Dear President Washington and Provost Ginsberg,

The foremost value of the Mason Vision is “Our Students Come First.” To fulfill this vision, Mason's faculty have devoted their careers to supporting our students and giving them the feedback they need to grow as professionals and scholars.

But here's the truth. The punishing workloads faced by many Mason faculty members threatens our mission to put students first. Hundreds of Mason faculty teach three or four feedback-intensive courses every term. In these courses, faculty give extensive feedback on multiple assignments, often scheduling meetings outside class to help students improve their work. With 90-120 students per term, however, these faculty are forced to make terrible choices. They can give students the feedback they deserve and work all the time, every evening and every weekend for months on end, putting their health at risk and pulling them away from their families. Or they can try to put some boundaries around their work lives, which can mean less extensive and less timely feedback for students.

This cannot continue. Faculty deserve to live full lives with a healthy balance between work and family. Students deserve to have professors who are not harried and stressed, and who have the time to provide extensive and timely feedback. We cannot continue to grow the university on the backs of a burned out and overworked faculty.

Luckily, a solution to the problem already exists. Professional organizations like the Conference on College Composition and Communication suggest that, for writing-intensive courses, a single full-time faculty member should not teach more than 60 students in total, and that no writing class should have more than 15 students. Keeping enrollments small in feedback- or writing-intensive courses means that faculty have the time to provide each student with the mentoring and feedback they need to develop their knowledge and skills.

To this end, we call on President Washington and Provost Ginsberg to take decisive action to address the faculty workload and burnout crisis by committing the resources and supports necessary for changes to be made at the local academic unit level.

Lowering course caps will require hiring more instructors. We call for the university to meet this need by hiring additional full-time faculty and fully funded GTAs. To the extent possible, these positions should be created by converting existing adjunct faculty and Graduate Lecturers to full-time status. Salaries must be competitive to attract and retain the instructional workforce we need.

Surely we can find the funds to create better labor conditions for overworked faculty and better learning conditions for all our students, now and in the future. Mason students deserve no less.

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