Imagination for the Unseen | Shohei Matsukawa, Associate Dean / Associate Professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies
2021.09.29
The work of a university faculty member can be broadly divided into three categories: (1) research, (2) education, and (3) administration. Of these, research and education are often in the public eye and are therefore relatively easy to imagine. But what about university administration? At SFC, committees are organized according to the topic they handle, such as the Curriculum Committee for curriculum matters and the Personnel Committee for personnel matters. If you are assigned to a committee, you gradually come to understand who is doing what. However, for committees you have never served on, there is much that is unclear, even for full-time faculty members.
Before joining the current executive board, I had experience on about 20 committees over seven years. In some years, I was a member of more than 10 committees at the same time. At SFC, Wednesdays are designated as committee days, and my schedule was often filled with back-to-back committees from morning until night. At the time, I was dissatisfied. I wondered why there were so many committees. I did not even know the total number of committees at SFC, so I was looking only at the information I could see and even felt a sense of unfairness. Looking back now, I can only say that my perspective was shallow.
After joining the current executive board, I first wanted to get a complete picture of the committees, so I created the Data-Driven Campus Task Force (hereafter, DDC TF). A task force is a temporary committee that focuses on a specific task. The task of the DDC TF was to create a list that visualized which faculty members were assigned to which committees and how many hours of work they were responsible for per year.
The total number of committees at SFC and their membership lists had already been digitized, but what was really needed was the number of workload hours for each faculty member. Since the frequency and duration of meetings differ for each committee, looking at the number of workload hours is a more accurate representation of the actual situation than simply the number of committee assignments. Therefore, we manually went through the archived minutes of each committee to determine how many times a year each committee was held and how many hours each meeting lasted. Of course, some committee members may have spent time working outside of meeting hours, but since this is not recorded in the minutes, we limited the workload hours to meeting time only as a rough estimate. In addition, since committee chairs have the burden of advance preparation, we uniformly estimated their workload hours to be twice that of a regular member.
Now, the data was ready. How many committees exist in total at SFC? The answer is 121 (as of June 2021). The breakdown is 44 internal SFC committees, 8 task forces, and 69 all-Juku committees (listing only those committees on which at least one SFC faculty member serves). The total number of members on all committees was 1,018. This calculates to an average of 8.4 members per committee (including the chair). Next, let's look at the workload hours. The sum of the workload hours for all members of all committees totaled 15,047.5 hours per year. This calculates to an average of 124.4 workload hours per committee per year.
Finally, let's look at the number of committee assignments and workload hours per faculty member. The number of full-time faculty members at SFC is 106 (as of June 2021). Therefore, if all full-time faculty members were to share the committee workload equally, the average number of committee assignments per full-time faculty member would be 9.6, and the average workload would be 142 hours per year. I mentioned earlier my dissatisfaction with serving on 10 committees at once, but it turns out I was just doing an average amount of work. I was stunned by my own shallowness as I compiled the data.
What was even more interesting was the imbalance in the workload. Naturally, it is difficult for all full-time faculty members to share the workload equally. When I created a semi-log plot of the workload hours, sorted from highest to lowest, the points plotted in a strikingly linear fashion. This means that the more work a person has, the more their workload hours increase exponentially. In fact, while not quite the Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule), as of March 2020, about 38% of the faculty were shouldering 80% of the total work. Later, after the Dean made committee appointments based on this data, the imbalance improved, and by June 2021, the situation was such that about 51% of the faculty were shouldering 80% of the total work.
So far, I have described the reality of SFC's committees in a somewhat self-deprecating manner, but what I keenly felt after visualizing the data was my lack of imagination for the unseen. A new executive board will take over in October, and the committee structure will be revamped, but the total number of committees and the total workload will likely not change much, as they are all necessary. This means that if all full-time faculty members were to share the committee workload equally, the average of 9.6 committee assignments and 142 workload hours per year per full-time faculty member will remain unchanged. Personally, I do not believe that every faculty member's workload must be equal, but as a faculty member myself, I want to continue to contribute not only to research and education but also to university administration, while exercising my imagination for the unseen.