Another Numbers Post - This Time on Staff Members
Staff numbers in the beginning
When the English Department was founded, in 1888, the number of staff members was very small. The University's list of courses for the summer semester of 1888 notes that Prof. Brandl reads an introduction to Old and Middle English grammar on four days a week, and twice a week "Ueber Byrons Leben und litterarische Entwicklung", on Byron's life and literary development – and that was it, it seems. (There is a whole paragraph on courses on German language and literature, by contrast.) Three pages later, though, an entry notes that Brandl also teaches practical English: "In der englischen Abtheilung stellt Prof. Brandl neuenglische Uebungen an, zweimal wöchentlich." Clearly the English Department was very literally a one-man business – but then, Alois Brandl was a highly renowned professor. |
As a side remark, some 38 years earlier – in 1850 – the number of courses on English studies had been decidedly higher: Dr. H. M. Melford was then employed as a lector, and he taught grammar and vocabulary courses alongside practical writing classes, but also read on Byron and Moore. He was assisted by Dr. Theodor Müller, whose status was described as "Assessor" (a graduate who was training to become a civil servant, as Beamter) and who also taught practical grammar in addition to a class on Shakespeare's Hamlet. Literature and practical English were the founding disciplines of the Department. |
Then: an exponential rise …
In the late 1960s and during the 1970s, the German academic landscape changed drastically. More and more students went to university, and the universities reacted by opening new degree programmes. Staff numbers had to be adapted, too, so that the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture agreed to finance more teaching positions. At the same time, it became clear that the exiting legal framework that regulated the rights and duties of professors and non-professorial staff had to undergo a radical change. The multiplicity of different positions at university was impracticable; new structures were needed, though it would take some time to rebuild the university structures. Both aspects had repercussions for the English Department, too.96 years after its foundation, in 1984, the number of staff members at the English Department had virtually exploded. In the place of one professor teaching English literature and practical English skills, the Department now had six professors and 24 non-professorial teaching staff. There is no indication how many students were enrolled in the Department in 1888 (or in 1850). The Faculty counted 347 students in the summer semester of 1888, with 94 of them having just started their studies, so it is doubtful that more than two handful would have sat at Brandl's feet. In 1984, though, more than 1.100 students took courses at the English Department.
… and now – stagnation?
Today, the English Department has 9 professors and some 24 non-professorial staff members. What looks good on paper and at first glance is by no means as rosy as all that: four staff members are employed on extra-budgetary funding, so the totality of staff members has actually gone down slightly. The charts below show the development of staff numbers per division.Use the slider bar below the column chart to see how the staff numbers per division have changed since 1984.
Having said that, the sheer number of people employed in teaching at the Department is quite misleading. Depending on the type of contract they hold, one person may be required to teach one course – which is the case of a PhD candidate with a part-time position – or nine classes, as is true for a full-time Lehrkraft für besondere Aufgaben. The "besondere Aufgabe" – special duty or task – for these staff is teaching, and teaching only. In that, such Lehrkräfte differ from other academic staff who are expected or even required to also do research as part of their academic duties. The number of full-time non-professorial staff positions today is 10.5. Judging from the courses held in 1984, the number of non-professorial positions must have been around 18. In other words, while we have 50% more professors, we have 58% fewer non-professorial staff.
What is so difficult about counting people?
It is not counting people that is the problem, but the contract type and the workload that goes with it. Today, there are four different contract types. Staff can be employed as- professors with a teaching load of 9 semester hours;
- lecturers (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter) on long-term contracts, with a teaching load of 10 semester hours for a full-time contract;
- lecturers on short-term contracts, with a maximum of 4 semester hours for a full-time contract;
- Lehrkräfte für besondere Aufgaben or lectors (teaching practical language skills) with a teaching load of 18 semester hours for a full-time contract, no matter how long it runs.
On that basis, it is fairly easy to deduce the type of contract from a list of courses.
In 1984, the employment structure looked different, as the list below shows, taken from the summer semester 1984 course listings of Göttingen University.
But surely there are rules to that?
Actually, no, or at least no clear rules that we were able to discover. While today's contracts have to conform to the Lehrverpflichtungsverordnung (LVVO) which regulates the teaching obligations for each contractual type, such a regulation did not exist in 1984. When the Lower Saxony state parliament passed a new (and in parts radical) Higher Education Act in 1978, one paragraph also addressed the question of teaching: |
§ 64 On teaching duties The minister is authorised to issue a regulation that stipulates the average teaching obligation of staff employed at institutions of higher academic and artistic education. University officials are to be heard on this matter before the regulation is drafted. The Home Minister and the Minister of Finances are also to be consulted. The regulation will take the different employment situations into account. It will also take into account the different types of classes, depending on the varying time for preparing, teaching and evaluating necessary, and weigh them accordingly. |
In reply, Cassens stated that that the Ministry was by no means remiss in this. No other federal state had issued such a regulation. In fact, negotiations on a nation-wide agreement on work hours and teaching duties had failed only the year earlier. The Ministry was, he said, currently working on drafting such a regulation. In any case, Cassens remarked, this had not really led to problems: "Soweit sich der Umfang der Lehrverpflichtung nicht bereits aus verschiedenen älteren Erlassungen ergibt, wird er zusammen mit den Dienstaufgaben festgelegt" (Niedersächsischer Landtag, Stenographischer Bericht 88. Sitzung, 1985). One such decree stated that Akademische Räte and Studienräte - viz., teachers employed at university - were allowed to teach if professors could not cope with student numbers otherwise, and that the maximum number of teaching hours should be fixed between eight and 14 hours. This does not help with our problem.
In the same meeting Cassens also pointed to the Lower Saxony regulation on computing the maximum capacity of student intake (Niedersächsische Kapazitätsverordnung). This regulation, however, does not state teaching obligations but instead the Curricularnormwerte per degree programme. These "curricular standared values" stipulates how many teaching hours are necessary for training a student in any given degree programme. The higher the value, the more hours - viz., the more members of staff - are required. Thus, for training an English teacher for secondary schools, a Curricularnormwert of 2.42 was fixed. Training an Arts teacher for secondary schools, by contrast, had a standard value of 4.43, so requiring nearly a double effort and time on the side of the university. Interestingly, training a student in a non teaching-oriented Magister degree was awarded a standard value of 3.2 - for the Ministry, at least, it was more time-consuming to train a Magister or Magistra than a future teacher. The computation of teaching hours per teaching unit is rather complex, and it is virtually impossible to deduce how many staff were employed based on the number of students the English Department was expected to accept.
So get to the point: has the situation improved?
Yes. No. Depends.Yes, the situation has improved since 1984 as the Department has more professorships on offer. This means that the diversity of focal areas in teaching and research has grown considerably. It also means a greater structural diversity in the Department, and one can be in two minds on how to rate that.
Between the divisions, the imbalance of staff numbers on the literature side has been reduced over the years. It is not that all divisions have an equal number of staff members, but then students's interests are also divided differently.
This is only one side of the coin, though. For staff members and anyone wishing to become employed at University, the situation has not improved. In the 1970s to 1990s, it was the non-professorial staff who formed the backbone of teaching at university, with correspondingly many positions. These days, the number of short-term contracts for working on a PhD has risen – there were few such positions around in 1984 – , but the overall number of positions has decreased. This is mirrored in the proportion of teaching hours per status group as shown in the chart below.
Use the slider bar below the pie chart to see how the proportion of teaching hours per staff member group has changed since 1984.
Did you notice the grey pie slice that comes up in 2019? The result of reducing Mittelbau positions in the face of growing overall student numbers is more stress for staff and students: an increase of student numbers per course. To compensate for this, extra-budgetary staff positions were granted, though this proved something of a tough fight for the Department. One of these positions was expressly created to alleviate pressure on courses because more students enrolled than were expected – as a consequence, once that overcapacity drops off, the contract will not be renewed.
Likewise, did you notice the yellow columns in the staff per division charts above? Employing staff on very short-term contracts - as Lehrbeauftragte, self-employed and not with university positions - is another feature that compensates for the reduction of non-professorial positions. Such semester-long contracts are quite beneficial, on the one hand, as they give advanced students the chance of teaching courses under their own steam. At the same time, though, such staff are not exactly well paid for expending the same effort and enthusiasm as regular staff members - Lehraufträge clearly are only a makeshift solutioin to the underlying structural problems.