Editor, The Channels:
This is written in response to Peter Naylor’s letter in the Instructor’s Association newsletter concerning “Guidelines for outside employment” Several statements struck me, but perhaps the strongest was “Being available on contract days for six hours, and committing yourself to your faculty duties for thirty-five hours a week or more are good minimums.”
Thirty-five hours a week? For the salaries we are paid? Six hours everyday we are teaching? I don’t think many full-time teachers have been aware of these “requirements” before reading Naylor’s letters.
Also I’m somewhat disturbed by the phrase “full-disclosure of all outside activities.” I know there are some “outside activities” I have no intention of “disclosing,” and I suspect is true as well for other faculty. “Outside activities” could be anything from giving a talk at the Institute of World Culture, to singing in the Santa Barbara Master Chorale, to conducting weekend seminars, to telemarketing, to dancing at the Spearmint Rhino. Dose the college expect us to reveal what we are doing on the weekend? What we are doing with our summers?
A former faculty member (dismissed for “working too much”) was demanded of, by his dean, to reveal what he was doing over the summer. In my humble opinion, it is none of the college’s business what we do over the summer.
This “full disclosure” is beginning to sound like “Big Brother”. Are faculty members to have no sense of privacy about where they spend their time outside the college? As long as faculty do not “engage in outside employment which will interfere with the optimum performance of his/her assignment” he/she should be left alone.
I dislike this intrusive invasive attitude of “Guidelines for Outside Employment”. And of course the irony is that college could care less about how much part-time teachers work outside the college. Part-timers, who makes two-thirds of the teaching staff, could be working 100 hours a week at other institutions, and no one cares whether this intense labor interferes with their ‘optimum performance” or not.
However, unless this “outside employment” is interfering with our teaching, we should be allowed to keep our mouths shut about it. Save me from a “supervisor” who wants “full disclosure,” and save me from the “supervisor” who counts every hour I’m on campus.