Handbook

SCHEDULING PRINCIPLES, POLICIES, OPTIONS

Department scheduling obligations:

1. To provide a full range of courses in support of various English curricula and the core, including composition
2. To spread classes evenly across the day and week
3. To minimize competition between courses
4. To distribute advanced courses as evenly as possible
5. To maintain capacity without increasing costs as tenure track faculty teaching workloads shift (N.B.: This has meant increased class sizes as compared with AY99-00, shifting some courses to alternate year scheduling, and cancellation of low enrollment sections after pre-registration.)

Faculty teaching loads:

1. The Department averages 4.25 sections per tenure track faculty member per year when long-standing programmatic releases are included in the count. Normally, individual faculty loads will be 2-2/2-2/2-3 over a three-year period, though assigned programmatic releases and/or non-standard research or creative agendas may result in variation.
2. Faculty will have an opportunity to express their teaching preferences for both regular and special topics courses.
3. Faculty will have an opportunity to express their scheduling preferences vis-à-vis morning/afternoon/evening, contiguity, days, and class sessions per week for assigned courses. Three-day-a-week teaching schedules are customary, although a five-day-a-week schedule may happen occasionally. Two-day-a-week schedules are a privilege possible on a rotating basis.
4. All tenure track faculty members will teach at least one large-section course every six years or the equivalent as part of their regular loads. Equivalents may include but are not limited to teaching a 3-2 load every other year or buying out a large section (20% of salary or replacement cost for three sections from grant or other non-self-funded sources).
5. As scheduling permits, faculty teaching multi-section courses will have the option of teaching two sections of the same course.

A note on course conflicts:
The Scheduling Committee (composed of the Assistant Chair in charge of scheduling, the Graduate Coordinator, and the Undergraduate Coordinator) controls conflicts among the graduate courses carefully: composition courses, for example, can run against literature or creative writing courses, but not against other composition courses. But as the Department continues to encourage the development of courses that appeal to more than one discipline within English, the task of avoiding conflict becomes more difficult. Consequently, we have to schedule graduate courses twice a week when faculty would prefer a single three-hour meeting, and three times a week when faculty would prefer two. This policy of minimizing scheduling conflicts will undoubtedly result in some less-than-ideal scheduling, but the policy is important, especially as we rely so heavily on variable-topic courses: students who are trapped by a schedule conflict will likely never get a second chance.