*The "other" category includes subjects peculiar to and individual to each novel, such as, for example, a huge pig, kidney stones, an ancient Ford Galaxie Convertible, a boa constrictor, and the suit Marilyn Monroe wore to her 1954 wedding to Joe DiMaggio.

One caveat: in analyzing the activities depicted in the novels, I confess to inadequacy in distinguishing between what constitutes administration/service and what constitutes politicking and conspiring. Although I feel confident that I can recognize drinking or sex, I am not always clear about the line between being on a committee, which is called doing service (and helps you earn merit pay), and something else which is called politicking and conspiring (and for which you earn no official rewards).

Straight Man, set in a comprehensive university like the CSU, shows itself to be pretty much like the CSU–heavy on the service component at 16 percent, which is close to the NSOPF’s 18 percent, and also, traditionally, with a demanding teaching load, lighter on research and scholarship, with only 4 percent of faculty time devoted to these activities.

But the most striking aspect of a comparison of three 1990s academic novels to a survey of faculty work in the 1990s lies in the top row of Table 2: in the percentage of faculty effort devoted to teaching. If you look at the top line across all columns, you can see what academic novels tell us about teaching, and that is: very little. Almost nothing. They tell us about research and service in roughly the same proportions as they occur in real life. They tell us about sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll in probably even greater proportions than they occur in real life, at least in my real life. But they don't tell us much about teaching—60 percent of faculty work in real life, but only 9 percent in all three of the novels. Our own experiences, as well as federal survey data, tell us that faculty devote most of their time to teaching, so it is striking that teaching shows up so infrequently in books that purport to represent the academic life. Why isn't teaching more thoroughly and comprehensively portrayed in these pages?

The novels themselves give us an answer: teaching is the most private and solitary act in academic life, and teaching is almost always done behind closed doors. In these novels, even the sex is more public than the teaching is. The characters have sex in the stacks at the library, in the stairwells, in campus greenhouses, in any available open space. But teaching is always private, unseen, invisible, imperceptible to the general academic community. This central fact about teaching is pungently illustrated in a scene from Straight Man:

The main character Hank Devereaux says:

I stop outside Finny's classroom and peer in through the small window in the door. [. . . ] His students have the grim look of death camp dwellers, [. . .] six of the eleven consult their watches. Four yawn. One starts violently awake. And they're only fifteen minutes into class. [. . .] I make what I think is a clean getaway, but then I hear the classroom door open behind me and feel pursuit. "This," Finny hisses at my retreating form, "is harassment." [. . .] I hold up my hands in surrender. "Finny—" "Stay away from my classroom, or I'll file a grievance," he warns me. "I'll get a restraining order if I have to" (63).

This is privacy with a vengeance.

There are probably at least two reasons why teaching is such an intensely private activity. First of all, the academy has few institutionalized, formalized structures to make teaching a more public and a more accessible venture, which is not the case for the other major parts of faculty work: scholarship and service.

Although research may be done in the privacy of an office, study, laboratory, or library carrel; although research results may be written up by a single individual working alone; nevertheless, the articles and books generated are submitted to journals and publishers for others to read, review, and comment upon.

Likewise with service. Faculty members may read a tenure candidate's dossier in the privacy of their offices, but then they go to a meeting and talk about it.

There is no such mechanism for teaching. Teaching involves only the lone professor. Teachers may share and discuss and form a community with their students, but not with their colleagues, their peers, their equals.

If we believe that free exchange of information makes for better research; if we believe that discussion and conversations make for better decisions about tenurings and promotions and curriculum; in short, if we believe that discussion can improve research and service, then it seems likely that discussion can also improve teaching and learning.

The second reason that teaching seems so inaccessible and invisible is that it is often perceived to be a black box; that is, something that we accept, admire, sometimes even reward, but never analyze very well. Exactly what do we mean when we say "teaching"?

According to the definitions used in NSOPF, teaching is at least five separate and distinct activities: preparing for class, performing in the classroom, developing new courses, advising students, and grading or evaluating their work. Although NSOPF identified these activities as comprising teaching, it didn't collect data about them individually.

Interestingly, however, a 1994 survey of Cal State faculty did collect data to show what percentage of time was devoted to each of these activities, and they are shown in Table 3. Like most faculty at comprehensive universities, professors at CSU campuses devote almost 60 percent of their work time to teaching—59.43 percent, to be exact.

As these percentages show, we spend as much time preparing for class, as we do actually performing in a classroom, and we spend even more time—almost 21 percent—interacting with students outside the classroom, either by evaluating their tests and papers or through conversations during office hours and in the hallways.