93-12-10: What Does a Professor Do All Day, Anyway? Edward L. Ayers, the Hugh P. Kelly Professor of History, has been named "Teacher of the Year" at U.Va. in an annual student survey focusing on faculty members who teach introductory-level undergraduate courses. The survey is sponsored by U.Va.'s chapter of Phi Eta Sigma, the national freshman honor society. He accepted the award Oct. 31 and gave the following talk to an enthusiastic audience of students and parents visiting the Grounds for Fall Convocation and Parents' Weekend. Mr. Ayers, who has previously won University and statewide teaching awards and is considered one of U.Va.'s most gifted teachers and scholars, was cited by the society for his "hard work and dedication" and "positive influence" on his students. His 1992 book, The Promise of the New South, was chosen as a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. One Saturday morning several years ago I found myself in the basement of Gilmer Hall, picking up a map I had sent to the mainframe computer the evening before. I had my son Nate with me, who was about six at the time. The place was deserted, it being 9:30 or so on a beautiful football Saturday. What kind of person would go to the computing center at such a time? It turned out that there was one other person there. It was Hugh Kelly, the Dean of the Faculty and soon-to-be Provost. He was there picking up his printout, which, considering he was an internationally renowned theoretical physicist in addition to his other responsibilities, was probably a little more complicated than my maps of Arkansas and South Carolina. I found myself wishing that I had bothered to shave. Hugh, an extraordinarily friendly man, beloved by everyone, seemed surprised and genuinely glad to see me. Kneeling to talk to my not-very-outgoing son, he asked Nate if he would like to be a historian like his dad when he grew up. Nate solemnly shook his head no. Hugh, smiling, asked him why not. "Because," Nate announced, "it would be too embarrassing and too boring." I smiled weakly, a bit daunted to find out what my son really thought of me, but Hugh didn't let on. When we got back to the car I gently queried Nate without trying to make the truthful young scamp feel bad about his honest feelings: "What did you mean about my work being embarrassing and boring," I said. "It's embarrassing when you have to stand up in front of all those people and boring when you have to sit in your study all by yourself all day," he informed me. Nate had come with me to lecture one day. I had pictured him swelling with pride as he saw people in cool clothes and hip hair cuts actually writing down what I said. It had turned out, instead, that he was blushing deep down inside the whole time that his dad stood up in front of all those people and talked, told jokes, and embarrassed the entire family. I had also pictured him filled with respect as I labored away on my computer at home, trying to build a solid future for him and his new baby sister, Hannah. Instead, he pictured me as bored, an automaton staring at a gray screen that didn't even show cartoons. Over the years, I've come to realize that Nate was expressing the feelings of many people. In the eyes of most folks, a professor either portentously and pompously lectures people from his narrow shaft of specialized knowledge, or is a bookworm -- nose stuck in a dusty volume, oblivious to the world. They should be embarrassed or bored. Not a very flattering picture. We hear it echoed in recent debates over the ways professors spend their time. What do we do all that time when we're not pontificating? Surely it can't take all that time to write the lectures we deliver. Surely there can't be that many books in our fields worth reading. The only logical solution that some people can draw is that we must be goofing off, or, just as bad, doing what is promiscuously labeled as "research." That word conjures up images of mad scientists in the basement or nervous twits poring over something like an elaborate stamp collection in the attic. In either case, research is something antisocial, something detached from real education -- which, I take it, is envisioned as something like Robin Williams standing on the desks in The Dead Poets Society. Although I teach, in widely varying ways, about 500 undergraduates and 20 graduate students each year, I spend, just as the newspapers charge, a small fraction of my time in front of classrooms: on average, I'd say, about five hours a week. That's not much. Maybe an honest reckoning would help clarify just what it is that professors do. This seems a good time and place for that reckoning, if you'll indulge me for taking advantage of your kindness to reflect on what a Teacher of the Year actually does all day. I ask this question because I understand where it comes from. Professors, like the students around whom we structure our lives, don't follow the same rhythms and schedules of most working people. The incongruity between my schedule and those of the men who recently remodeled my house quickly became a running joke: they kidded me when they found me still unshaven at nine in the morning before my 9:30 class because I had been at the computer a couple of hours and hadn't taken the time yet to get ready for the day. I kidded them when they quit work at 4:45 when I knew I had another two or three hours of work to do, perhaps including a class. People in the academy, whatever their age, tend to follow unusual hours, work in cycles of desperately hard work and periods of apparently less desperation, tend to work in places other than a central office, tend to spend considerable amounts of time alone or in intense conversation with a few people, tend not to work in terms reflected in billable hours or tightly scheduled appointments. The fruits of our labor are not always as visible as a new house, a successful surgery, or a settled law suit. For that reason, and for the reason that intellectual work has been suspect-in the United States for most of our history, professors have come under attack and derision lately. Let me give you an overview of what I do in addition to teaching two large lecture courses and two discussion courses each average year. First of all, I talk to about 20 students a week in office hours, during appointments, or on the phone (often, my family points out with grim humor, at dinner time, the kids' bedtime, or my own bedtime). My office hours are actually the most draining work I do, as I give my full attention to a constantly changing series of people and problems. I feel like a sort of combination of psychologist, bureaucrat, salesman, teacher of English 101, guidance counselor -- and, occasionally, even a historian. I enjoy these times a lot and find that I'm usually busy the whole time from when I walk in the door until I show evidence of really having to leave. In fact, I can't get any other work done if I stay in my office, so I tend not to be there unless I'm scheduled to be there. I sometimes feel a little guilty about that, to be honest, but I find time, as quickly as it needs to be found, for any student who wants to talk with me about anything. Another activity that takes a considerable amount of time that is not immediately obvious from the outside is the much -- maligned "committee work." The very name makes it sound like a bunch of gray and graying drones shuffling paper and cold coffee around as they discuss something without consequence or interest. Granted, some committee work is like that, as it is in any group in which labor and responsibility are shared. But the cost is worth the reward, for one of the best things about academic life is that so much of it is done democratically, without a cumbersome administrative superstructure. People take turns running the most important parts of the University: its hiring, its promotion and tenure, its grievances -- things that full-time staff do in organizations a fraction of the size of a university. I serve on five or six committees. Those committees deal with everything from overseeing research policy for the university to overseeing all our information technology, from reviewing proposals for new degree programs to choosing the recipients of newly created chairs in teaching excellence, from managing the large and complicated graduate program in the history department to advising the library. I spend about three hours a week on committee work, though that amount can easily soar to ten or twelve hours when we're engaged in a major hiring decision, to twenty or thirty hours when we're admitting new graduate students. This work is largely invisible, but it is essential. It is usually done as overtime work, and saves the university a great deal of money. It also tends, in my experience, to be done very conscientiously by everyone involved. My time is absorbed to some extent as well in talking to various groups outside the classroom. I've lectured to the Rotary and to general contractors, to investment bankers and Echols Scholars, to groups of secondary school teachers and museum professionals, to alumni and parents of students. I talk quite a bit to student groups ranging from first-years to those discussing the honor system to those who are being inducted into honor societies, to rallies in front of the Rotunda. These add up to about an hour a week's worth, I imagine, if you average them out. OK -- we've now accounted for five hours in the classroom in an average week of an average semester, 10 hours meeting with students. I spend another three hours preparing for lectures, another five hours preparing for undergraduate or graduate discussion classes, another hour and a lot more in some weeks) writing letters of recommendation for undergrads eager to get into law school, medical school, graduate school, the Peace Corps, a postdoc), a position teaching English in Japan -- you get the idea I read student papers and the like for, say, an average of another six hours a week. Committee work takes another three, and talks such as this one another one. That adds up, if I'm not mistaken, to 34 hours. If, as U.Va. professors claim, we put in an average of 50 hours a week, where are the other 16? Although it appears not to be politically correct to say so, I am proud that I spend considerable time with my graduate students. I know the average graduate student for six or seven years, not the two or three semesters I have with even those undergraduates I know best. Those grad students share my passion for what I'm so curious about. They want to know everything I know and then go beyond it. They are smart, dedicated people who are sacrificing all kinds of earning potential with their fancy degrees and GPAs to come here and study. Their livelihoods depend on me in a way undergrads' do not. The job market for professors is, as you all know, incredibly brutal -- harder than for almost any field in the so called "real world." Where else are there 300 applicants with Ph.D.s from the best schools in the world fighting for a job from which they may very well be fired in six years if they don't write a book that is considered not merely good but groundbreaking? Those graduate students and I write books together. More accurately, each one writes a book and I tear it apart, several times, until it is good enough, we hope, to put them on the top of the pile of 300 job applicants. As you can imagine, that takes a lot of time, effort and engagement. But a lot of our time together is spent in teaching undergrads. In fact, I know I would not be standing here today had the TAs in my class on the United States since 1865 not done a wonderful job. I do organize the course, select the readings, give the lectures, coordinate the questions asked in discussion, and take responsibility for the course as a whole. Teaching assistants, though, lead the discussions and grade the papers and exams. They are my partners, my allies, my friends. Undergraduate education at U.Va. would be much impoverished without graduate students. I know that TAs get a bad rap; they are often cited as examples of what's wrong with higher education, the number of sections taught by TAs counted as demerits in the rankings. I understand that it is a very real problem when TAs do not speak English adequately, or when they are thrown into courses they are not ready to teach, or when they are abandoned by the professor. I know, however, from the experience of having worked with more than sixty TAs over the last 13 years that graduate students are more energetic, more concerned, more generous and even more knowledgeable than many experienced professors. In my opinion, the most effective money we spend on undergraduate education at Virginia is spent on graduate fellowships to bring the best young scholars to Charlottesville and on groups such as the Teaching Resource Center to help them become the best teachers they can be. I see no other way to teach the number of people who want to take our courses. Virtually every course in United States history at U.Va. is full to overflowing, and it is only with TAs that we can teach the students who want to know what we have to teach. We can't go back to the days when faculty taught 30 students in each class, as appealing as that might sound on the surface. I think there is a kind of excitement in having several people as the teachers in a class, an electricity. We would do best, I believe, to recognize that and embrace it, to accept and celebrate our graduate students as key people at the University. Back to the accounting. I'd say I spend six hours a week with graduate students, which, together with the 34 hours I tallied before, brings me up to the standard 40 hour work week. But there's a problem: perhaps you'll notice that I've not created a single bit of knowledge in the 40 hours. I've only conveyed what I've learned from other people. That's a useful job, one I am happy to perform, but it's not the only reason we have a place such as U.Va. Here, we are given the resources and the expectations to add to what is being taught not only in my own classroom, but in classrooms across the country. Thus, I spend the other 10 to 15 hours a week I work -- often in the evenings or on the mornings of weekends or early in the mornings of weekdays -- working on my contributions to the larger process of teaching. Part of that time is spent on the national equivalent of committee work: refereeing manuscripts for journals and presses, writing letters for tenure and promotion at other institutions. Academic work is as close to a meritocracy as we come in America; no one cares what you look like, whom you know, what kind of car you drive. We only care about the quality of the work you do. We are constantly being evaluated by our peers, held to public account for what we publish. It's a rigorous discipline, democratic but time-consuming. I have several publishing projects of my own going right now: a textbook that tries to tell the story of the American people in a new way the Oxford Book of the American South that has the capacity to reach an audience beyond any classroom, and a very large research project that is trying to create one of the first books to take advantage of the exciting development of the so-called electronic super-highway. All of these projects are extremely exciting to me and influence the way I teach every day. And virtually all of it is done in what appears to people outside academic life as the "spare time" of breaks, summers and leaves. So you see that what a professor does all day is in fact several jobs. I'm constantly shifting among being a teacher, an administrator, an entrepreneur, an employer, an entertainer, an ambassador, a scholar. If I don't like what I'm doing at any one moment, it doesn't matter because I'll be doing something else, apparently only tangentially related, the next hour. And yet it is of a piece. While I often feel harried, I don't feel schizophrenic. Each of these activities has a lot in common with the others. They are generally done in collaboration with other people. Sometimes that work is a discussion with a single person. Sometimes the work is a discussion with 10 or 12 people, trying to keep it going like a jazz combo, letting everyone solo but keeping the tempo sharp, bringing it all together at the end. Sometimes the work is a collaboration with 400 people, playing the room, reading the mood, trying to channel all that attention and energy in a way that makes a lecture a common experience. And sometimes my work is taking place without my immediate knowledge, as a TA tries out an idea we cooked up during lunch together, or as a class at some other college discusses something I've written or a reader at a public library picks up my book and finds some connection there. What's the common denominator, then, in what professors do all day? Translation. We translate from a field of knowledge to people who want to know about it. In my case, I translate between the people of today and the people from the past of the United States. Other professors translate physics, or business, or languages, or other cultures. We all live in at least two worlds. One of those worlds is a world of ideas, of print and numbers, a world almost limitless and impossible to master, growing every time we turn our backs. The other world is the immediate and human world of classes, committees, office hours, deadlines, budgets, advising. Without being a citizen of both worlds, an active participant in both worlds, we are diminished, our ability to teach diminished. The dichotomy between teaching and research is no dichotomy at all if we understand that a professor journeys back and forth between two worlds, translating among many people. All in all, it's not as embarrassing or boring as you might think, especially when your students see fit to give you an award for doing what you love doing all day anyway.