During a recent visit to Sewanee University of the South in Tennessee, we took a few moments to explain how faculty teaching loads are a very important indicator of the emphasis a school places on teaching.
Watch the video below to find out what he has to say or read the transcript that follows:
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Here at Sewanee, the admissions office was great. They set up a meeting for me to meet with a professor of history, Professor Register and he was great. He was an American historian. Really forthcoming about how the tensions between academia and scholarship and teaching all interplay.
Here at Sewanee there’s a 3/3 load for the faculty. So, they have three courses they teach in the first semester and three courses in the second semester. It’s a really good question to ask to get an understanding of how the faculty weighs the importance of scholarship versus the importance of teaching. So, if they’re teaching a 3/2 load, that means that they have three courses in the first semester, two in the second. Some places will have a 2/2. Apparently here at Sewanee, in the not so distant past, it was 4/4. So, that’s really a measure of a teaching college versus a university where it might be 2/2 or 2/1. So that there’s much more time and priority given to scholarship versus teaching.
So, when you’re looking for a college and thinking about that you want to weigh what your own importance is. Do you want to go to a place where the faculty are primary teaching, like a place like a Sewanee where it’s 3/3? Or are you looking for that big research university where your professor may be only teaching one or two courses per semester.
