BY HANK REICHMAN

Today all eyes in higher education are on Georgia, where the state Board of Regents has voted to all but eliminate the protections of tenure for all faculty in that state’s public colleges and universities, thereby inviting the AAUP to make good on its pledge to investigate and, ultimately, censure that board.  But if you thought that attacks on our profession were the product solely of reactionary “red state” GOP politicians and their hand-picked trustees in states like Georgia, consider what’s happening now in deepest blue California.  Here the AAUP-affiliated California Faculty Association, representing nearly 30,000 faculty members, tenure-track and contingent, in the California State University system, and the University Council-American Federation of Teachers (UC-AFT), which represents 6,000 non-tenure-track faculty members (known as lecturers) in the University of California system, are once again at impasse in contract negotiations.  In both systems allegedly liberal, even “progressive,” trustees and administrators have, to quote CFA, “set up only roadblocks to changes that faculty desire and deserve.”

Today, UC-AFT held informational picket lines and rallies at all UC campuses.  I attended the modestly sized but highly spirited rally at the Berkeley campus, where dedicated instructors and their allies called on UC President Michael Drake to agree to a contract that would improve job security and teaching conditions for the system’s lecturers, whose treatment is little short of scandalous.  In office now for 15 months, Drake has maintained a conspicuous and embarrassing silence about the negotiations.

While tenure may be the most desirable and effective means of protecting academic freedom and providing “a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability,” to quote the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the untenured equally need that protection and security, if not ensured by tenure then by contractual guarantees for something similar.  As the AAUP’s Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure declares, “There should be no invidious distinctions between those who teach and/or conduct research in higher education, regardless of whether they hold full-time or part-time appointments or whether their appointments are tenured, tenure-track, or contingent.”

Yet such distinctions clearly exist in the UC.  Last week CalMatters, a “nonpartisan, nonprofit journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s state Capitol works and why it matters,” published a bombshell report, “UC workforce churn: Why a quarter of lecturers don’t return each year,” which revealed shocking details about the working conditions of those who teach over a third of the UC system’s undergraduate classes:

• About 25% of the lecturers at UC don’t return annually because of low pay and lack of job stability, meaning their students lose the mentors they rely on to guide them through their academic careers.
• While UC lecturers are guaranteed a 6% raise after 3 cumulative years of teaching in the same department, the average length of service for UC lecturers is less than two years, meaning most won’t ever qualify for that bump.
• While lecturer turnover — also known as churn — has increased in the last decade, the number of UC lecturers continues to grow, raising speculation that the UC is relying on a cadre of part-time workers with few protections to educate its more than 285,000 students and keep costs low.
• Minimum pay for full-time lecturers is currently $57,000. According to federal housing data, that’s a low-income wage in areas where six of the nine UC undergraduate campuses are located.
• Since 2011, the number of lecturers at the UC has risen by 41% while the number of Senate faculty on the tenure track has increased by just 19%.

California State Assembly member Ash Kalra addresses the rally

Mia McIver, a lecturer and president of UC-AFT, told CalMatters, “What we’re fighting for is to stop the gigification of the university.”  UC-AFT members have already voted by an overwhelming majority of 96% to authorize a strike.

UC-AFT has won growing support among tenured and tenure-track faculty (known in the UC as “Senate faculty”), other campus unions, and students.  See, for instance, this statement of support from the Council of University of California Faculty Associations, posted last month on this blog.  Yesterday, The Daily Californian, the Berkeley independent campus newspaper, published an op-ed, “The working conditions of lecturers are learning conditions of students,” signed by leaders of the UAW local representing student employees, the student government, and the Berkeley Faculty Association.  They wrote:

Before the end of the Fall 2021 semester, there is a high possibility that the lecturers at UC Berkeley will go on strike.  As a coalition of faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, we are appalled and alarmed that after two years of negotiations, the University of California has yet to agree to a new contract with lecturers and their union, University Council-American Federation of Teachers, or UC-AFT.

It is time we all support the lecturers who play an essential role in teaching our classes, yet are continuously unsupported by the University of California.

On the surface, little differentiates instructional faculty on campus.  However, lecturers, in contrast, are paid solely to teach, rarely receive security of employment and have no formal say in campus governance.  In the past decade, the number of lecturers at UC Berkeley has grown dramatically, from 637 in April 2011 to 1,029 in April 2021.  There are now almost as many lecturers on campus as there are Senate faculty and the official figures don’t include several hundred employees who have teaching responsibilities but different job titles.

According to the Academic Senate’s own study, lecturers teach 40% of student credit hours at UC Berkeley.  That means that most undergraduates are almost as likely to be taught by a lecturer as a member of the Senate faculty. . . .

[O]ver the past decade, as undergraduate enrollments have shot up and the number of faculty positions has barely risen, lecturers have been hired in increasing numbers to fill the gap.  Simply put, lecturers are cheaper than Senate faculty and can be hired and fired on demand.  The median salary of a lecturer was just $19k in 2019, as opposed to $163,742 for Senate faculty.

As the majority of lecturers are hired to teach on a part-time basis for a semester or a year, 29% of lecturers on our campus do not even qualify for health benefits.  More than a quarter of lecturers are “churned” every year — that is their appointments are not renewed.

This is a disgraceful way to treat our colleagues without whom the campus could not function and students could not graduate.  The working conditions of lecturers are the learning conditions of students.  Insofar as (actual, if not official) campus practice is not to rehire lecturers as they approach the threshold where they are eligible for security of employment, lecturers’ focus on teaching is disrupted by the constant search for new work.  The unpredictability lecturers face produces uncertainty for students, too, as they face losing inspirational teachers and mentors.

If UC Berkeley is to maintain its position as the best public university in the world, it must ensure that no instructional faculty endure such unpredictable, precarious and poorly paid working conditions.  It is especially galling that lecturers are treated so poorly given that they are often women and people of color and research scholars whose expertise is neither recognized nor funded.

UC-AFT’s informational pickets will resume tomorrow, October 14, from 10-2, with noon rallies on most campuses.  If you’re in the neighborhood, please consider joining them.  Here are some photos that I took at today’s event.

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom has just been published.