POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN

The following is the text of a statement in support of the union representing non-tenure-track faculty members, or lecturers, in the University of California issued today by the Berkeley Faculty Association (BFA), which includes tenured and tenure-track professors (so-called “senate faculty”) at the University of California, Berkeley.  BFA is affiliated with the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), a partner organization of the AAUP.  Last month CUCFA issued a statement which read, in part, “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.  We want to make sure that UC negotiators are taking the lecturers’ contract proposals for improving their working conditions seriously, and thus their ability to serve students.  Keeping more than a third of our teaching faculty in precarious working conditions does not benefit any department’s teaching mission.”

On Friday, Vice Provost, Benjamin Hermalin sent a Cal Message to all tenure-track faculty, giving an update on the contract negotiations between UCOP and the UC-AFT.  By parroting the UCOP press release on the Unit 18 Lecturers and not presenting the perspective of the UC-AFT, VP Hermalin and the Berkeley administration clearly show where they stand in these negotiations.  We hope that the faculty who received this unsolicited email will reject its divisive message.

It is important to remember that collective bargaining is a process of negotiation.  Hermalin’s letter presents many of UC-AFT’s initial demands as if they constituted an ultimatum.  UC-AFT’s demands are ambitious; they radically challenge an increasingly untenable status quo.  As such, they should be viewed as a tool for forcing serious attention to the core concerns of lecturers, with the goal of arriving at a compromise that will improve the now-expired contract.  Instead, according to the UC-AFT, the university did very little, over the nine months of negotiations, to respond to their key proposals; then, at the last minute, they presented an unacceptable package that did not seriously address most of the union’s core concerns.  Now they claim that UC-AFT is denying its members a chance to receive a pay raise.

Here on our campus, key administrators, including Vice Provost Hermalin, have refused to meet with lecturers concerned about the negotiations.  The letter seems like a clear attempt to use the details of UC-AFT proposals, which would likely be characterized differently by the union, to drive a wedge between tenure-track faculty and Unit 18 lecturers.  UC-AFT bargaining summaries can be found here.

Let us also recall the context in which these negotiations are taking place.  The median lecturer salary is about $19,000 annually.  This is about 5 times lower than the median tenure-track faculty salary at Berkeley and at least 10 times lower than that of the administrators who signed off on this Cal Message.  There is virtually no job security for lecturers in their first six years on the job; they are hired and fired on a yearly or semesterly basis, with no provision or plan for retaining or rehiring lecturers who are excellent instructors.  Full-time work is difficult to obtain, and many lecturers hold additional jobs to make ends meet.  Turnover is high.  Lecturers perform substantial unpaid work to maintain high-quality instruction, and they often do it with few resources.  Lecturers often feel excluded from the university community and their departments and experience disrespectful treatment.  UC Berkeley campus administrators are well aware of this—it is detailed in the Academic Senate’s own report and data on the issue.

Hermalin’s letter indicates that UC administrators would like to keep the status quo, by which UC students receive excellent high-quality instruction by highly qualified and dedicated teachers who can’t earn a living wage and have to overcome substantial institutional hurdles for job security.  In the Cal Message, VP Hermalin acknowledges that lecturers should be paid better, but balks at the idea of improving access to job security or expanding access to full-time work.  And how should the university assess quality?  With student evaluations?  Study after study has shown that these evaluations are biased and unreliable indicators of quality of instruction.  Surely it’s time to diminish reliance on student evaluations for all faculty — tenure-track and lecturers alike.

Earlier this year we asked who UCOP and UC administrators were representing in their stance at bargaining with lecturers.  Now it is crystal clear.  They represent a union-hostile administration actively working to divide tenure-track faculty on this issue and discourage them from joining together to support their lecturer colleagues.  It is remarkable (and extremely disappointing) that VC Hermalin decided to reinforce UCOP negotiators’ messaging rather than to take the side of the faculty and students who support lecturers in their bargaining.

Paul Fine and Michael Burawoy for the Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association