{"id":62368,"date":"2014-12-30T15:00:49","date_gmt":"2014-12-30T20:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=62368"},"modified":"2014-12-26T12:57:23","modified_gmt":"2014-12-26T17:57:23","slug":"what-do-professors-do-all-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2014\/12\/30\/what-do-professors-do-all-day\/","title":{"rendered":"What Do Professors Do All Day?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2\"<\/a>Anthropologist John Ziker decided to try to find out. \u00a0With his collaborators —\u00a0Matt Genuchi, Kathryn Demps, and David — Nolin\u00a0Ziker recruited a non-random sample of 16 professors at Boise State University and scheduled interviews with them every other day for 14 days. \u00a0In each interview, they reported how they spent their time the previous day. \u00a0In total, he collected data for 166 days<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s a small, non-random sample at just one university, but here’s what he discovered.<\/p>\n

All ranks worked over 40 hours a week (average of 61 hours\/week) and all ranks put in a substantial number of hours over the weekends:<\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Professors, then, worked 51 hours during the official workweek and then, in addition, put in ten hours over the weekend.<\/p>\n

What were they doing those days? \u00a0Research<\/strong>, teaching<\/strong>, and service<\/strong> are the three pillars of an academic workload and they dominated professors’ time. \u00a0They used weekends, in particular, to catch up on the first two. \u00a0The suspension of the business of the university over the weekend gave them a chance to do the other two big parts of their job.<\/p>\n

\"1b\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This chart breaks down the proportion of time they spend on different activities more clearly. Ziker is surprised by the amount of time faculty spend in meetings<\/strong> and I’m particularly impressed by the amount of time they spend on email<\/strong>. \u00a0Most professors will probably note, with chagrin, the little bars for primary research<\/strong> and manuscript writing<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"1a\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Interesting stuff.<\/p>\n

This was just a first phase, so we can look forward to more data in the future. \u00a0In the meantime, I’ll add this data to my preferred answer when asked what I do all day:<\/p>\n

\"5\"<\/a>Cross-posted at Business Insider<\/a>, Pacific Standard<\/a>, Networked Scholar<\/a>, and the Huffington Post<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anthropologist John Ziker decided to try to find out. \u00a0With his collaborators —\u00a0Matt Genuchi, Kathryn Demps, and David — Nolin\u00a0Ziker recruited a non-random sample of 16 professors at Boise State University and scheduled interviews with them every other day for 14 days. \u00a0In each interview, they reported how they spent their time the previous day. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":62516,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[209,76],"class_list":["post-62368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academia","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/04\/123.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62368"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65561,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62368\/revisions\/65561"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}