UW Professor Emeritus Says Proposal Would Be Complicated To Implement
By Breann Schossow
Thursday, February 9, 2017
(WPR)---During his budget address this week, Gov. Scott Walker's highlighted proposals to increase state funding for the University of Wisconsin System and reduce tuition for in-state undergraduates. Also included in the governor's budget proposal is the required creation of a UW faculty workload policy, that looks to ensure professors' time is accounted for. Reporting on faculty course loads would also be required.
John Witte, a UW-Madison professor emeritus, agreed that the amount of time faculty spend in classroom is an issue that's worth looking at, setting a specific standard would likely be difficult.
"The reputation of the university is based, in part, on our teaching, certainly in our graduates," Witte said. "But it's also based on the research people do, and how much time should be devoted to which is a very complicated question that varies across departments and it varies across research fundings and all sorts of things."
He noted that research funding pays for a lot of what happens at UW System campuses.
"We have overhead costs that are 40 percent of federal grants, for example, and that goes generally to the maintenance of the university in general, so you have to maintain those sorts ... of cash flows and resource flows," he said.
Witte added that if teaching loads are increased too much compared public universities in other states, faculty might not stay.
"We're going to lose faculty," Witte said. "We're going to lose them in droves. You just have to be competitive in that area as well.
The workload policy in Walker's budget would reward faculty that spend more time teaching. In addition, institutional performance funding would reward institutions with professors that spend more time teaching.
In remarks prepared for the address, Walker said this will reverse "a nationwide trend" in which time professors spend in the undergraduate classroom has declined while tuition rose.
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