This is long, so bear with me. I don’t think it necessarily is a job academics don’t like to do, I suspect it is a time issue really.
So, let’s say that you have 50 tutees, and you have to meet with them individually one hour per term (this was about what we had to do). So it is an afternoon a week for 14 weeks per term. (3.5 hours a week or 50/14)
Let’s say then you have 7-9 undergraduate dissertation students, and you have to meet with them an hour every other week. So that’s another afternoon a week (assuming 3.5-4.5 hours per week) So now we are up to day a week of advising with the personal tutoring.
Let’s add in another 3-5 MA students and a PhD student that you meet with every two weeks. So that’s about another 1/2 day a week as sometimes these sessions take a little longer. So now it is 1.5 days a week in advising.
Let’s get to teaching. I had three modules a term I convened, so 9 hours of lecture, and then another three seminars. That’s 12 hours of teaching a week, or 1.5 days. We are now up to three days a week.
Preparation for lectures/seminars. You get an hour prep time per seminar/lecture, so that’s another 1.5 days. So now we are up to 4.5 days a week. Of course, if the module is new to you, you will be working many weekends as a decent lecture can take a day to write, but we’ll set that aside for now.
Committee meetings/school meetings/training/email…3-4 hours a week. So that’s your work week during the 14 weeks of term
There are 52 weeks a year, 7 weeks hols, and 28 weeks of term.
So 17 weeks left.
What is missing? Research/grant applications. It was expected we did an article of 4 star quality a year for REF and one grant application. We were also supposed to have a major book in the pipeline.
A article takes about five work weeks in my field to accomplish as there might be a research trip. Sustained work on a book, about a month a year. A grant, 3-4 weeks to prepare
So let’s say 3 months or 12 weeks.
Marking. I taught about 150 students a term. They would do an essay and an exam. 300 assessments a term, or 600 assessments a year, and about 15 minutes for each one (that is what we were allocated in workload). That’s 150 hours a year or 4 weeks of marking. 2-3 MA thesis a year…those took 2-3 hours to go through, that’s another 9-10 hours. A PhD thesis a year, a day to mark. So round about 4.5 weeks of marking.
So that’s about your year.
If you are 100 percent efficient, never get sick, your computer works perfectly, never have any new modules, you always have a good idea for an article or grant. you can just about do it. But, then what if you get a grant? Then the wheels come off.
My institution if we were very lucky gave us 2-3 hours a week teaching release to run it, which was about 1/4 of the time needed to do it. So you worked Saturdays or over holidays.
Or you have a new module? Well, it is about a day prep time for a good lecture and seminar. And of course these have to be loaded on Moodle, you have to caption every image in every slide for disabled student and make sure the entire module is ready by the first week of term. Students get anxious and they work a lot, so fair enough, they have to know what to expect every week of the term ahead of time. Guess when you do this…during your holiday allocation or weekends.
Our institution also wanted us to do public outreach, so a talk or two a year, or an afternoon at a secondary school for recruitment. Then we were supposed to do Open Days….that could be 3-4 Saturdays a term, depending on the rota. There was no Time Off in Lieu.
This is at a post-92. There was little to no PA help for much of anything, and our computers were replaced every 7-8 years or so. Offices for one were shared by three, so we had to coordinate to meet with students as there could be privacy issues. And of course with the massive MH issues facing students, we also were supposed to be alerted to that. If you had a student that really needed your help, then other things didn’t get done, and you’d be pulled up for it and told to be more efficient.
So, that may be why personal tutoring wasn’t as extensive as you would have liked it to be. Sorry about that, but if tuitions stay at the 2017 level, the international student market has dried up, there are mass redundancies, and a higher staff-student ratio as a result, this might be why.