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Policy Statement for the College of Arts & Humanities on “banking” of teaching hours

The chairs and dean agree that we need clarity across departments with respect to banking of teaching credit hours. The policy articulated below arises out of our desire to protect faculty and chairs from situations with the potential to cause misunderstanding.

Ordinarily, full-time contract and tenure-line faculty are expected to teach 12 teaching credit hours (tch’s) per semester, for a total of 24 tch’s over an academic year. In addition, such faculty members are expected to engage in service as well as in scholarly/creative activities.

At times, for a range of personal or professional reasons, faculty have asked if, over a period of several semesters, they might “bank” tch’s above the required 12 per semester in order to “buy” a semester-without- teaching or a semester with reduced teaching.

The college discourages this practice for several reasons, the most important being:
  1. Course scheduling presents challenges in any semester when a faculty member is not available to teach a full load;
  2. During that semester the faculty member generally is also unavailable to meet service responsibilities;
  3. The teaching/scholarly/service load at WSU already is heavy. Taking on additional teaching may result in decreased scholarly activity and service.
If, however, the faculty member:
  1. applies to his/her chair with compelling reasons for banking of tch’s leading to a semester-without-teaching (or with reduced teaching);
  2. makes such an application to begin banking six weeks prior to the chair’s deadline for submitting the next semester’s teaching schedule;
The chair may grant such a request if:
  1. the chair believes that banking will improve the faculty member’s situation and will not adversely affect the department’s other faculty and students;
  2. the chair informs the dean in advance of the semester in which the faculty member intends to begin such banking.
The chair and the faculty member will be mutually responsible for tracking the accumulation of tch’s. A faculty member may NOT bank tch’s for longer than a two-year period, and may NOT bank any more than 4 tch’s in a single semester.


March 3, 2008

 

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Weber State University
Ogden, Utah 84408