Somewhere out there, joked Towson State University President Hoke Smith, is a college professor who moves from state to state, and always buys a big house next door to a powerful state legislator. The professor mows his lawn every Wednesday noon and then departs for a round of golf.
"I wish we could get rid of that guy," Dr. Smith said.
So do a lot of other people in higher education, which is under pressure from frustrated legislators, taxpayers and parents to increase the workload of college and university professors.
The picture of professors as elitists who spend little time working, most of it in research or lawn care and almost none teaching undergraduates -- has been propounded in recent years by a string of popular books and several prominent critics of higher education.
Two-thirds of the nation's colleges and universities are examining faculty work and pay with an eye toward improving undergraduate teaching, according to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
"I wouldn't call it a groundswell," said Ernest L. Boyer, president of the foundation, "but it's going on. There's no question about it. Parents and legislatures are concerned that costs are going up while attention to students is going down. There's also a healthy amount of internal criticism, and external critics have hit the mark in shaping public attitudes," he said.
"The problem," Dr. Smith said, "is that the public thinks it's paying for undergraduate education. When their money goes to graduate education or research, they don't think they're getting what they paid for."
Public higher education systems in 20 states, including Maryland, are under some sort of mandate to examine faculty workload, if only to report on it yearly. Many states have started to collect data but direct comparison isn't possible because each study uses different measuring sticks, several higher education specialists said.
According to a report prepared last summer for the states' higher education finance officers, only Florida has established a minimum requirement of "contact hours" between faculty and students -- 12 hours a week. But the statute is so vague and full of holes, said Michael Dallet, a Florida higher education official, that "it's a toothless cat."
The Ohio legislature in 1993 ordered a 10 percent statewide increase in undergraduate teaching, beginning this fall. But critics say state officials have little idea how to measure college teaching across the state or how to enforce the law. The Ohio law also does not specify a year to which the 10 percent increase is to be compared.
Like Maryland, most of the states aren't under direct legislative order. But their higher education governing boards are working to improve undergraduate teaching and to assure students they won't be shut out of courses because there aren't professors to teach them.
Arizona's Board of Regents moved after the legislature "made noises as if it was going to regulate" faculty workload at the three state universities, said Suzanne Pfister, the regents' associate executive director for public affairs.
"We recognized that more teaching is only one way to improve undergraduate education," she said. "So we developed a set of measures, 80 in all, and we promised that undergraduates would have adequate course selections. We've heard no complaints from the legislature in the past two years."
How hard do professors work? How hard should they work? The answers to both questions are extremely difficult, in part because American higher education is so diverse. The professional life of a research scientist at the University of Maryland College Park is very different from that of a professor of English at Catonsville Community College.
Various studies (largely based on self-reports) and data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics show -- the research-oriented professor works between 46 and 56 hours a week, devoting 47 percent of that time to teaching and activities directly related to teaching (such as the grading of exams), the rest to research (27 percent) and other activities.
The community college teacher has a slightly shorter work week and spends 81 percent of it on teaching-related activities, typically handling five courses each semester. The "preferred teaching load" of the American Association of University Professors is nine hours a week (three courses) at the undergraduate level and six hours (two courses) at the graduate level.
But professors don't punch clocks, and relatively few of them teach 12 months a year. For example, thousands of professors across the nation worked at home last weekend grading final examinations and papers, but a large number won't return to the classroom until the end of January and won't teach during much of the summer. For this nine-month teaching year, the typical American professor earns about $50,000 ($72,000 for a full professor at College Park).
Few in higher education deny that there are professors like the lawn-mowing golfer of Dr. Smith's joke -- or the University of Maryland teacher who named his sailboat "The Protected Day" after the one workday each week when he didn't work. But they say these are extreme cases.
What does concern them is that financially strapped colleges and universities have emphasized high-profile research and graduate education at the expense of undergraduate teaching.
"What we've seen," said Mary Burgan, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, "is the superstar
syndrome at every state university. They play the academic game just as they do the NCAA basketball tournament. Everyone wants to be No. 1, have the most grants, the most books, the most Pulitzers, the big-name professors. They're all competing with each other, while at the other end there's pressure to cut budgets, to cover undergraduate classes at any cost, even if it means loading up on part-time faculty or teaching assistants [graduate students who teach undergraduate classes]."
"We have to honorably acknowledge that there's been an imbalance," said Dr. Boyer of the Carnegie Foundation. "But we shouldn't be embarrassed about research. Research is part of scholarship, and scholarship is a communal act. It's not scholarship until others are engaged. Research and publication are part of it. With both, you have to tell someone what you've done. They're really another form of teaching."
R. Eugene Rice, who directs a national "Forum on Faculty Roles and Rewards" for the American Association for Higher Education, believes too many teachers have "withdrawn into disciplinary interests. We have to start thinking of the work we do as our work rather than my work. We have to redefine the work that faculty do."
Dr. Burgan of the AAUP said, "We don't have to extrapolate from the extremes, bringing up the faculty member who doesn't teach at all or who gets a sabbatical [leave] every other semester. But what faculties have to do is put their houses in order. If they don't do it, someone else will."