workload to that person’s health, and what the consequences of ill health were to colleagues and the department. The interview conversation, however, was loose, allowing the interviewee to talk casually from her or his own experience and express perceptions and perspectives on the topic generally.

Thematically, I find the talk of the interviews can be characterized in these three ways: (1) as assertion and description of workload, health problems, and their relations; (2) as expression of demoralization and alienation in the midst of collegiality; (3) but also as analysis of the situation and proposition for actions for change. Expanded, these themes show up in the following ways.

Faculty members observe both work overload and ill heath.

· relations of both cause and exacerbation between excessive workload and illness/injury.

· ill effects from both excessive workload and health problems on the quality of one’s own work, on the work and well being of one’s colleagues and department programs.

Faculty member express feelings of affinity with colleagues but animosity towards top administrators and aspects of University structure.

· interviewees value other department members and sympathize with their difficulties;

· interviewees assert that the University has inappropriately reshaped itself using a business model;

· interviewees believe that the policy of “targets” is harmful to curricula and the progress of their students;

· interviewees sense that work is undervalued;

· interviewees assess that excessive workload is institutionalized and systematically maintained;

· interviewees assess that excessive workload and the structure maintaining it undercut employment security and threaten academic freedom.

Faculty members further express their understanding of the workload and health situation and the need for change.

· interviewees assess that the SSU administration wrongly prioritizes spending, as seen in lack of support for programs, little hiring of new faculty, and focus on building projects;

· interviewees assess that there is a relationship between tenure faculty overwork and lecturer faculty underemployment;

· interviewees state intentions to take individual actions to leave SSU (which would affect faculty retention) and group actions agitating for improved working conditions.

This write-up is the first form I have given to a report of the findings of this study. I intend to share it with SSU and CSU faculty and administrators, and with other bodies, including CFA. I welcome responses: birch.moonwomon@sonoma.edu.

2. faculty experience of workload and health.

The interviewed members of the department came to SSU in different periods in the history of that unit and of the university, beginning in 1989. The hirings were not, of course, distributed evenly over the 17-year period, but occurred in times of growth, that is, in times of recovery from budget crises, which were also sometimes accompanied by changes in administration. The cooling-and-warming periods of the economic history of CSU background the entrances of these faculty members, as does the campus’s own financial practices and Presidents’ policies, as well as the work habits of the department’s faculty, already well-established by 1989. The interviewee who came to SSU earliest arrived just after the end of the Diamandopoulos era, a time of great animosity between the faculty and the campus President, including bitterness about job losses of tenure and lecturer faculty. The interviewee who is the newest hire is a very recent arrival, coming in at the end of the latest budget crisis. Throughout the 17-year span the department has had, as is common for academic programs, several overlapping generations of faculty. This layering still includes a member of what one interviewee calls “the first cohort,” faculty of the first generation, from the department’s founding or at least its early days.

The two interviewed faculty members who have been longest employed, a tenure faculty (FM1) and a lecturer (FM2), were hired in the late 1980s and 1990s period, a time of recovery from the devastation left in the melt water of Diamandopoulos. FM2 associates her entry with a now retired colleague. “I was recommended for the lecturer pool by [a former department member]. …I interviewed to teach [an introductory course].” FM1 first worked at SSU in a staff position, then was hired to teach as a lecturer, “on the eve of…the Great Awakening”, as the campus was trying “to dig itself out of the institutional and infrastructural collapse.” When she became tenure faculty, she was “the first [such] hire in the… department in 19 years.” In her first years in the department she participated in the tough recovery struggle, an endeavor not accomplished simply through hiring; work overload was the norm, and cooperation with it was already the accepted practice. FM1 became aware of habits of overwork that her senior colleagues had developed, perhaps during the Diamandopoulos era. Overwork was a model, an inheritance of practice transmitted from one cohort to the next. In later years FM1 has tried to undercut the influence of this model on new faculty, advising a junior colleague in the department “not to sacrifice having a life for this job.” Speaking of the current come-back period in the light of the late 1980s/early 1990s recovery, she says, “Now we have to do it again. …[F]or a lot of us who were hired in in that cohort, this looks so horrifically familiar. We’re seeing it just tank again. And we know, because we lived it, that it takes a decade to come back from that. And I don’t wanna be here and be sixty…with a time-and-a-half to double-time workload. I literally can’t. I’d be on disability retirement by then.”

Two of the interviewees were hired in the late 1990s, in the interglacial between another two periods of lay-offs and hiring freezes. FM3, a lecturer faculty member, came to SSU from a fieldwork job outside the country. “I was looking for work in [the discipline]. I was not having luck finding anything. …I found out [from an advertisement] a position here.…I came up to do an interview.…They took me. I’ve been here ever since.” FM4, tenure faculty, arrived from graduate school, where he had been a returning student. At more than one point in the interview conversation FM4 speaks of the workload imposed on and accepted by members of the first cohort and his need to resist fulfilling expectations. In the period in which he was hired, new faculty confronted the demands of the old model. Failure to meet those demands had consequences. “A big wave started in the 90s and continued until funding collapsed” with the latest budget crisis. “We were coming in with debt or young families, still paying student loans. … A lot of us were saying, ‘We can’t get caught between our families and covering the load of those who are retiring.’ [FM4’s predecessor] was doing ridiculous overloads. I realized there was no way this was going to be happening. My daughter is only 3 years old once.” The program development work for one of the programs for which FM4 has responsibility has suffered because he has refrained from increasing what is already a large overload for him. “I wouldn’t take it on as an overload like [FM’s predecessor] did, and it didn’t get done. It got pushed into Extended Ed.”

Several faculty members were hired in the new millennium, three—FM5, lecturer, FM6 and FM7, both tenure—shortly before the budget crisis period, that is, in the late portion of the interglacial, under the threat of hard times just ahead. All three came from positions in Midwestern universities, except that FM5 had been away from academia for more than a year before her arrival at SSU. FM7 recalls, “I was looking for a place to go.…I love the area. I love Sonoma County. And I’m very, very impressed with my colleagues in the department.” In the period that these three members were hired, distance between the faculty and the administration was increasing as the budget crisis neared and hit. At the convocation beginning the first semester of FM6’s work several years ago, he heard “[the Academic Senate Chair] give his address, and it was stand up comedy,” and, clearly, quite critical of the administration. FM5 remembers the fearful atmosphere as the budget crisis loomed. “In the Senate the President assured us that no permanent employees would be lost, that is, employees he considers permanent, people working at his pleasure. There was no assurance of employment to lecturer faculty. It was a really scary time.”

FM8, lecturer, is a retiree from an eastern institution. The last hired faculty member interviewee, he has come within the last year, after the most recent hiring freeze ended. He notes that the university seems financially over-cautious, and comments that “what may seem fiscally wise at a higher level is a disaster at ground level. …There’s a shortage of money for the basic academic function.”

These eight members, tenure and lecturer faculty, representing the several subfields of their discipline, and with varying degrees of post-degree experience—four right from graduate school or postdoc-type work, four from positions in other universities—, all report coming into the department expecting good things. Several mention the good relations among faculty. FM2 was “struck by the collegiality, even though the persons were not very much like each other—a far cry from Berkeley.” She was “young in experience and in age.…I felt welcomed, could go pick [a senior faculty member’s] brain about her experience with native California people.” FM4 found a camaraderie with “no competitiveness, [and that] network is key; it’s not in most other places. That solidarity was a real pull.” And he was impressed that “when I interviewed here, [a former colleague] was sick, had emphysema, was using a breathing machine, had a hard time moving around, and I noticed everyone giving support, stepping in to help.” Tenure faculty also expected—were led to expect—certain conditions for teaching, like small classes and support for innovative teaching the mentoring of students. FM1, FM4, and FM7 mention interests in applied areas of their fields that they expected to have supported at SSU. FM7 recalls, “My impression was that this was a place that really valued small classrooms. HA! … It wanted me to come and develop an applied program.” FM4 was and is “very interested in being at a state institution.” He is “philosophically in line with a teaching place, where there is research to support being a good instructor.” He expands, “I didn’t have illusions about research opportunities that a research institution would give. Teaching would be foremost. But you have to be a teacher-scholar. You need support for that. There is an expectation of continuing research for publication.”

FM1, though, does tell of being cautioned against the job by her graduate school professors. “I can remember advisors …saying to me, ‘Don’t stay there permanently. Get out as fast as you can, because the longer you stay the less likely you’ll be to’, as one put it, ‘achieve escape velocity’. And the second piece of advice was, ‘Under no circumstances get tenure at Sonoma State on the basis of production that wouldn’t get you tenure anywhere else.’ She adds, “Realistically, with the kind of academic workload we’re talking about, it just wasn’t gonna happen.”

One by one these individuals entered work in the department and became acculturated in their initial periods of employment, where overwork was expected, although resistance to that expectation was attempted. In whatever period of SSU history a member joined the faculty, it was a time when threat to growth and loss of jobs marked the recent past or instilled fear of the near future. Always, tenure faculty felt burdened by overwork; lecturer faculty sought sufficient, secure employment.

2.1. Workload. Interviewees provide impressions about their workload and tell pointed stories from their experiences. In the interview conversations they also account specifically for daily and weekly tasks and the burdens of time and attention these represent. The structure of department labor and the work habitus—the history and practice of overwork, with which faculty members are expected to and do cooperate—shape the daily work and discourse of work. The doing and the discourse are reciprocal, constructing and reconstructing each other.

2.1.1. Sense of work overload. Faculty members speak of an excessive and increasing workload that has now grown beyond a limit that allows obligations to be met, even with as many hours of fatigued labor as one can commit. Interviewees report that labor to fulfill contracted or felt obligations for teaching, research, and university and community service is onerous; a good deal of other work, also performed, goes unnoted and uncompensated.

Department members report experience of workload that adversely affects their daily routines and their mental states. FM7 says, “I never had a meal where I wasn’t working by the last half of the semester. Going over notes at breakfast, and if you even get lunch, you’re eating it at your desk, answering emails.” Others also express the sense of no escape from the demands of the work. FM1: “There is never a moment in my life when there’s not something I’m supposed to be doing, including right now…even when I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, even when I’m standing in the classroom, I’m thinking, ‘OK, I gotta get out of here, cause I’ve got six other things.’…I don’t see beyond the end of the week. To the end of the week, standing up.” And, “You get to the point where you cannot physically get that many hours into the work week.” FM6 talks at some length about the constancy of attention to the work demands, requirements that cannot be fully met; attention becomes anxiety and the anxiety can never be relieved. “The worrying never stops, not for a moment …I can never find those little moments of reprieve anymore.…I’m always having angst about what not to do, how to make the choice of what things will just not get done.” Along with increasing numbers of demands, FM1 points to increasing fragmentation of the workday as one of the more burdensome aspects of employment. “The workload issues for me are the increasingly frenetic pacing, the increasingly fragmented work day.…[O]ur workload has escalated but also fragmented with the combination of teaching, student support and advising, administrative work.…[I]t fragments your day into essentially 10-minute intervals.” FM6 also said, concerning both workload and his change in perspective on SSU, “I kept telling myself every year since I’ve been here that it can’t get worse. And every year it gets worse.”

In connection with the sense of workload that has expanded to fill all of an individual’s daily world, faculty members judge that they are being cheated as wage earners, and not only because salaries have not increased in years. The paycheck that does not compensate for overtime is a real, material condition, but also seems metonymic for the unfairness of the work situation. Several department members note that faculty are certainly not working-to-rule. FM2: “I’m always working more hours than I get paid for.” FM4: “ I would be doing a lot less if I were just doing what I’m paid for.” From his lecturer perspective FM3 observes, “The department is getting…far more hours out of me [for each class] than would be possible if I were a full-time faculty member, and far more than I’m paid for.” FM5 refers to “the demand that we be super-people and somehow—magically?—do the job well, when we’re paid for doing a forty-hour a week job but are taking sixty hours of the week or more to do it.”

Teaching and program administration. Direct instruction tasks, such as class preparation, grading and office hours, and advising of students are all impacted by the overall workload. Contrasting her initial expectations of teaching at SSU with her experience of the last few years, FM7 says, “You can try to do innovative education, you can try to make it so that the students actually learn, i.e., by having multiple papers, by having weekly quizzes, by having response papers, by having exercises build one on the other. That is preferred, in fact strongly recommended. But the subtext of the job description should then read, ‘Forget about it, because you’re gonna make yourself sick if you try to do that. Forget about it. Nobody [in the administration] is gonna appreciate it.’” FM6 complains that excessive workload harms teaching: “There’s no question—pedagogy suffers.” He instances the lack of preparation time he can commit to a new course: “It’s a really neat concept. And if you really had the time to put into developing…the lectures…on a week-to-week basis, I think it has a lot of potential. But…I’m sitting here trying to work in today’s lecture between putting together the faculty agenda and responding to things from [a staff member], and everything.” FM2 describes trying “to mitigate the time pressure” so she can teach courses “without dumbing down.” FM4 is disappointed that “For the first time this year I used scantrons,” an unusual practice in this department, where descriptive writing is the disciplinary norm. Commenting on one consequence of increasingly fragmented work in a semester of teaching overload, FM1 says, “The students don’t have enough access to you. If you’re teaching 17 units, you can barely get in the minimum required office hours.” She makes use of “virtual office hours” by email. FM7 notes, “Advising takes up a great deal of time. And everyone in the department…[all] who do advising, have about 16 students…and then we’re advising for other programs, so we get another 10 or so.”

The department’s main curriculum is of the major, but there are other programs taught and administered through the department. FM4 reports he has had “no release time for program development.” He has seen himself “start letting things go,” and asserts that “the programs suffer.” FM7, too, is disillusioned about the administration’s valuing of program development. “I simply assumed…that when you’re developing innovative coursework, that if you’re not given release time, that there’s certainly a great deal of acknowledgement, and they make it up to you in other ways,” but this has not happened.

Department members report that even updating catalog copy and scheduling classes semester-to-semester have become triage events. “Targets really make me boxed in,” says FM 6, speaking of the requirement to fill seats for any class to a certain number, effectively discouraging or disallowing some courses. FM1 says, sadly, that “[T]he last class I had to cut from catalog was the … field class, my version of a service learning course, because there was not enough enrollment, and I can’t do it as an overload. I can’t keep my commitments to community groups.”

Department administrative work takes up an unreasonable amount of time, tenure faculty members say. FM4 is one of several respondents who express frustration over “time given to assessments.” Faculty especially resent program assessments demanded by the administration in forms that do not suit the discipline and at the same time duplicate the work of assessment processes already in place. FM1 adamantly protests against “administrative work, basically the god-damn paper pushing, the infinite amount of what feels like make-work paper pushing… like the assessment stuff …that basically keeps butts higher up than yours in the system out of the sling, which means that you feel no real pay off for having done this at all, but you have to do it. ” FM6, describing WASC-related assessments, among other tasks, resents “the pissy things” he has to do “rather than real work or, god forbid, having down time.” A different example of paperwork required by “butts higher up…in the system” a few years ago was the ranking of faculty members for pay differential based on supposed differences in merit. FM3 provided uncompensated labor to mitigate the inequity of the merit pay scheme for his colleagues. He recalls, “When the idiotic merit pay stuff came along, the department had to score people, and because I’m more quantitative, I ended up doing it.” This work was appreciated by tenure colleagues. FM4 expresses frustration about both the obligation of the task and the lack of compensation for his lecturer colleague. “[FM3] was helping us set up a process that wouldn’t tear the department apart. He’s not even in a tenure-track spot, and here he was, trying to keep it a collegial environment, helping to set up models on spread sheets, so we could figure out how would we do this when we were told we HAD TO give some…objective form, that could possibly compute out to people being ranked.”

Service. Department members are engaged in service to the university and the community. This area of work, required of tenure faculty, also involves lecturer members of the department. The labor is compensated in some part, but interviewees perceive that they are unappreciated and under-rewarded for the time and effort put in. It includes Academic Senate and committee work, community service, and, importantly for this department, fieldwork experience for students. Community service projects, either as Service Learning courses or as field training for students are as much teaching as service area labors.

One or more members of the department always seem to be serving in the Academic Senate. For several years this has included a lecturer faculty member, who receives one unit of compensation per year. Over the past few years, Senate work has fallen to three of the eight interviewees. There are, of course, committee obligations as well. This has meant not only participation in Senate committees, but also required attendance by three of them at the Council of Department Chairs, since the department represents several programs. FM7 refers to always having to “go to the…damned meetings.” She says, “I go to the Senate meetings, never read the minutes before. I don’t have time.” FM1 says sarcastically, “I could just say, ‘Screw you. I’m not going to these—count them—Tuesday, noon-to-one meeting, Wednesday noon-to-one meeting, Thursday noon-to-one meeting…since that’s the only time that the free gym for the faculty is open, during those lunch hours’…That’ll work, right?”

FM1 has been weekly involved in teaching in the field. Describing a typical week’s work, she reports spending one whole workday in the field “supporting my volunteer field class”—that is, the class for which she is supplying volunteer labor, since she is teaching it as an overload. By obtaining outside grants, FM3 conducts summer fieldwork, taking SSU students along. He has presented his work at faculty seminars and brown bag forums. None of the work associated with grants, whether fieldwork, writings, or presentations, is salaried work. FM7 does community service in a population facing certain health problems; this work is complexly connected to service learning for her students. She inventories her community service duties: “making contacts; serving on a health commission and in other community groups; doing fieldwork in order to understand the service area.” She adds, “This would be part of the job description too: ‘Develop a community-based project that students can learn in.’” Voicing the administration’s charge to her, as if found in such a job description, “ ‘O, and in your spare time, go and develop a field program, and find funding for it, because we’re not going to give you any release time…In fact, we’re not even going to really recognize [the additional effort] at the administrative level, on your RTP documents.”

Research. Besides teaching and service, a tenure position requires, and, in this department, lecturer academic work includes, research. There is, of course, a difference between tenure and lecturer faculty burden with regard to department administrative work, since these are not required duties for lecturers. Comparison of reports from tenure and lecturer interviewees also reveals a difference in amount of time dedicated to research and writing. Fieldwork is relegated to the summer for everyone. Ironically, some members of the lower caste of academic workers—lecturer faculty—report finding time to analyze and present results of research, even in the semesters of the academic year; while tenure faculty do not. The difference is due to underemployment of lecturers. The reality of formal full employment is that the load amounts to something more like a constant time-and-a-half job for tenure faculty.

FM3 reports spending some hours of the day three or so days a week during the teaching semesters working with the literature of the field and his own findings, in part weaving the information into lectures he will deliver to classes. FM2 is also an active, current researcher and makes time to write and publish. Finding time for this is not easy, but is barely possible, she says, because she does not travel far. “Summer is the time for publication work, and I stay in Northern California.” By contrast, no tenure faculty member is able to work on research at all within the teaching semesters and barely in the summers. Burn-out interferes. Energy that might go into analysis and writing goes partly into recuperation; or there are other responsibilities either in the field or, as FM4 says, “playing catch up” on duties relating to coursework or administration. FM4 speaks of the need for “being in the daylight,” that is, of the need simply to rest and recuperate in the summertime. Concerning research, FM7 observes, “You don’t have time to do it. You get to do it in the summertime, but then you’re burned out.…I have several papers that are partially done, and one that’s about ready to go back out.…And I was told that there’s concern, there’s a great deal of concern about publication.”

FM4 notes that even tenure faculty cannot count on getting sabbaticals at SSU, unlike at other institutions. “Most of my colleagues [at other universities] get a sabbatical every seventh year, so they know they can go do fieldwork then. We have people going fifteen years without a sabbatical, and then it’s competitive.”

Invisible work. Some academic work goes unrewarded because work hours given to assigned tasks—those within expected duties of teaching, research, and service—just go uncompensated. Other academic work goes unrewarded because it is structurally invisible.

Labor is sometimes hidden because there is just not an opportunity to make it visible. Speaking of reading in the professional literature, FM1 says, “Being professionally current, it doesn’t really count towards you workload, does it?” It will not show up in the Faculty Activity Report. FM4 can only attend one professional conference per year, if that, because the trips are too costly; there is very little travel money from the administration, and he speaks of “staying at one of the secondary hotels nearby…and always bunking up with people, at times sleeping on the floor.” He also reports being unable to share the results of his research with colleagues, something one should expect to do at a university. “I tried to do a brown bag for the Dean, cause of the $1500 for the summer. My schedule was so packed I couldn’t. There was no time to give a talk to my colleagues the whole semester. So I don’t even get the intangible reward of ‘Wow, that’s cool’ or of making connections with others.”

Some invisible work is simply not in the position description. Lecturer faculty research is always in this latter pot. Such research may become visible if the individual has received an outside grant—FM3’s situation—.from which, of course, the University takes money. “Lecturers have to get all sort of special dispensations to get [a federal] grant through Sonoma State. If I hadn’t been here for years, I couldn’t have done it. Because they’re concerned that someone will get the grant and then go blow it in Rio and never be seen again.…You’ve gotta be kidding! …I had to get papers all the way up to [the President] signed… ‘We’ll make an exception for him.’” FM3 has been employed at the University for 11 years. Lecturer faculty work on producing or participating in scholarly meetings is also structurally invisible. FM2 tells of spending a year of work to bring a certain conference to the campus; the work amounted to about a half-time job. She did not expect compensation, but observes that her efforts were hardly noticed by the campus. “I got no institutional support from [the Media Relations’] office or from Catering, because …Catering is only interested in large things, for technology or business. …An effect of not getting support was an agony about pricing the conference.…I sent [Media Relations] everything, asked for publicity. Nothing came of it.”

Estrangement from administration. Faculty members experience themselves as overworked in all areas of duties. Across employment castes, faculty members engage in teaching, research, and service. While tenure faculty are more weighted down with administrative tasks, some lecturer faculty find more time for their own research. These phenomena are not unrelated, surely. Interviewees also believe that the burdens they experience personally and the distress to the department’s programs matter to them but not to administrators. They do not perceive the administration as being on the same side, as really sharing the same mission. FM6 recalls how his impression of Sonoma State changed as he became involved in faculty governance. “The administration seemed not to be on the same page. They seemed to have different goals. We were not fighting for the same goal, but fighting each other.”

2.1.2. Hours of work. The accounts of labor given in the section above construct a general picture of work overload. They reveal what faculty attitudes are and report some specific incidents of overload and unfairness. But what is the burden of a workday or a workweek in hours?

FM1 says, “I used to have this fantasy, when I had one of these kinds of semesters, of forcing an administrator, someone at the level of like Ochoa, to follow me around, even for a day, but a week would be better.” Interestingly, while respondents are able to specify their work activities for a day or week of a semester (see the table below), this exercise is awkward for all. FM6 kept a log a couple years ago, but has discontinued it. No other department mentions a log. No one has a ready answer about numbers of hours spent at work per day or week. And the task of chronicling work events seems difficult. Answers are halting and—except with prodding—unfocussed. Respondents seem almost daunted by the assignment to actually list tasks and count hours. This discoursal difficulty does not characterize any other portion of the interview conversations. Time can be calculated, however, person by person.

Table of faculty time use and hours worked.

Faculty member	Hours on basis of 40-hour work week	Actual hours	% full time worked
FM1. Four days a week, FM1 is up at 5:00 or 6:00 to answer email or grade papers, then is at the University by 9:00, spending from 9:00 to 4:30 teaching, advising attending meetings, doing administrative tasks, or writing correspondence. In the evenings she reads journals, reads dissesrtations, edits manuscripts, and answers emails. (10 1/2/day.) On the other weekday she conducts a field study class (8 hrs). Weekends: at least another 8 hours.	40 hours	58 hours	148%
FM2. FM2 reports working about fifty hours a week. Some of this is at another institution. Besides teaching, her work includes reading and reviewing articles and other non-instructional tasks. FM2 is at SSU all workdays, devoting about half her effort to the university.	27 hours	36 hours	133%
FM3. In the semester reported, FM2 teaches two days a week (8 hrs), holding office hours on these days (4 hrs). He spends many hours four of the other days grading, writing comments, and preparing for the next week (6-8 hrs for each class session, making use of his research.	21 hours	40 hours	185%
FM4. On a weekday, FM4 is up at 6:00 to answer emails and at the University by 9:00, spending the day in his office or the classroom or at meetings “escaping only to do grading”. In the evenings he writes. (work @ 10 to 12 hrs/day). Weekend work is @ 5 to 6 hrs.	40 hours	60 hours	150%
FM5. FM5 reports 54 working hours per week, some for work in another department. She is at SSU by 8:00, works through lunch, and leaves between 5:00 or 6:00, except Wed. (leaves at 2:00). 3 days a week 9-10 hrs., 2 days, 6 hrs. Evenings and weekends:12 hrs. Duties: teaching, meetings, office hrs, emailing, fr. advising.	29 hours	41 hours	141%
FM6. FM6 arrives on campus at 7:00, always works through lunch, and leaves at 5:00. He is in his office, in the classroom, at meetings, preparing classes, seeing students, reading or sending email, and coordinating with faculty, staff, and administrators. Evening work: 1 hr./night. He works at least 6 hrs. every weekend.	40 hours	61 hours	148%
FM7. FM7 spent, in the semester reported, @ 10 hrs/weekday at the University, in her office, in the classroom, and at meetings, teaching, advising, grading, preparing for classes, doing administrative tasks. She works evenings variably, (“up till 2:00 in the morning”) and 6 hrs. on the weekends.	40 hours	61 hours	158%
FM8. FM8 has a 4-unit course, with @ 6 hrs. outside class.	10 hours	11 hours	110%

Every worker here is producing more than the 2.67 hours of labor per academic unit that is compensated, on a 40-hour a week basis. That is, all department members are working more hours than they are paid for. All tenure members show more than 40-hour workweeks; not all lecturer faculty members do. This difference is due to underemployment of the department’s non-tenure members. There is another factor, more elusive, that makes a difference between tenure and lecturer overwork, and that is indirectly reflected in the difference of hours per week spent. The burden of fragmented work, multiple duties, tasks just not compensated, stress from too few hours in week to do the work—all this hits tenure faculty harder. The burden is bigger and more complex. Both groups feel the overwork and lecturers feel the stress of job insecurity and the psychological affect of low status and lack of institutional respect besides (although both groups report feeling this). But if lecturer faculty are overworked, then tenure faculty are massively overworked. There are, of course, individual differences.

In any case, all department members are doing uncompensated overtime, and the cumulative effect is to produce three more workers, that is, three virtual faculty members. Because several interviewees are lecturer faculty members not hired to teach full-time, the labor of the eight individuals ought to amount to 6.1 FTEF. The hours of uncompensated work produced make the FTEF actually 9 (368 hours per week).

FM8, the newest member of the department, a retired professor coming here from a similar department on a campus of another large state system, comments, “I feel that there is a sense of being overwhelmed to the point of burnout, even to the point of academic depression.” He warns, “Disorder may be set in motion by this overwork. People are running around like chickens with their heads cut off.”

2.2. Health. Although the department members were in good health when they were hired, many have developed health problems since becoming employed at SSU. Most interviewees have been unable to maintain regular exercise regimens. They associate this with the demands of long work hours; and while meeting these demands they are cooped up, kept immobile in offices or meeting rooms. There have been changes in physical health of several degrees of seriousness, including injuries that are job associated an long term illnesses, the successful management of which would require rest, lowering of stress, and therapeutic exercise. Psychological states have worsened. Along with demoralization and a sense of constant stress, there is depression, recurrent nightmares, regular nigh-time anxiety, and serious insomnia. In reports of these compromises to health, respondents associate them with workload and an anxiety –producing work environment.

All eight interviewed department members were in good health on arrival. FM1, referring to those in her subfield of the discipline as “the dumb jocks…relatively…sturdy types,” recalls that she was robust when first hired. “I mean, we spend a lot of time outdoors. … I didn’t see myself as …jeopardized health-wise in any way.” FM2 (“health was excellent”), FM3 (“It was fine. I didn’t have any problems.”), FM4 (“pretty strong”), FM 5, (“[physical health] still seemed pretty good”), and FM6 (“good health, although…a little heavier”) were all well. FM7 reports that she was “in a very solid remission from a chronic illness.” FM 8, newly arrived, relates, “My health is fine” although “I find it hard to walk sometimes.”

Most of the interviewees engaged in activities during the first stretch of their employment to maintain or improve their physical conditions. On the whole, individuals could not keep up these regimens and warning signs of trouble followed. As instances, FM4 “was bicycling to work and had the time to do that” the first semesters he was employed, but gave that up when he and his family moved farther from the campus; for lack of sleep at night and the demands of work during the day, he has not replaced bicycling with any other exercise. He says, “I got into driving to work and sitting at my desk during the day and into the evenings. I see people walking around on campus sometimes to try to [get exercise], but I don’t see faculty doing that very much, because the workload sort of expands to take all the time. If I go out to do that, it means I’m not getting something else done.…I’ve never once used the gym since I got here. Never once. I don’t have the time to get in there. I wouldn’t know where the desk is.” Expressing frustration at her lack of flexible time, FM1 says, “Forget going to the gym. Forget taking a walk. My big break [in the day] is to actually physically be able to walk to the library to reserve a film.…I’m either in my office, in a meeting, or in a classroom from 9 o’clock in the morning until 4:30 in the afternoon. …I don’t [get exercise].…Not] the kind of pain maintenance, weights workout, and regular aerobic exercise that make the difference.”

Department members have tried to keep in good health but have found that damage has been done. Some become discouraged about self-help efforts to mitigate such damage. FM5 remembers that she “lost weight and exercised the first year I was here.” Later, however, “The shit hit the fan.…in the fall of 03, …[pain] was seriously affecting my mobility.… I was not getting enough exercise, in good part cause of tiredness, cause of work.” For some interviewees, the trouble began to show up by season or semester, tied to the demands of the academic calendar. FM6, the only tenure faculty member who still exercises regularly, reveals, “My weight…sorta goes up at the beginning of the semester. Then usually during the semester I can…get it back down. Then up again at the end of the semester. …I’m totally a stress-based eater.…I can see the belt tightening…in those high stress [times] at the beginning of the semester, end of the semester.” FM1 declares: “Summertime, Thanksgiving, and Spring Break, I get sick every time…I hang in there until I get the four days, consecutive days off, and then I instantly get sick and spend almost the whole time in bed.” She notes, “I’m getting cold sores right now. It was a bad semester.” Looking hopefully to repair harm she has suffered from semester work overload, FM7 says, “A plan I have over the summer is that I can write a major grant…and buy myself course release time, which is a pisser, cause the teaching’s what I love.” Ironically, she has to “free myself up enough so that I can do this job.”

2.2.1. Changes in physical health. The health of the department collect