As part of an annual report to the Iowa State Board of Regents, ISU faculty presented an “average” composite sketch of tenured professors at last week’s meeting, which was held in Council Bluffs.

The report revealed, among other things, that an average professor spends six hours per week grading and preparing classwork, makes $68,000 a year and sends or receives more than 6,000 e-mails per year.

This information was presented by ISU Provost Richard Seagrave.

Seagrave’s presentation also reported the average male tenured professor is 52-years-old and has worked at ISU for 19 years, and the average female tenured professor is 50-years-old and has been at ISU for 16 years.

Seagrave noted in an interview with the Daily that there are three times as many male as female professors at ISU, and their salaries figure out to be about $40 an hour.

“That’s a little bit less than a plumber,” he said, noting that the composite professor works more than 57 hours per week.

One point of Seagrave’s presentation that sparked some discussion among the regents was the finding that the composite professor sends and receives about 30 e-mails a day.

During the meeting, Regent Clarkson Kelly questioned the validity of some of those messages.

Seagrave agreed that the e-mail factor is somewhat of an issue.

“I think [Kelly] was concerned that a lot of it is junk, advertising, stuff you just didn’t intend to get, which we’re concerned about, too,” he said.

However, Dean Ulrichson, president of the Faculty Senate, said the e-mail finding is not necessarily negative.

“That is an average I can relate to,” said Ulrichson, professor of chemical engineering. “One of the regents suggested that those e-mails were all jokes and nonsense, and that isn’t my experience at all.”

One part of the report that Ulrichson thought was most interesting to listeners was that the typical faculty member spends 26 hours a week on undergraduate education.

“That is substantially more than they spend in the classroom, and there tends to be a public perception that undergraduate education is not really teaching, so I thought that was a positive aspect,” he said.

Overall, Ulrichson said he thought the composite sketch painted a fairly precise portrait of an ISU faculty member.

“I think [what] was discovered, in fact, is that faculty members are multidimensional,” he said. “It’s not an average, perhaps not even typical, when you compare the numbers that he got from the database. It’s one view of a faculty member.”

Seagrave agreed that the composite sketch was accurate, and he noted that ISU’s findings were similar to the other regent universities.

“It’s an absolutely good feeling of how all those people work,” he said. “I’ve run into many faculty members who’ve seen the composite, and they say, ‘That’s about right.'”

Ulrichson said he doesn’t know whether the composite sketch will be used by the Faculty Senate in the future as a method to improve.

“That could be, I suppose, a tool one might use,” he said. “It would have to be refined a bit, though.”

Five hundred faculty members, all tenured, were surveyed for the presentation. Seagrave said there was a 98 percent response to the survey.