I've been reading the recent letter dialogue (Buffa and Kelley) regarding faculty workloads and wish to contribute to the discussion. I've been a professor and department head for 27 years; 20 years at Cal Poly and seven years at a college in Pennsylvania.

My sense is that academia -- Cal Poly included -- is its own worst enemy in promoting what it does, how it does it, and the reasons for doing it. The public merely sees the tip of the iceberg in what is involved in not only teaching at a great university such as Cal Poly, but also in what it takes to grow the university so it continues providing quality education in the future. When questions arise about workloads in academia relative to other industries, my response typically is, "The one good thing about being a professor is that you only have to work half days -- and it doesn't matter which 12 hours they are."

The point here is that when most of the public thinks about the teaching profession they, and perhaps rightfully so, envision contact hours with students in the classroom. The public typically has little knowledge of requirements and responsibilities related to research, writing, outreach, laboratory development, attending relevant conferences, presentations of research at conferences, and other professional development activities that makes for the professorship. This is what helps deliver leading-edge education making a university as attractive to top quality students and industry as Cal Poly is. Add to this requirements related to service to the university via committee work, student advising and course preparations. Take all of these components and add them to actual teaching in classrooms and laboratories, and then one begins to develop a realistic vision of the professorship.

A logical rebuttal by one who may not know otherwise is that Cal Poly is a teaching institution, and research, publishing and other forms of professional development are not required. That may have been the case many years ago but it certainly is not the case today and hasn't been for a long time.

Today no faculty member at Cal Poly gets promoted without evidence of meaningful professional development, and service to the university and professional community. This along with teaching effectiveness is part of the university's formal faculty evaluation criteria.

I present this not as a complaint about those having a narrower sense of what is involved in being a professor at a good university. I present this as a shortcoming of a profession in not promoting itself sufficiently enough for the public to understand the responsibilities of universities and what it takes on the part of professors to meet those responsibilities.

Harvey Robert Levenson, Ph. D., is the head of the graphic communication department at Cal Poly.