What if you had an RTS?

“It’s almost worse having the grant without RTS.”

“The only reason I need funding is to buy time. If the grant won’t pay for my time, what is the point?”

How many times have you heard someone (maybe yourself) say something like that? I suspect that with the demise of the Research Time Stipend (RTS) program at SSHRC, cynicism about research grants has increased.

But what if you already had a research time stipend and you just weren’t using it?

An RTS subsidized teaching load for one is the normal load for another

The researchers I’ve met in presentations and workshops, or when reviewing their grants, have a wide variety of working conditions.

Some have a standard teaching load of 2:2 (two courses each semester for 2 semesters). Some have a standard 3:2 load. Some even have a 3:3 load.

Some always teach in fall and winter unless they make a specific request to do otherwise. Some teach summer term and one of fall or winter, because their department runs co-op programs. Some are able to voluntarily unbalance their load to turn a 2:2 into a 3:1.

Some teach in programs that run on a different timetable so that while most of their colleagues are finished with exams at the end of April, they are still teaching and marking for several weeks.

You have time for research

If your contract requires you to do research …

If you are rewarded for research …

If your institution has a VP Research, a Research Office, and other support for research …

Then you have time. The institution is paying you to do research as well as to teach.

The proportions will vary among institutions. The type of research valued will vary among institutions. But most tenure-stream academics in Canada have time for research.

If you were on a teaching-only contract, you would probably have a teaching load about double what you have now. You would have to teach in the summer, or you wouldn’t be paid for the summer.

What are you doing with your de facto teaching release?

I’m willing to bet that you are just spending more time on each class you are teaching.

Which leads me to wonder what you would do with the time released if you actually had funding to buy-out one of your teaching commitments. Would it really release research time?

Or would that time fill up with teaching related activity the way new bookshelves fill with books almost as soon as you buy them?

If you can only do research when you have no teaching obligations, you are in trouble.

Autonomy has it’s downsides

Because you have autonomy, you can use that autonomy to decide to work full-time on teaching despite what your contract says.

The thing is no one ever checks on how you spend your time. Not even in a good way.

If you don’t do any research this week, no one is going to notice.

The message we get from friends, family, the general public, and even the administrative staff is that teaching is our real work.

Consciously limiting the amount of time you spend on teaching and giving some priority to your research is not valued on a day to day basis in our institutions. It is derided.

But most of those people only understand teaching from the perspective of the student.

From a student perspective teaching is all about what happens when the student is in the room. A student doesn’t even recognize the time it takes to prepare that class or mark the papers. Just look at what happens when high-school teachers unions ask for more time for those activities.

You value teaching.

You want to be a good teacher. You want to be available to help students who need it.

You aren’t selfish. And you don’t want to be seen to be selfish.

So you autonomously privilege teaching over research, at least during term time. And then find it hard to get back into the research in the summer.

And then fall arrives and you are back into a vicious cycle in which you aren’t doing as much research as you want to.

It doesn’t take long before cynicism about research starts to set in.

You need to recognize your baseline RTS

It might be worth thinking about your workload differently. Instead of seeing it as a full-time job with a 2:2 teaching load (or whatever). You need to see it as a full-time job with x% teaching and y% research. (The administrative stuff would be there regardless and largely services these two aspects of the university mission.)

The teaching load you have isn’t a full time job. It is x% of a full-time job. The other y% is your RTS. Fully funded by the institution.

That x% isn’t evenly distributed throughout the year

You have 16+ weeks in the summer when you will do relatively little teaching related work. Some preparation for the fall and winter, but nowhere near as much as you will do between September and April.

Similarly, between September and April you will spend more than x% of our time on teaching and teaching-related tasks.

But if you are spending 40 hours per week every week during term time on teaching and teaching related activity, you are mis-using your autonomy.

And just because all your friends do it, doesn’t mean it is right. Remember what your mother said about jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge?

Autonomy isn’t easy

I bet your mom had something to say about that, too. And she would have been right.

You can autonomously choose to balance your actual workload to match your contractual obligations. Including taking vacations.

The arithmetical calculations necessary to figure out how x% looks in different terms are probably the easy part.

The hard part is going against the discourse that says that your real work is teaching. That research is some hobby you have that is nice, but should happen in the holidays, weekends, and evenings. That valuing teaching means having no boundaries about when you are available to students.

You might need some support

Some people have the strength of will to carve out time for research and to guard that time. Some people find that much harder.

You might struggle with internal self-talk in which setting boundaries is selfish and bad.

You have gremlins you didn’t even know about that call you names when you  say “no” to an unreasonable student request, or jeer at your pretentious desire to be a “researcher”.

You might struggle with perfectionism and find it hard not to tweak that lecture just a little more. More gremlins who taunt you with the possibility of poor teaching evaluations.

Or maybe you can see how to carve out small amounts of time for research but have no idea how to use those small time slots effectively. Maybe you have money for a research assistant but aren’t sure what to do with one.

And if you’ve been in this cycle for a while, it might just be hard to get out of. Sometimes you need a push to get out of the ditch.

Here’s where I get stuck

I can help. I know I can. I’ve done it for friends. I’ve done it for other researchers as almost a side-effect of helping with their grant proposals.

Some of the help is just having someone to talk to who you know is on your side. Who won’t agree with the gremlins and might even help you work out how to make the gremlins go away. Or at least sit quietly under a tree.

And I know I can do that.

What I don’t now is what you need.

I’ve been going around inside my own head trying to figure it out and I’m coming up blank. Or I put an offer out there and then no one responds. And I don’t know if that’s because I’m not framing it properly, or not pricing it properly, or not talking to the right people.

I want to help you achieve your research goals. And part of that is finding the time to do research and using that time effectively.

So, instead of guessing, I’ve designed a small survey (just 4 questions). I’d appreciate it if you would take a few seconds to fill it out.

Click Here to take survey

Thanks. If you have friends who might be interested, please pass the URL on to them, too.