BY HANK REICHMAN
Yesterday I posted a piece about the outsourcing of work in the University of California (UC) and a pending strike by members of AFSCME, the union representing many staff employees at the university. But UC Berkeley sociology professor Michael Burawoy has reminded me (and others) that UC’s non-tenure-track lecturers, represented by the American Federation of Teachers, are also in contract negotiations. Last year Burawoy co-authored a report, Second Class Citizens: A Survey of Berkeley Lecturers, which found that lecturer conditions at the Berkeley campus are substantially inferior to those of tenured faculty. I wrote a blog post in response to that report, which asked, “Must We Accept a Two-Tiered Faculty?”
The encouraging news now is that at Berkeley tenured faculty — so-called “Senate faculty” — are working to support their non-tenure-track colleagues. In September the Berkeley Faculty Association, a partner organization of the AAUP, issued this statement entitled “Who Do UC Negotiators Represent?“:
The University of California is a public institution, accountable to its students, faculty, and the larger community. This is part of the reason that it is so important that union negotiations are public too. Last week, the UC-AFT, which represents lecturers and librarians in the UC system, engaged in negotiations with the University of California labor relations representatives on the Berkeley campus–the 6th bargaining session in what promises to be a long series. In attendance as observers were undergraduate and graduate students, lecturers, librarians, faculty, BFA representatives, and members of the Academic Senate leadership. We were all there to see how our University negotiates on our behalf with the lecturers who, in terms of student credit hours, perform more than 40% of the teaching on campus.
The negotiating session opened with a set of statements by campus lecturers which put on display the incredible quality of the work they do every day. The negotiators’ responses, on the other hand, demonstrated their fundamental ignorance about what teaching and learning looks like on the Berkeley campus, or even how academia works at all. UC labor relations staff believe they speak for the University in offering as little as possible to non-Senate faculty. But to the contrary, the work conditions of the lecturers matter to us as faculty every day. We teach the same students, and if lecturers are better supported to do that work well, we all benefit. That is why it is so essential that so many members of the campus community are there to observe negotiations, demonstrating to both sides that lecturer work conditions matter to all of us.
We urge all BFA members to pay attention to these proceedings and support lecturers. So far, it appears that UC negotiators are not taking seriously the lecturers’ contract proposals for improving their working conditions and, by extension, their ability to serve students. We wonder: on whose behalf are the UC negotiators bargaining? Keeping more than a third of our teaching faculty in precarious working conditions does not benefit any department’s teaching mission.
And now, in what may be an unprecedented move, Berkeley’s Academic Senate has added its voice, in a statement issued November 4:
The Academic Senate recognizes that the teaching excellence on campus depends in no small part on lecturers, who teach over 40% of the campus student credit hours. Lecturers, represented by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), are currently engaged in bargaining over their next contract. Lecturers are essential members of the Berkeley community and carry out their duties with energy, dedication, and professionalism. Sharing a commitmentto teaching excellence on campus, we support the lecturers’ calls for higher wages and stability of employment.The Academic Senate urges the University, in its negotiations with the AFT, to recognize, respect, and reward the vital contributions that lecturers make to our campus community.
In my October 30 Davis, Markert, Nickerson Academic Freedom Lecture at the University of Michigan, “Do Adjuncts Have Academic Freedom?, or Why Tenure Matters,” I concluded with these words: “We must fight for tenure as it could and should be, not as it too frequently has become. But to restore tenure — and in doing so defend the academic freedom, job security, and professional standing of all who teach and research — we must build on what unites the faculty and not capitulate to what divides us. All faculty, including the tenured, need each other in this effort, but a precondition for unity is that the privileged among us, the tenured, must discard their too-frequent indifference to the plight of their peers.”
At Berkeley that indifference may well be starting to erode. And hopefully other UC divisional senates will follow Berkeley’s lead.
