BY HANK REICHMAN
In a recent “Data Snapshot” the AAUP’s Research Department took a look at the data around tenure and the casualization of faculty labor, finding that “the percentage of instructional positions that is off the tenure track amounted to 73 percent in 2016, the latest year for which data are available.” At Ph.D-granting research institutions the largest such group is graduate employees, comprising 28% of all faculty positions. Another 27% are full-time non-tenure track and 15% part-time non-tenure track. At the University of California at Berkeley, the nation’s most prestigious public research campus, about 40% of all faculty fall into one of these latter two groups, where they are designated as lecturers or, alternately under their collective bargaining agreement, as “non-Senate faculty.” Unlike the tenure-track and tenured faculty these instructors are not represented in the Academic Senate. (In the U.C. a small group of “Lecturers with Security of Employment” are members of what is denoted as the Senate Faculty, but “they are few and far between at Berkeley.”)
Recognizing considerable variation in how these lecturers “were recruited, the insecurity of their employment, as well as the way they were treated and regarded in their home departments,” Berkeley’s Committee on Educational Policy (since amalgamated into the Undergraduate Council) conducted a survey “to assess the variation in conditions with a view to improving the lot of lecturers.” Written by sociologists Michael Burawoy and Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, the resulting report, Second Class Citizens: A Survey of Berkeley Lecturers, was completed on February 4 of this year, endorsed by the Senate Council a month later, and forwarded to the campus administration on May 1.
With a response rate just short of 50%, the survey and report mark a major achievement and a contribution to our understanding of contingent faculty employment. While much of the detail will be of use mainly to faculty members and administrators at Berkeley, much of what the study found will resonate broadly. For while Berkeley lecturers are better off in terms of income, benefits, and job security than their similarly situated colleagues nationally, the report found that their conditions are substantially inferior to those of tenured faculty. Complaints voiced in the survey reveal these colleagues to be in key respects “second class citizens” in ways that will surely be familiar to many. More important, perhaps, the report provokes us to ask the critical question of whether the existence of two “classes” of faculty is justifiable or even sustainable.
But before addressing that issue, it will be useful to review some of the report’s findings. According to a 2012 report by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, the average payment per course for non-tenure-track faculty nationwide was just $2,700. The AAUP’s annual compensation survey for 2016-17 reported that “part-time faculty members teaching on a per-section basis earned a total of $7,066, on average, from a single institution. . . . Because many faculty members teach more than one section of a course, this average is greater than the amount a part-time faculty member would be paid per section.” By contrast, at Berkeley “starting payment per course is more than $8,500. Lecturers are on the same medical, dental and retirement scheme as Senate Faculty as long as they are employed at least half-time, i.e. at least three courses a year.” But such compensation, Burawoy and Johnson-Hanks point out, is “far inferior to Senate Faculty, and this difference is felt intensely by many of our lecturers.” One lecturer reported, ““I have never had a sabbatical despite teaching continuously since 2004. I have a big book accepted for publication that I can’t work on. I write scores of letters of recommendation every year, develop new courses without course relief to do so, advise students formally and informally, attend Major Madness events and accept invitations for dinner at the sororities. Underpay. I have taught up to six courses during the academic year for about $68K (only recently, it was well under $60K for half a decade), and given that low pay, I have had to work over the summer as well.”
According to the Memorandum of Understanding between the university and the lecturers’ union (UC-AFT 1474), lecturers are entitled to “a regular system of review after two years, three years, and four years, culminating in a sixth-year ‘excellence review’. Those who pass the six year review become ‘continuing lecturers’ with a certain stability of employment, based on the department’s commitment to award the lecturer a given number of courses.” In that status a course load may be reduced “only if a tenured or tenure-track faculty person is hired to teach those courses or if there is budgetary crisis.” As a consequence short notice of teaching assignments “is not as frequent at Berkeley” as elsewhere, yet among those responding to the survey “only 18% had an on-going appointment, a further 9.9% were notified a year in advance, while 20.2% had a semester’s notice. Over half, 51.9%, had less than a semester’s notice, including 10.8% who were informed about their assignment less than a month ahead.” Moreover, the survey found, just 17.3% feel very secure in their positions, 35.6% feel somewhat secure, and 47.2% feel somewhat or very insecure.
One gratifying finding with positive implications for academic freedom, was that Berkeley lecturers “retain considerable autonomy over their courses,” as demonstrated in this chart from the report:
Table 1: Work Autonomy
Great Autonomy Some autonomy No autonomy
Material covered 69.6% 26.4% 4.0%
Books/articles assigned 77.3% 16.8% 6.0%
Nature of assignments 75.8% 21.5% 2.8%
Form of examination 71.8% 21.3% 2.8%
But this autonomy may come largely at the expense of involvement in department and university life. One lecturer reported:
as a lecturer, I feel like a second class citizen of the academy and on a daily basis reminded of it. You teach as many and possibly more students than the tenure track faculty and you are sent all the honor thesis students to work with because senior faculty don’t have the time or [are] on leave from the department. Moreover, the MA and Ph.D. students knock on your door daily and/or are sent to you by senior faculty members because they are doing you a favor to sign on a grant on your behalf. I mentor GSIs [graduate student instructors] for my own existing courses and then again I am asked to help the new GSI for the senior faculty who is on leave for research and because I taught the course in the past I become the go-to person to fill the vacuum.
Added another, “There is no effort by my department to create a healthy or supportive environment for lecturers. Many tenured faculty are known to be rude or condescending towards lecturers, even though many of those lecturers have superior research, publication, and teaching records. I was not given adequate office space, despite protests. I was promised teaching only to have those promises rescinded on short notice.” A third lecturer said that “Some senior faculty make it a point to remind you that you are a lecturer and have no business in the conduct of the department affairs and the chair speaks to you as if you are working as counter person in a fast food establishment. In one of the departments that I have been the longest with for 32 semesters, I never have received a single offer of financial support for my courses.” According to the survey, “lecturers are least likely to be involved in department hiring (70.4% never) and department meetings (44.0% never), and most likely to be included in department email lists (52.5% always), socials (43.5%) and colloquia (41.6%).”
While more than 3/4 of respondents reported that they were either very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their work, Burawoy and Johnson-Hanks conclude that this is probably exaggerated. Indeed, national surveys also report high levels of satisfaction, which they suggest may mean that “insecurity is taken-for-granted and viewed as part and parcel of the job.” Two responses, said to be “typical,” illustrate the contradictions implicit in contingent employment:
I love teaching, but I don’t feel like I can give it my all because I feel caught between a rock (students & student evaluations) and a hard place (department). The insecurity of the job I think seriously undermines my ability to be creative and to be innovative in the classroom. I stick to old methods of teaching that I know have worked well in the past, but I am way too afraid to try new things. This is not a good thing. Also, I feel basically invisible in the department. Save for a few faculty members who know me, most ignore me – in much the way that homeless people are ignored in the streets of Berkeley. Oh… and students are pretty brutal. Given how much role student evaluations play in reappointment decisions, this is a very tough place to be for a teacher. Especially a woman teacher.
And:
I like teaching the courses that I get to teach. I do not like the fact that lecturers are treated like second-class faculty and excluded from almost everything on campus. I also do not feel like I have institutional backing when dealing with students. I feel very vulnerable when dealing with students who are angry because they did not get an “A.” Given the job insecurity of lecturers, I feel like a few angry students could make me lose my job because I know how much weight is put on the student evaluations. . . . The stress and anxiety that this creates for me frequently makes me want to quit my job. Research has shown the gender bias in these evaluations, and yet they continue to be used (and as a major component of assessing teaching excellence). This is gender discrimination at play. While other evidence of teaching excellence is allowed to be included in the reviews, I have been told by my department and my colleagues who have been teaching for longer that it all boils down to getting at least a “6” on overall teaching effectiveness.
Finally, one lecturer stated bluntly, “In general, I feel disconnected from the department as a whole and completely disconnected from the sub-unit I teach for. We really aren’t included in what’s going on very much. I do love the students and feel lucky to teach here. The biggest issue for me is that I do not really have security and do not know how much teaching I’ll be getting for the next semester and especially beyond.”
As a whole, the survey found, lecturers in the business and law schools expressed a greater sense of security and satisfaction than those in Letters and Science, reflecting no doubt that most of them, especially those teaching part-time, are gainfully employed elsewhere and can often be deemed, as the report does, “hobbyists.” With respect to demographics, the survey found that “the only statistically significant effect was the dissatisfaction of Latino lecturers as compared to other racial groups. . . . African Americans felt far more excluded than Latinos though the association again was not statistically significant. As regards gender, women felt less secure and satisfied but more connected than men, but none of these effects were statistically significant.”
Useful and enlightening as the survey results surely are, it is what Second Class Citizens does not say that may be as critical as what it does. The one-page conclusion begins with this statement: “With budgetary pressures the employment of lecturers is bound to increase.” Maybe so, but shouldn’t that assumption be called into question? Here the final paragraph of the report is telling:
Senate Faculty are in a contradictory position between lecturers and administration. Given the present budgetary crisis, they may be said to benefit from the precarious employment of lecturers – a cheap expendable labor force, clearly demarcated from themselves in terms of conditions, status, and power. Inasmuch as their conditions of employment are made secure on the backs of lecturers, their short-term interests are opposed to those of the lecturers. At the same time, however, Senate Faculty have a long-term interest to defend the conditions of employment of lecturers – both their security of employment and their working conditions – since what is at stake is the erosion of tenure.
I am reminded of the words of Kevin Birmingham, a non-tenture-track writing instructor at Harvard University, on accepting the 2015 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for his book The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses. Birmingham, the first “adjunct” to win that award, used the occasion to decry the exploitation of non-tenure-track faculty. While he was addressing directly only his own discipline, his remarks had wider relevance:
The abysmal conditions of adjuncts are not the inevitable byproducts of an economy with limited space for literature. They are intentional. Universities rely upon a revolving door of new PhDs who work temporarily for unsustainable wages before giving up and being replaced by next year’s surplus doctorates. Adjuncts now do the majority of university teaching and grading at a fraction of the price so that ladder faculty have the time and resources to write. We take the love that young people have for literature and use it to support the research of a tiny elite.
All of this is to say that the profession of literary criticism depends upon exploitation. Even this formulation is too soothingly vague, so let us be more direct: If you are a tenured (or tenure-track) faculty member teaching in a humanities department with PhD candidates, you are both the instrument and the direct beneficiary of exploitation. Your roles as teacher, adviser and committee member generate, cultivate and exploit young people’s devotion to literature. This is the great shame of our profession. We tell our students to study literature because it will make them better human beings, that in our classrooms they will learn empathy and wisdom, thoughtfulness and understanding. And yet the institutions supporting literary criticism are callous and morally incoherent.
Birmingham was challenging his colleagues to own up to the implications of an inegalitarian system in which they participate and to reject the terms of the corrupt “deal” they have signed up for. To some extent the Berkeley report does so as well, if in less strident language. The choice outlined in Burawoy’s and Johnson-Hanks’s concluding paragraph is one faced by many faculty members. That choice was avoided, however, when the chair of Berkeley’s senate forwarded the report to the administration and communicated three “specific requests.” These were not only modest (if desirable), they failed totally to address the underlying problem: the erosion of tenure. Can a major university succeed in its mission with a two-tier faculty in which one tier is second class?
To be more specific, what is the basis for dividing the Berkeley faculty into one group with formal representation in governance — with such representation enshrined in their very description as “Senate faculty” — and another with no representation at all? In 2012 the AAUP’s Committee on Contingency and the Profession and its Committee on College and University Governance jointly issued a report on The Inclusion in Governance of Faculty Members Holding Contingent Appointments, which was adopted by the Council. It stated:
The causes and repercussions of a system in which some faculty receive vastly more compensation, privilege, autonomy, evaluation, information, professional support, and respect than others extend far beyond governance. But the routine exclusion of some faculty from department meetings, curricular planning, and other governance activities does much to foster the sense of inequity. On the other side of the divide, the proportion of full- time or tenure- track faculty appointments in some departments and institutions is dwindling, and those who hold such appointments are overburdened with governance responsibilities as the pool of colleagues eligible to share this work shrinks.
Perhaps most important is that the exclusion of so many faculty from governance activities undercuts the ability of the faculty to carry out its responsibilities in this area. When half or more of the faculty at an institution may not participate in meetings of the faculty senate [boldface added], when decisions about revisions to a course are made without input from those who teach it, or when the majority of a department’s faculty has no voice in the selection of its chair, something is amiss. While these problems are by no means universal— governance structures vary widely both among institutions and among academic units within an institution— they are widespread. And as the percentage of tenure- track faculty at an institution dwindles, any governance system that relies primarily upon them to represent the faculty’s views becomes less representative, less effective, and more easily bypassed.
The authors of the Berkeley report were surely being realistic when they acknowledged that employment of lecturers is “bound to increase.” But such realism risks becoming self-fulfilling prophecy if tenured and tenure-track faculty do not embrace the concept that there is but “one faculty.” Writing in the May-June 2017 issue of Academe, Nicole Monnier, a full-time non-tenure-track faculty member at the University of Missouri, put it clearly:
I ask all of you faculty members with tenure to fight for us and with us. Use your own protections to create new faculty policies that will protect our academic freedoms—for example, to give us access to due process for nonrenewal, as AAUP policies require. Bring us into institutional governance structures—and advocate for us when we cannot be there. And, most fundamentally, recognize us as fellow members of a shared profession. As faculty colleagues.
But that is only a start. In their short but important book, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments, Michael Berube and Jennifer Ruth (a former and current member of AAUP’s Committee A) proposed “that many full-time faculty lines off the tenure track be converted to teaching-intensive tenured positions. . . . The tenure process for such faculty would involve rigorous peer review, conducted by their tenured colleagues at the same institution, but would carry no expectations for research or creative activity,” although service would still be required. That is one possible road forward.
In a 2015 essay that asked the question, “Does Academic Freedom Have a Future?” I wrote:
If, as the AAUP has argued, the tenure system provides the most reliable protection for academic freedom—especially if that system can be supported by the provisions of a collective bargaining agreement—then academic freedom today may be as endangered as it has been at almost any moment since the AAUP’s inception. . . . The point, however, is not simply to “defend” tenure, especially if such defense is understood as limited to those already blessed with this increasingly infrequent status. The point instead is to expand considerably the reach of tenure, much as our founders did a century ago. . . . In other words, even as we champion as aggressively as we can the academic freedom rights of all faculty, including part-time “adjuncts,” we must continue to insist, in the words of the 1940 Statement, that “after the expiration of a probationary period, teachers or investigators should have permanent or continuous tenure, and their service should be terminated only for adequate cause, except in the case of retirement for age, or under extraordinary circumstances because of financial exigencies.”
On Monday, October 29, from noon to 1:30 p.m. in Barrows Hall Room 402, the Berkeley Academic Senate, the American Federation of Teachers (UC-AFT 1474), and the Berkeley Faculty Association will be holding a forum to discuss Second Class Citizens and its implications for the campus and the profession. I hope those attending will venture beyond the Senate’s sensible but inadequate recommendations to consider how best to reverse the erosion of tenure and restore the faculty’s unity.
