How do academics who teach and do research spend their time on the
following activities during the academic year?
1- learning new material in their field (time learning)
2- learning material in related fields (time expanding)
3- comparing concepts (time "thinking")
4- creating new concepts (time inventing)
5- sharing new concepts with others through publishing (time writing)
6- teaching

Thank you!

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Request for Question Clarification by answerguru-ga on 02 Jul 2002 11:46 PDT

Hi there,

THat is indeed quite a subjective question...various academics
allocate their time quite differently based on academic status, age,
field of interest, and so forth. Also, many of these academics are
also forces in the corporate world...so thats another area where time
is spent.

In order to answer your question accurately, we need to know what
exactly you are looking for...statistics on this sort of thing will be
hard to come if not impossible altogether. If you could clear up what
you are looking for that would be great.

answerguru-ga

Dear Gantonick, 

I must admit I was also intrigued, since as a student I always
wondered how much time is being spent on Faculty balls and private
initiations, compared to teaching and advising us.

Several researchers and surveys have been made on the general question
you raised (although not specifically with your definitions). As
answerguru has remakred, there is a substabtial difference in a
cross-faculty level - and especially when academics from different
disciplines are examined.

According to a research done on the Purdue (American public
University, http://www.purdue.edu/) Faculty, academics spend most of
their time teaching (on average less than a quarter; but in technology
more than 51% of the time); 12% of the time is being spent in advising
students (I'm afraid you haven't considered this element in your
question) - advisory time is higher than average in engineering. The
research defined what you defined in categories (1) and (2) as
"professional growth" and marked that an average 18% (! - my remark)
of the Faculty spend *no time at all* on professional growth (this is
especially evident in the Management Faculty). As for research and
invention, 6-14% of the time is spent on that (Purdue, 2001 -
http://www.mmkd.org/faculty/survey/results/contents.htm).

Cook, Wright and Hollenshead (http://www.crlt.umich.edu/occ14.html)
found that professors spend 40% fo their time teaching/advising, while
 33%-40% of the time goes to "personal growth" (your (1) and (2)
categories) and 1%-2% to clinical work.

Turner and Kirkwood found similar ersults among UK academics
(http://www.finance.ed.ac.uk/general/research/transparency.html) .
Casey's (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/r3_114.htm) median for
research is 20%; and found that "Very little time (1%) is directly
spent on professional development".

I hope that helped, please contact me if you need anything else. I am
also leaving some of my search terms:

Search terms 
time allocation teaching research university professors 
time allocation teaching research academics

a solid answer, well-summarized with links.. search terms very helpful. thanks!

(writing as an academic) I would be extremely doubtful about any of
these surveys, for three reasons:
First, because there are few constraints on how academics can spend
their time – or when they spend the time they do spend.  They are a
little nervous of protecting that privilege, and if a survey of that
sort comes around, they will fill it in as they are expected to, not
as they actually do.  (Of course, I don’t know the methodologies used
in those surveys – they may have found ways around this problem). 
Even if you did want to answer honestly, it is very difficult to do
so.  The last link refers to the UK transparency review – I know
people who filled this in, and I wouldn’t trust it as far as I could
spit them.  The first question (in the format I was told about it)
asked how many hours per week you worked, on average.  The next
questions asked you to break that many hours into what you did.  The
challenge (of course) was to make the second set of numbers add up to
the first set of numbers.
The second problem is defining the work that an academic does.  When
am I working, and when not working.  If I go out for a drink or meal,
we will often chat about our work, and areas of overlap.  Sometimes,
this leads to collaboration.  Often, it leads to knowing more (time
expanding).   A quote from a book review in the Times Higher
Educational Supplement, said “It is more than 20 years since the
economist Maurice (now Lord) Peston, writing in The THES , illustrated
the difficulties of defining when an academic is, or is not, working
by pointing out that he was wont to while away the time when queueing
at Arsenal by speculating on the economic effects of ticket touting”.
Third, I don’t think that those areas can be separated.  If I am
preparing teaching material, am learning new material, or am I
comparing concepts.  If I then go on to use the materials that I
prepared in a publication of some sort, am I now writing?  If I am
discussing something with a student, or reading some work that they
had done, this would appear to be teaching.  However, if they then ask
me to clarify something, and I think of a new way of explaining a
concept, and maybe a slightly different way of thinking about a
concept, am I learning, comparing, inventing, sharing or teaching? 
And these are the questions that academics must ask themselves, when
they try to fill in the surveys which monitor their time.  Academics
often review books or papers – again I don’t know how I would fit
those into your categories.
One more curious aspect of the work is that it comes in “bursts” of
different activities.  You may have a particularly heavy teaching
schedule for a short period of time.  During that time, I may do
little other than teach, and prepare teaching.  And you may spend more
time than normal working.  How do you divide up that time – by number
of hours, or number of weeks?  They will give different proportions.
Given these difficulties, I would be surprised if any survey found
anything much different from 40% teaching, 40% research, 20%
administration.  Because that sounds about right (and they are nice,
round numbers, and that makes 2 days, 2 days, 1 day in a week.)
The answers found by politicalguru-ga are the best you are going to
get.  It’s just my opinion that they aren’t very good.
jeremymiles-ga
[A final thought: am I working now?  I have just spend longer thinking
about measuring workloads than I have in the past.  But it’s in the
evening, so I am not at work.  Can I count this as time thinking? Or
expanding? If someone asks me in the course of my work about
workloads, my thoughts on the matter are quite well formulated now,
which they weren’t when I started writing.  But if they don’t, was
that time wasted?]

My mother was given the job of organising such a survey at her
institution (this was before the UK transparency review). She
allocated everybody two essentially random weeks of the year
(including vacations, Christmas etc.) and made people fill in a diary
for those two weeks. Even so it's unlikely to be that accurate and
it's slightly intrusive having to fill in such a diary.

She had a lot of criticisms of the way the UK transparency review was
done.

jeremymiles, juliette, thanks for your thoughts! the UK transparency
review sounds very interesting.. an attempt at something not fully
realized yet.