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“You’re the First to Ask Us That”: The Question Academic Interviews Quietly Discourage

Updated: Jul 26


At one academic job interview, the panel emphasised something several times. “You have to understand that we are a teaching university,” one of them said. “Research is important to us, of course, but teaching comes first.” That sounded perfectly clear to me: if teaching is the core of the role, then understanding the teaching expectations should be straightforward. So I asked what I thought was a natural follow-up question:

“How much teaching would I actually be doing?”

The reaction was… unexpected. The panel looked at each other. Someone paused. Finally one of them said something I had never heard before in an interview:

“You’re actually the first person who has asked us that.”

At first, I assumed that was a good thing. After all, if no one else had asked the question, what did that mean? That the other candidates were simply willing to accept whatever they were given? That they were so eager to secure the job that the details didn’t matter? It seemed obvious to me that asking about the teaching load was simply part of understanding the role. 


But what followed was surprisingly uncomfortable. The panel began discussing the question among themselves. They tried to estimate hours, modules, days on campus. For a role where teaching had been presented as the defining activity, the panel seemed oddly unprepared to describe its practical scale. I was made to feel almost like I wasn't supposed to ask that question and instead should have waited to find out about the workload on my first day at the job like a good and obedient little academic. I was "the first one" to challenge that, really?


The reason I started asking this question


A month earlier, I had applied for a role that, judging from the vacancy description, seemed to combine significant teaching with meaningful research expectations. During the interview, the panel examined my research in detail: we went through the journals where I had published, checked their rankings, and even looked up some of them online together. It all suggested that research performance mattered.


And then, later in the conversation, I learned what the actual expectation looked like. The role would essentially involve being on campus every day from nine to five teaching or being available for teaching. This arrangement, I was told, was temporary, until the university would eventually introduce formal rules allocating research time, perhaps sometime the following year.


If the expectation is to teach essentially all day, why scrutinise research publications so closely? More broadly, why recruit academics with research ambitions if the structure of the role leaves little realistic space for research to happen? That experience taught me that assumptions about workload are dangerous. Since then, I have made a habit of asking the same simple question in every interview. Not aggressively, just plainly: 

What does a typical teaching week actually look like?

And almost every time, the reaction has been similar: polite surprise, hesitant answers, and the sense that the question itself has caught the panel slightly off guard. Experiences like these gradually made me realise that asking about teaching workload touches a sensitive nerve in British academic hiring. 


And yet the question is entirely legitimate 


Academic commentary has discussed workload transparency for years. Studies and reports frequently highlight how academics work far beyond their contracted hours, partly because workload models rarely capture the full reality of teaching preparation, marking, student support, and administration (Ross, 2022). Advice columns about academic job interviews even recommend asking about teaching loads to understand the nature of the role (Inside Higher Ed, 2013; Dyer, 2024). At the same time, interview etiquette guides warn that candidates should be careful not to appear overly focused on workload or conditions (Jenkins, 2012).


In that sense, asking about teaching workload can feel a bit like asking about salary during an interview: technically legitimate, but surrounded by an unspoken rule that it should be approached cautiously, if at all. And yet the reality of academic work makes that question essential. Teaching does not only mean time in the classroom. It means preparation, marking, emails, student support, supervision, administration - all the invisible labour that turns a few hours of contact time into weeks of work.


Imagine a different norm


Imagine if every candidate asked the same simple question:

“What does the actual teaching workload look like in practice?”

Not as a complaint, but as a professional conversation about expectations.

If everyone asked it, the question would stop being unusual. It would simply become part of how academic jobs are discussed. Universities would answer more transparently. Candidates would make more informed choices. And fewer academics might discover the true scale of their workload only after the contract is signed.


From the other side of the table, in my experience being part of hiring committees in the UK, only a handful of applicants would ask about potential workload. While I can't confidently claim that this had a universally positive impact on the entire panel, I know it did for me: the person means business and is mentally ready to start working. A coincidence or not, I don't know, but these people typically ended up getting the offers for these places. 


Sometimes changing academic culture does not require a new policy, a committee, or a framework. Sometimes it simply requires asking the question everyone quietly avoids.


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