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At Syracuse University, faculty are required to balance three core responsibilities: teaching, research and “service.” A new proposed policy would standardize how much time faculty members spend on each, SU Vice Chancellor and Provost Lois Agnew announced in a Friday campus-wide email.

The policy, available on SU’s Office of Academic Affairs website, lays out the day-to-day and long-term work expectations for all SU faculty, proposes a new structure for faculty “effort,” sets “teaching caps” and differentiates expectations by faculty type.

“Syracuse University is committed to creating a framework to ensure equitable, fair and transparent faculty workloads across campus,” Agnew wrote. “This policy seeks to lay out guiding principles for how we should think about and approach the crucial work that faculty do.”

SU is providing students, staff and faculty the opportunity to give feedback on the proposed policy via a short survey.

The Daily Orange has broken down the proposed policy.

What is “faculty workload?”

Faculty workload is the distribution of “effort” among the “core responsibilities” of a faculty position, including research, teaching and “service” according to the proposed policy’s “rationale” and SU’s faculty manual.

“Service,” per the manual, includes everything a faculty member does outside of teaching and research, such as sitting on committees, taking on leadership roles, mentoring students and colleagues or contributing to their professional field.

Workload, according to the rationale, affects professors’ daily routine and long-term career, as well as the university’s “overall scholarly impact.”

The proposed policy aims to standardize how professors approach their research, teaching and service. It does not, however, change what is specifically expected of faculty in terms of leave for research or administrative leave.

“Effort” structure

The policy proposes that SU’s faculty have their workload “effort” divided into five 20% “units.” These units, which include research, teaching and service, differ for faculty types.

• Research professors are expected to put all of their effort into research. This leaves little room for service and teaching, according to the policy.
• Teaching professors should devote 80% of their effort to teaching classes and 20% toward service. There should be “little to no effort” on research except for “unusual circumstances,” according to the policy.
• Tenure-stream faculty are expected to commit 20% of their workload to service, while splitting the remaining effort between teaching and research. In some circumstances, tenure-track faculty can reduce their service expectations to 10%.
• Professors of practice, industry professionals that also serve as contracted professors, should also commit 20% of their effort to service, while splitting the remaining workload on teaching and professional engagement.

Teaching caps, faculty “overload” and “effort banking”

The proposed policy would prevent faculty from teaching more than 24 credits — or eight three-credit courses — in an academic year, or 30 credits in a full calendar year.

Faculty must decrease the amount of service they conduct to 10% of their overall workload to exceed the teaching cap, according to the policy. Individual schools and colleges are allowed to set their own lower caps for professors.

When a professor is assigned more than their allotted 100% of effort, they enter faculty “overload” and are compensated for it, per the proposed policy. The policy caps “effort overload” at 20%. Faculty overload includes teaching extra courses or taking on more service responsibilities but does not include independent studies, thesis/dissertation hours, non-credit courses and study abroad, according to the policy.

Tenure-track faculty are discouraged from taking on overload and can never be forced to, according to the policy. Faculty who are already on reduced load due to research grants or leave can’t take overload work.

The policy also outlines how faculty can “bank” their teaching effort — loading all their courses into one semester to free up the other for research or other work, for instance. To do this, faculty must be performing well, still contribute 20% of service effort each semester and be permitted to do so by their school or college, according to the proposed policy.

Effort “banking” would be approved on a case-by-case basis by the dean, and no faculty can be forced into banking their responsibilities. Tenure-track faculty are advised to avoid banking.

Authority structure

The policy would require deviations from the standards set in the policy to be approved by the provost. The provost’s office has the final authority over all workload framework and disputes and is responsible for ensuring the university has enough faculty to meet its goals, according to the proposed policy.

The deans of SU’s 13 schools and colleges have final authority over their school’s workload policies. They must, however, consult with their school’s department chairs, faculty councils and faculty before finalizing any decisions.

Every individual school and college’s faculty workload policy must detail the distribution of teaching, research and service by faculty type, how course credits translate to workload effort, how advising loads — the number of students a faculty member guides academically — are accounted for and set up a process for non-standard workloads.

Deans can reduce a faculty’s teaching allocation due to increased workload in other areas, including advising, special research or external funding, but must document all changes in writing.

Department chairs are responsible for determining the courses faculty teach and their service responsibilities each semester but must take into account faculty input. Faculty set their own research goals, but they must be evaluated against school standards.

Any disputes about workload first go to the school’s dean and eventually the provost, according to the proposed policy.

Faculty members can appeal their faculty workload negotiations through this chain of responsibility. A 16-member faculty advisory committee consisting of faculty from “diverse disciplinary and social backgrounds” will review appeals that make it to the provost’s office, according to the policy.

Policy feedback

Amid campus-wide discussion of the university’s position on faculty workload, SU is providing the opportunity for students, faculty and staff to give feedback with a single-prompt survey.

Feedback should be submitted by May 8, per the email.

Published on April 26, 2026 at 10:08 pm
Contact Brenne: bsheeh03@syr.edu