Ugh, busted pencils! T
Johnny Lupinacci. Well, that's Dr. Jacob, the chairman of the boards,
and me, Dr. Tim Slecker, we are here. Man, lots going on. I'm just going to tease this one
because there's not enough that we want to be talking about it, yet until there's more details.
But there have been six programs from the federal department of education
that have been taken out of the department of education and put into other agencies the details,
that's breaking news coming out right now. So, is special education now part of the department
of education or is it, you know, probably somewhere, you know, like international fairs or
something like that where they'll give it? I mean, and so the news is, well, Trump's making true
on his promise of dismantling the department of education. What it sounds like is dismantling is,
well, we're going to have all the programs, we're just going to put them other places. I don't know,
so that's what's going on. Johnny, how you doing, my friend?
Doing well now, we're in the thick of it. You know, we're about to go into Thanksgiving break soon,
and the college semester is coming to a very fast finish shortly after that break. So,
it's busy days here on campus, you know, lots of, lots of, oh, I didn't get everything done,
I needed to get done. How can I get some extensions or some supports in place? And of course,
as a teacher teaching teachers, you know, we're accommodating. We understand that things pile up,
and sometimes you have to loop back around and complete missing assignments or figure out a good
game plan for end-in-the-semesters. So, long days here in the classroom, there's an echo
because the students are laughing. I'm alone in my classroom. I thought you might be doing class
from like the university or the Washington State University Spalunking Club in some time.
No, I'm actually, you know, in my classroom on the third floor of a wonderful building that,
you know, has high ceilings, and when you take all of the bodies out of it, it gets quite echoey.
So, listen there, you get to experience what after-class hours is like here on campus for me.
Lupinachi with some office hours, that's what we love to see.
Jake, I've got to check in with my man, Jacob. Jacob, how is all, you know,
how's all well in your world? All's well that goes well, Tim. I'm excited because, you know,
you can must have do a lot of education shows out in the world, okay? I'm sure there are
hundreds, if not millions of podcasts about education broadly speaking, but how many of them bring you
the authentic experience of being a teacher like busted pencils does. You know, we've got Johnny,
he's in a fish tank, he's living a teacher's life, and you make it work, and that's what's so great
about busted pencils. You know, and the other thing Johnny just said, he's a teacher teaching
teachers to teach. That's like educated educators, talking education, and when Johnny's not an
educated educator, talking education, he's a teacher, teaching teachers to teach. You see that?
See, I got that man. Then with Tim Twister, Punquister Tim today.
Hey, I got it all. But, you know, classes in session and, you know, two new stories. In fact,
though, Johnny, it is nice to see that you are actually in a classroom where you claim that you
do the job of teaching. Well, the University of Wisconsin system, this just came out today,
the cap times. In fact, I'll read the headline, University of System Faculty Balk at Legislature,
Legislature's teaching workload requirements. When lawmakers passed a new state budget this year,
they approved $256 million increase for funding the University of Wisconsin's public universities,
but hey, that money came with strings attached, and that would be faculty, you now are required
to teach, you're saying to go on like, what's the catch? Well, and Johnny's going to help us
understand this, but Johnny, the University of Wisconsin system under what is, let me just make
sure that I get the name of what this is called. Tony Aver's lawsuit, you know, of course, lots of
lawsuits, but I'll find it. Legislature says 12 credits of teaching is mandatory now if you work
for the University of Wisconsin, and I can hear a lot of people out there going, wow, that ain't much,
and they're mownin' about teaching 12 credits. Johnny, help us understand what it means to be a full-time
faculty member under a 12 credit mandatory teaching load. What's him, I'm not familiar with all
the specifics of what's happened at the University of Wisconsin, so just hearing that my initial
questions is that per semester or they have quarters, is that 12 at a time, or is that 12 over the
course of their contract, which many most professors are on what we call either a 9 or 10 month contract,
which is like the academic school year, you know, typically universities with a semester,
that's like fall semester, and either winter or spring if you call it that, but it's, you know, August
to December and then January to May, and those 15 week terms, if they're, if they're semester,
it's a full 15 weeks, 12 credits in just one semester is not a typical workload for teachers
professors. That would be, you know, if you're a graduate teacher, that's three credits, four
three credits a class, that's four graduate classes at a time, that is unheard of all at once.
Undergraduate courses, big ones tend to be four credits at a time, they all remember if you
went to college or you know someone in college or you're a student, this is like your, you know,
your core classes in your undergraduate, maybe it's like history 105, right, and that's a four
credit class, that would mean that that instructor is teaching three of those four credit classes,
which is also, you know, it would be assuming that their only responsibility was teaching those
courses, but many professors and faculty members have different allotments of their workload time,
and most professors like at the University of Wisconsin and a lot of the schools that, you know,
are pretty frequently, you know, part of our listening audience as well as our participants'
guests on here, you know, that their faculty are usually most likely under what's called a 40,
40, 20, 40 percent of their work hours of the week are spent teaching, 40 percent of those work
hours of the week are spent on research, and 20 percent on what we call service, which is like
serving on committees, it might be advising, it might be, you know, a community partnership,
like for teacher educators, it might be working with local schools, but it's, you know, service work,
and that rounds out your 100 percent of what you're doing on, you know, on the idea of a
40 hour work week, it never coils down to that for every professor listening out there,
it's a 40 hour tour, you can, you know, we work all the time, and that's actually very true,
we overwork, but that's typically, you know, a common breakdown, and then some people are full-time
teaching faculty, and they teach usually 80 percent of their workload is teaching, which teaching
isn't just the time you're in the classroom, it's preparing, it's meeting with students, like we
just talked, you know, Tim and Jacob, I'm in my classroom still late today, because we had
extended office hours, meet after class, let's talk about, you know, if you have missing assignments,
are you struggling as you prepare to wrap things up for finals that are coming up really quick,
you know, professors do a lot of advising and meeting with their students to help different
learners, you know, meet the objectives that they're expected to in the courses they teach,
so when I first hear like mandatory teaching 12 credits, I think what do you think, and this is,
this is not, but I also think two sides to that point, if that's spread out over two semesters,
that's actually very, very, very manageable, very understandable.
It is not Johnny Lupinacci, it is 12 credits, a semester, over the academic year,
in the academic year, only consists of the fall semester and what we call the spring semester,
so in other words, from August until mid-December, and then somewhere in January until May,
and each of those semesters is a mandatory that you carry 12 credit hours of teaching,
which then amounts to 24 for the academic year. There's a couple things here, though, too,
just to get, you know, for for anybody who's listening to this, I get concerned too about
what you just said, Johnny, is gone. Wait a minute, they're they're moaning about 12 hours,
we work 40 hour work weeks and sometimes longer, so let's first, let's get this clear,
is that what what 12 hours means is 12 credit hours, meaning a three credit course,
typically, and that would be teaching four courses during the week,
and if you're talking about a three credit course, it it minimally has to meet for three hours of
face time, then there's prep time and then there's out of class time and those things like that,
so this is not about faculty who are complaining about working more than 12 hours a week.
Let's get that straight for everybody, okay? Again, this is class's in session, so we're teaching
a little bit to the listener, right, about what does it mean? Yeah, absolutely, Tim, and when I
mentor new faculty and I talk to others about balancing workload and thinking about hours
the week, this is really helpful, and we talked about this to students too. One credit hour,
you can expect is about three additional hours per one credit hour a week,
right, of work that you have to do, and it's quite similar to teachers, it's a little bit less,
like I could say, you could think about it's at least two additional hours, right, per course,
per week, so if you think about that 12 credits you're talking about in a semester, say,
like you just said, in an academic school year, whether you're on quarters that might be broken
down differently than a semester, but typically August to December 15 weeks of instruction,
you know, that three, that say if you have four three credit hour classes to make your 12,
right, you have three classes, well each of those is going to meet for three credit hours or four
of their four credit hour classes, but in addition to that, you're, you know, you're expected to be
working at a minimum, and I say at a minimum, because I have never met a good teacher who's,
you know, oh, my class only takes me 45 minutes to prepare for, and the grading isn't that long,
I don't really have, and you know, there's additional hours, but Tim, you just described with the
12 credit hour course load, when I would say is 80% of your work week is spent on teaching.
You know, so that when I told you before, most faculty at universities are on something close
to like a 40, 40, 20, 40% teaching, 40% research, 20% service, they're most likely now being asked
to be 80% teaching, 20% service, and they've sort of either, the message is either research no longer
matters, but I have never heard an institution say our professors are not researching. So all
these professors just add the double, their teaching work amount of time they spend having to teach
that got doubled without any adjustment to the other things that they're expected to do with
taxpayer dollars. Yeah, the other expectations, and this is the way the two to break this out,
now we're talking about the University of Wisconsin system too, and that actually then requires
some other learning, which is, so what do each of those individual institutions do? What is their
specialty? What is their, you know, focus? So just taking the University of Wisconsin Madison,
that is for everybody listening, right? That's a research institution. It is absolutely mission-driven
that key research must come out of that institution, and that research is produced by the faculty
that are hired to work at the University of Wisconsin Madison campus. And so what you just said,
Johnny, to help people understand that 40, 40, 20 ratio, 40 percent of your time teaching,
40 percent of your time doing research that the taxpayers are actually funding their funding
faculty to do the research. That's their job. And so you're pointing that forward. And so you start
to hear of going like, well, wait a minute, 100 percent teaching. What about an instance?
I know, but 80 percent, but when you're hearing this, you say, so if you're at the University of Wisconsin
Madison, you're sitting there like, well, there goes my research project that I'm working on,
because I have to give that up now. And the reality is just like, well, then that would be going
against the funded mission of the University of Wisconsin Madison, which is to produce research,
and that's why it's funded. And so, again, breaking this down so that people understand,
you know, a workload. So that's a research-intensive university, an R1, where you might go to one of
the other University of Wisconsin, say, whitewater, which is a more comprehensive public university,
where there is more, where they'd say we're a teaching university. And so you might see more of
that ratio tilted more, maybe 60 towards teaching and 20 towards research and 20 towards service,
right? It gets bumped up. But that's just to understand that. So to me, this is also the problem.
This is what happens when legislators decide they're going to mandate education policy,
because they have no idea what it is they're actually mandating. Actually, that's giving them
way too much credit. They actually know exactly what they're mandating because they know this.
And this is an attack. And it's framed as going, those lazy professors, we legislators are
going to make them finally work. And the reality is we have to understand what workload is,
because I'm going to bet that if the University of Wisconsin, let's just say Madison,
and Milwaukee's the research-intensive university too, if they now have to
try to advertise to get the best scholar academic researchers in the country to come to their
institution and say, oh yeah, by the way, all that research that you're required to do,
that's on top of teaching an 80% teaching load. All of a sudden, the important research,
important research that's coming out of the University of Wisconsin system grinds to a halt.
It stops. And so we need to understand the nuances, the complexities of what it means to be
a faculty member. And as you said, Johnny, you know, are there, there are people who are teaching
faculty and they have a bigger teaching load. There are faculty who have a more intensive research
position. And I will, and yes, I'm going to admit it right now. Some of them are only teaching
three credit hours a semester, because the other part of their time is doing original hardcore
research. Looking at, you know, what is the next cure for this? What is the next new way of
understanding how to deploy some form of artificial intelligence? What's the best new pedagogical
opportunities that we have for working with kids to close that achievement gap? If you want all
that work to stop, then that's what happens when you start to think about
teaching loads mandated by a legislature that is only really trying to actually create a narrative
of lazy government employees who work for the state who aren't doing anything. Let's break that
apart and understand, wait, no, these are faculty who, as you said, Johnny, you know, and you want
to talk about a 40 hour work week, I haven't met a faculty member, whether it's at a research
institution or a teaching institution, those faculty that are working their butts off, 40 hours,
that's, that's a vacation week. If they're, if they're right. Okay. I, I, I, I ramble. And Tim,
the other part that's, I think, helpful to deep, debunking this myth, right, that this sort of
attack on like the so-called lazy professor is that even the research intensive professors that I
know, and when I've been on similar contracts like that, it's not that we don't want to teach. It's
that the, the way that we're mandated through our contract and through whatever particular
research project we may be funding, usually externally funded, demands our full attention. And
it's almost everyone I talk to, they miss the teaching aspect of it. You know, it's not like
the professors are just trying to not teach. It's usually, it's usually like they're, they're so buried
and swamped in large grants or in big research projects that aren't important part of what the
role of the university is that they are bought out often. So like their grants or their funding
includes enough money to hire somebody to teach those courses that they would have been, been
teaching. My hopes in this, Tim, is that, you know, administrators and leaders in higher ed get
creative and figure out ways to like really, you know, shift and change as higher ed is changing to
balance research with teaching. And it's not always like balance doesn't need to be equal time.
It's, you know, more on an equity model of like how are the very best researchers also teaching.
I'm a big fan of even administrators like you were once professors often in many of you like
teaching a course, right? Primarily what we do on campus is research and teach. So those are two
like our like prized products, if I'm like, you know, use that metaphor. So being close to the product
I think is really important for everybody involved. And I've never met anybody who says, oh gosh,
don't give me a teaching assignment. It's usually like, oh, this is going to be so great because I
love what I research so much that I get the opportunity to share with exciting young minds and
it's always a privilege and an honor. So just debunking that myth a bit Tim, this is exciting stuff.
I agree with you. I think there's a real political agenda at work here, you know, in the midst of
a culture that says, hey, we're going to cut federal funding for research. And at the same time,
we're going to say, hey, you know, what are these professors doing now that the funding is is
really cut. Let's get those, those, you know, like you said, so-called lazy government employees
working. And the least they could do is be teaching more classes, right? Like just because the
funding stopped doesn't mean that the research has stopped and that's partly part of the problem and
the adjustment that's happening. At the same time, I do think Tim, we are going to see more
faculty teaching than we're used to just because I agree with this in this moment of like really
understanding changes in higher education, you know, are very fast ought to be in the classrooms.
And so I don't necessarily like it mandated from legislation, but then again, I don't like anything
mandated, you know, legislation. So I have a big hope that like faculty governance, like the leaders,
like, you know, the department chairs and the deans and all the folks who are working in sort of
a manager position in higher ed, much like principals do in our K-12 schools or superintendents office
and things. They kind of figure out how do we get a really great product, a K-A educational
experience for our students and involve the most, you know, exciting and bright minds that we have
on our campus in that process. So I think it's a it's a call for educational leaders,
you know, to be creative and not just say, okay, guess what? Now you're teaching 12, figure out how
to do it all, you know, and I don't think anybody's doing that, but I like legislation out of it,
just let those organizations figure it out. Yeah, and you know, kind of, I don't let us kind of
bring this to an end on that gone. I thought the last time I checked Wisconsin was a Republican
controlled legislature. And the last time I checked Republicanism, they hated big government
making decisions for people of which they have no business making their decisions for.
How is it that the Republican legislature of Wisconsin, then now comes around and says,
you know what, Deans, you know what, Provost, you know what, leaders in higher education,
and you know what, faculty with PhDs in every content area there is, you guys have no business
making decisions regarding higher education. That's our job. I mean, before becoming a legislature,
you know, I used the pop popcorn, and that gives me so much experience when it comes to
making educational decisions. Don't make a popcorn, Tim. I was a job I had in the past. I was a
popcorn poper at a comedy club. So, and that's really where I learned most of the interesting things
I talk about on this program. So, you know, no knocking. No, but hey, we just wanted to bring that
to you. So class was in session, but now it's time for your moment of sin.
So, yes, they depend on our obedience. When we withdraw it, their power disappears.
It's important to know that. It's important to know that every little thing we do helps.
Thanks for listening to today's class in session. If you want more bus depensals podcasts,
just go on over to Apple, Spotify, or you can always find us at civicmedia.com or on our website
busdepensals.com. Remember, you can find great bus depensals content every Monday for home room,
Wednesdays for class in session, and on Fridays for producer Jacob's choice. And of course,
pencil busters. You can always tune in on Saturday and listen to the bus bus depensals weekend
broadcast at 3 p.m. Central time across all the civic media networks for one hour of your favorite
blue collar scholars. Tim and Johnny, they keep bus depensals.