Measuring faculty workload

Efforts to Measure Faculty Workload Don't Add Up, a recent article by Alison Yin in the Chronicle of Higher Education, discusses the (perennial) debate between state legislators (and others) who want to know how many classes university faculty are teaching and the university faculty and administrators who argue that such measures are woefully incomplete:

Faculty productivity, or the lack thereof, is a common concern raised by politicians and others looking for inefficiencies and waste in higher education, especially when budgets are tight. Lawmakers often go out of their way to contrast the everyday employee who works 9 to 5 or longer at the office, or who pulls extra shifts doing manual labor, with the stereotypes of the elitist academic who teaches one or two hourlong courses a few times a week, takes summers off, and travels to far-flung places in the name of research.

Experts and professors in general say they don't mind the measuring of faculty work. What they're against is so much of what they do being left out of the equation. They are concerned about data elements that are incorrect, misleading, and not complete enough to allow outsiders to get an accurate picture of how professors use their time inside and outside of the classroom.

Unfortunately, the article fails to point out that a root cause of this debate is that each group has a different understanding of the objectives of a contemporary research university. Essentially, it comes down to whether universities should have (and faculty should spend their time in) classrooms or research labs. Until everyone agrees on what research universities should be doing, the arguments over measurements will continue unabated.