At the beginning of every semester, students ask me how much time they should devote to my course. It's a fair question deserving of a thoughtful answer. So here it goes.
Start with a God-given budget of 168 hours per week. Off that time budget come 49 hours for meaningful sleep. For a definition of "meaningful sleep," students should consult either their parents or, in loco parentis, the website of the Dean of Student Affaires (not to be confused with the Dean of Student Affairs).
In theory, Princeton students should optimally devote 21 hours per week to eating three proper meals per day. In practice, of course, many students skip breakfast — on the theory that the resulting loss of calories will be made up with binge drinking over the weekend, where just one boiler maker packs the caloric power of a full bacon-and-eggs breakfast.
Next comes grooming. At one extreme, Tiger Inn mates can easily get away with no more than two hours of grooming a week. At the other extreme, members of Ivy Club must devote at least 10 hours a week to that activity because, for the candlelit dinners at which Ivy Club members sup, the waiters expect them to exchange day clothes for proper evening wear. That time spent on grooming, however, is not time lost from Ivy member's education, as careful grooming prepares one for life on Wall Street, now the ultimate destination of about half of Princeton's graduates and most Ivy Club members.
Many Princeton students require remedial English. I am speaking here not of students from abroad, who usually write and speak English well. Rather, I refer to American-born students whose mother tongue was English once upon a time but who now cannot utter a sentence without sprinkling it liberally, redundantly and mindlessly with words such as "like" and "you know," or who say "I'm like" instead of "I said" and "she goes" instead of "she answered." Students thus impaired must spend at least seven hours a week speaking and endlessly repeating graceful English prose — for example, passages from Hemmingway or excerpts from a Goldman Sachs Bond Prospectus. Students whose habit of speech makes them mindlessly exclaim "Oh, my God!" on every occasion must devote an additional two hours a week reciting the Ten Commandments to cleanse their blasphemous souls.
In theory, students should devote about six hours a week to the incredibly valuable and varied seminars offered daily on this campus. In practice, few undergraduates ever avail themselves of that valuable learning experience, presumably to make room for the many town people who flock to those seminars. Even so, I budget a nominal two hours per week for it, if only for the sake of tradition.
Finally, let us throw in a very generous allowance of 25 a week for "Other Stuff" — stacking books for cash, practicing campus capitalism or campus politics, meaningful relationships, downloading stuff into iPods, endlessly talking on the cell phone with practically the entire universe, ditto with emailing, networking (or whatever) at those fabulous Prospect soirees and, of course, gossiping about who's dating whom, who just broke up with whom and stuff like that. Unlike students at Harvard and Yale, every Princetonian cares deeply about the private life of every other Princetonian.
Now do the math for the worst case scenario — a student with the above-mentioned speech impairment who eats three full meals a day, dutifully devotes 49 hours a week to meaningful sleep, has managed to get into Ivy Club and exclaims "Oh my God!" all the time. That student would have a residual of 52 hours per week available for concentrated academic work, defined by the Dean as "work without an iPod blaring into one's ears." Most people in the real world work much harder than that and without iPods. At the other extreme, a pious (non-blasphemous) Tiger Inn mate who has at most five hours of meaningful sleep per day, routinely skips breakfast and is not afflicted with that untoward speech impairment would, in principle, have as many as 90 hours a week left over for serious academic work, though I would counsel him or her to divert some of that extra time to yet more "Other Stuff", perhaps even to meaningless relationships.
It follows that I can minimally and in good conscience claim 52/4 = 13 hours per week of a student's time just for my course. Of that total, classes and precepts (if attended — a big IF) will absorb about six hours a week, including an allowance for walking to and from. That leaves three hours a week for doing Talmudic-like studies of the textbook and four hours for homework assignments in my course.
So there's the short answer to that question. Uwe E. Reinhardt is the James Madison Professor of Political Economy and a professor in the Wilson School. He can be reached at reinhard@princeton.edu.
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