The general workload responsibilities of a faculty member at a complex institution such as the University of Houston can neither be defined simply nor summarized easily.
Faculty members have fundamental obligations above and beyond organized teaching and research.
They perform their normal classroom duties and carry out a multitude of essential functions including, but not limited to, academic advising and counseling, the supervision of undergraduate and graduate students, direction of individual study, special projects, theses and dissertations, and curriculum development. In addition, they accept many institutional and public service obligations. The variety of faculty responsibilities that must be undertaken for the university to function in an effective and efficient manner makes it impossible to equate faculty workload with the sum total of semester credit hours taught, or with any other single criterion. Indeed, it is inappropriate to adopt any measure of faculty workload that is fundamentally numerical in nature without consideration of qualitative issues. While recognizing these facts, however, the university must develop a minimum teaching load requirement and report its fulfillment to the state.