UNLV Faculty courseload increases as pay and staffing levels decline, RJ data says

For the second time in two days, the RJ editors have run a misleading headline over an otherwise very solidly reported story on higher education.

Today's "Workload has picked up, faculty at UNLV say," reports that average full-time faculty courseload (which is, of course, not the same thing as workload) has increased by over 15% over the past two years, measured in terms of courses taught, and that average class size has increased by about the same percentage in the same period. And that UNLV faculty courseload, already above the national norm for public research universities, is now even farther above that of our colleagues nationally.

All solid reporting, based on data from the System of Higher Education, the UNLV Office of Institutional Analysis, and the US Department of Education Center for Education Statistics.

So why is it introduced as a matter of what "faculty say"?

Seems like such a misleading headline would be an easy fix, since as it is, it implies the editors don't have confidence in their reporter's research.

(Two days ago, they ran an important story about proposals from the Chancellor's office for administrative streamlining which could save the System over $16m per year, as a matter of "campus closures," a term never used in the story. This misleading headline contributed to a great deal of confusion in the Regents' actual discussion, and eventual rejection, of the proposed streamlining.)