In Praise of the 4-4 Load

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | April 22, 2026 | David Randall

[karpov]

My recent article “A Roadmap to Take Back Higher Education” got a mixed reaction from tradition-minded professors. They liked the general framework of the scale of the problem facing the humanities, the suggestion to support the new autonomous schools being developed rather than individual professors, and the suggestion that philanthropists dedicate large-scale grants for these schools. They didn’t like my suggestion that philanthropists need to focus on supporting teaching, not research:

If [philanthropists] fund professors with 2-2 teaching loads and a half-dozen worthy books to their credit, they will have wasted their money. Their dollars will be far more effective if they create a corps of professors [who have] a vocation for teaching, have 4-4 teaching loads, and have no more than a handful of published articles to their name.

It was put to me that this was a misguided suggestion. Ambitious professors want teaching positions with a serious research track. The autonomous schools that are succeeding (for example, Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership) are working to attract the best professors by offering them research tracks. Philanthropists will waste their money if they support jobs with 4-4 teaching loads, since no professors worth their salt will take these jobs.

This is a counter-argument worth taking seriously. It’s also a counter-argument that underscores both the necessity and the difficulty of shifting the professoriate from a research focus to a teaching focus. Professors’ professional self-respect is bound up tightly with the research vocation. We risk the demoralization of tradition-minded professors if we make them do nothing but teach. Yet we also face a Long Night, in which a research vocation is a luxury we cannot afford. Western civilization may not survive if tradition-minded professors don’t shift to a teaching focus.

---

TOPICS: Education
KEYWORDS: academia; college; humanities