An instructor is being added to co-teach a course for questionable reasons, against the course author's wishes—what can be done?

Question

A friend of mine teaches an elective course at a university. She developed the course herself and has been teaching it for several years. Depending on enrollment in this elective course, one or two groups are formed each year to take it. When two groups are created, my friend receives double pay according to her teaching load.

Last year, her department head changed, and just yesterday, the new boss informed her that, while two groups will be formed this year, she will only be teaching one. The other group will be taught by a different instructor. The boss also asked my friend to share her teaching materials with the new instructor, assist in any way needed, and still handle all paperwork for the course.

The justification given in the boss's email was "university policy restrictions related to finances," making it sound like she would have preferred to give my friend both groups but was unable to.

Skeptical, my friend emailed the university's finance officer to ask if any financial restrictions were indeed preventing her from teaching both groups. She cc'd the new boss.

Within an hour, the boss responded by email, seemingly irritated, asking my friend to simply accept the decision and saying that "having a second instructor makes the teaching process more reliable and flexible."

The instructor being added to the course is a close friend of one of the boss's close friends, leading my friend to believe that the real reason is that the boss wants to help her protégé become familiar with the course, with the intention of giving the course entirely to the protégé next academic year, excluding my friend.

What can my friend do to retain her job?

Factors to consider:

• The decision about who teaches the course is entirely at the boss’s discretion.

• If my friend refuses to share her teaching materials, the new instructor could likely create her own, though it would be time-consuming and difficult.

• Losing this job wouldn’t have drastic consequences for my friend, as a large portion of her income comes from private tutoring, which she could easily expand if necessary.

• Student evaluations of my friend's teaching have always been excellent, way above the average in the department.

• My friend is technically a staff member employed by the university, but receives short-term contracts and also has to sign acts about her actual teaching hours/load to get paid. She is paid just for this teaching.

Options she is considering:

1. Meet with the new boss for a face-to-face discussion. My friend would stress that she developed the course and has been successfully teaching it for years. She would also ask directly about the course’s future, especially if only one group is formed next year, and express her desire to keep the course. The meeting could also help my friend ensure she fully understands the boss's true motives.

2. Send an email along these lines: "Thank you for the clarification. I understand this is your decision. My decision is to either teach both groups or none at all. Which will it be?" (Of course, not in these exact words, but conveying the same point.) This is highly confrontational but could be the only chance to keep the course if the boss truly intends to hand it over to her protégé in the future. Faced with such a tough choice, the boss might decide to let my friend keep both groups, as the new instructor may struggle due to her lack of experience with the course.

3. Start with option 1 and, if that fails, proceed with option 2.

4. Accept the decision without further escalation. There might be a chance that the new boss won’t take the job from my friend in the future. Escalating now might jeopardize that possibility.

What's the most reasonable strategy?

Answer 1

Your friend has some valid reasons to be upset, but is also looking at things slightly askew and behaving in ways that will not help her professional reputation.

The boss gets to decide who teaches what. Your friend gets to decide whether they want the job or not, under the terms offered. They can ask for things to be a certain way, but there are better and worse ways to ask. She could have politely expressed her desire to teach both sections, while acknowledging that it's the boss's decision, and asked for more clarity about the decision and/or what she can expect in the near future. This is your option 1, essentially, and it would normally be fine, but at this point (see the next paragraph) I would honestly skip it, and maybe pick the conversation back up in a semester or so.

Going over the boss's head to fact-check their explanation is throwing a nuclear bomb on the relationship. What was the goal there? There is no rule like "if I can prove you're lying about the reasons for your decision, then you have to change it." That's just not how jobs work. It pays to be smart about maintaining relationships, and that goes double for someone with a big influence on your work assignments (which this person has).

The key of this question is not really specific to academia, but for what it's worth: even tenured faculty are somewhat at the mercy of the person who decides the course schedule, and not everyone gets to teach their first choice of course every time. (I'm excluding hot-shots who have a lot of weight to throw around, which is a minority of faculty.) Having good evaluations doesn't change that, and neither does developing a course. That doesn't mean your friend has to agree with the boss's decision or not be upset--I'd be upset too. It's just, this is the boss's call to make, and there's a right and wrong way to advocate for things like this.

Answer 2

While I don't know the law in Japan, if that is where this happened, in most places the person has little recourse. Most university instructors are specifically paid to develop courses, not just deliver courses they personally "own". I suspect the university, therefore, has all rights to the material, having paid for its development. Most place will let the instructor carry the course elsewhere if they terminate enrollment, I suspect, treating this a a common good.

Imagine a researcher at IBM claiming that they personally own things they invented there while employed specifically for that purpose.

One reason that it is valuable to the university to have another instructor teach the same course is if your friend should leave. It would be an advantage to them to have the knowledge more widely spread in the faculty so that the course can continue without interruption.

It could also be valuable as a sort of training for the other person. Also, forcing them to redevelop the course could leave inconsistencies.

Personally, I don't find the actions of the head objectionable. I won't try to judge the first reason they gave, but asking for your friend to share materials is not objectionable. It would be different if they were an independent contractor paid to deliver the course.

I'll note that, even at research universities where the main task is research, there is usually an expectation of course development as well as delivery. At research universities (R1 in the US), a 30% (approximately) focus on teaching is expected, including development of new courses; perhaps especially including such development.

Having a talk with the head is fine. Threatening is not fine. Lots of bad things could happen. Even threatening to refuse to teach the course seems self defeating. And it seems inconsistent with the mission of a university.

Cooperating with colleagues also seems like a better career move than trying to shut them out.

Answer 3

I think at the start of the story, it's at least as likely if not more likely that the department head was just trying to find a way to pay this other new person. That's one of the jobs of a department head: finding money to pay the people you want to have in a department. That includes giving them assignments that come with money.

I don't think that necessarily means they had any intention of "taking over" the other section of the course. Especially given:

Losing this job wouldn’t have drastic consequences for my friend, as a large portion of her income comes from private tutoring, which she could easily expand if necessary.

If the department head is aware of this, then their move is logical. Sometimes managing a department means taking money from where it's in excess and putting it where it's needed. If they know your friend is going to be okay with half the sections, then giving the second section to this other person might be seen by them as a net benefit. It's especially useful to guard against the possibility that your friend might at some point move on and take another job. This gives them two people with experience teaching this particular course which means next semester/next year it's far less likely that they end up with zero people with experience teaching this particular course.

However, after this:

Skeptical, my friend emailed the university's finance officer to ask if any financial restrictions were indeed preventing her from teaching both groups. She cc'd the new boss.

I'd kind of expect the new department head will want to force your friend out, eventually, after this. It will certainly color all future interactions with this person negatively. Your friend should have started with a face-to-face conversation with their boss about what's happening and also their own future goals; instead, they started an aggressive conflict with a person that has decision-making power over them. Not likely a winning strategy.

I still think it's possible to try to have that conversation, but I think the chances of anything going well are low at this point, and your friend should work on figuring out what's next outside this department.

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Other thoughts:

Student evaluations of my friend's teaching have always been excellent, way above the average in the department.

Student evaluations are generally a poor way to evaluate teaching. The feedback they include can be very useful in adapting the class, but otherwise evaluations are highly correlated with assigned grades: give good grades, get good evaluations.

If my friend refuses to share her teaching materials, the new instructor could likely create her own, though it would be time-consuming and difficult.

As others have pointed out, your friend may not actually own her teaching materials; it's common that materials produced for an employer are owned by the employer. If some ownership is shared, it's far more likely that your friend can take those materials with her to use at some other institution than it is that she can actively block a new instructor from using them.

My friend is technically a staff member employed by the university, but receives short-term contracts and also has to sign acts about her actual teaching hours/load to get paid. She is paid just for this teaching.

Overall, this makes it sound like your friend has a very low-status, low-priority role in the university pecking order. A short-term, temporary employee is a relatively disposable/replaceable one. I think your friend should have seen their job as quite a fragile one from the start and acted accordingly, including pursuing more solid employment, long before this new department head came along.

The justification given in the boss's email was "university policy restrictions related to finances," making it sound like she would have preferred to give my friend both groups but was unable to.

I think this is not good behavior by the chair, but in a face-saving culture it's possible this sort of thing is seen as a acceptable "white lie" over a more honest reasoning. In any case, I think this was more likely a backfired attempt by the chair to not upset your friend rather than an underhanded way to move them out. The new explanation: "having a second instructor makes the teaching process more reliable and flexible" is quite a reasonable one.

Answer 4

As you correctly assess, teaching assignments are done by the chair/head/dean, and instructors don’t have much to say about this. An instructor is not the “author” of a course: the course is part of a program, and it exists outside of the instructor, even though the expertise may be hard to duplicate and the course may be terminated if nobody else can reasonable teach the material.

On the other hand, an instructor could rightly be protective of the material they develop. I’ve never heard of anyone forced to share their lecture notes or course contents. I rarely share my material with other instructors not out of spite but because I want to leave other instructors with the freedom and flexibility to choose their own material. Likewise, when I take over a class I am expected to produce my own material. I don’t have an issue with not sharing notes, claiming copyright or intellectual property if I have to.

I don’t think it’s useful to see conspiracies to displace an instructor. The best defence of your friend is to do an outstanding job. From an academic point of view it’s easier to have a single instructor as it simplifies course continuity, so the argument about flexibility is BS, but you can’t fight BS with logic.

I don’t think confrontation is productive either. In fact, I would not have collected information on this by email, and I would have certainly not cc’d the boos. Nothing has been gained, and you now have an irritated boss. I don’t think being faced with a lie will change the decision.

The reality is that there is a power imbalance in this situation, and your friend has the short end of the situation. It’s very difficult to get people with power not to pursue their pet projects, unless they are foiled by higher ups; here, it’s difficult to see how a higher up could intervene since your friend is still teaching a section.

So in practice the only defence is to run an excellent class. Students talk, and if your friend is doing a much better job than the other instructor, this will be known.

Answer 5

I've seen a similar situation and it's sounds as if your impression is correct -- your friend is being abused to help a friend of the Dept. Chair. As for what to do, playing it straight seems to work best. Treat them as a normal co-instructor, which includes sharing notes, weekly meetings and so on. But "doing all the paperwork" isn't a thing. I don't think ethically your friend can grade the other class's assignments or tests, and new assignments or tests should be co-written. By the end of the semester, or possibly sooner, it will be obvious to the Dept Head "well that attempt to give my friend a do-nothing class didn't work out".

As to why I think this is a screw-job, number one is, again "do all the paperwork" for a section you're not teaching isn't a thing. It's pretty much the Dept Head acknowledging that his friend isn't capable of doing the job. Number two is that merely adding another instructor for no good reason to an elective makes no sense. When you have an adjunct doing a good job on a non-core course, you leave them alone. If they leave while the course is still relevant, deal with it then. And if they somehow want to worry about that now, a tenured or tenure-track professor would be chosen -- someone who permanently works there. There would be a process to see who would be a good fit, not an off-hand "oh, this person is teaching a section now".

As far as my advice about playing it straight, it's because there's nothing on paper that's unusual. Having two people teach different sections of a class is normal. Sharing course material with a new instructor is also normal (for someone seriously interested in learning the new course I always hope they'll find at least a few things in my notes they want to use for themselves). Being given poor or no reasons for course assignments isn't unusual. So yeah, it seems obvious your friend is going to be underpaid to carry the Dept Head's friend, but on paper it looks exactly like standard co-teaching (except for the bizarre "do all paperwork" thing). So your friend should share notes, grading criteria, offer to have a weekly meeting and so on, and in general be nice.

Now my guess is it will fall apart for, one: your friend's notes, slides, etc... are probably a third or less of the actual class presentation. A power-point bullet probably reminds her of a 5-minute explanation; a written out example is missing what it's an example of and why (I know mine are). "Giving instructor B your notes" won't be the turn-key solution they assume it is and instructor B probably won't want to do the work to learn the material. The other is that, for the fourth time(?), your friend can stand on not doing paperwork for the other course. To bring it home, student's in section B with Q's about their grades can't be redirected to your friend, who is not their instructor.