BY HANK REICHMAN

A week after non-tenure-track lecturers at the University of California held rallies at UC campuses statewide in support of their union, the University Council-American Federation of Teachers (UC-AFT), there are signs that at long last the university’s negotiators are being forced to respond to these colleagues’ demands.  Thanks to pressure from faculty, legislators, the press, and a stiff response from UC-AFT, the university has agreed to return to the legal bargaining track, with a session scheduled for tomorrow.

A good piece published today on Cal Matters, “Pressure mounts on UC system to reach agreement with lecturer workforce as strikes and class cancellations loom,” reports the following:

• The university’s latest offer from last Monday — which promises increased job security —is seen as “a step in the right direction” but falls short of the salary increases the union has requested and includes job security  provisions that would kick in next summer, creating the possibility for mass dismissal of current lecturers, the union said.
• Twelve members of the California State Assembly, including assembly member Ash Kalra, a Democrat from San Jose and chair of the Assembly committee on labor and employment, released a letter addressed to UC President Michael Drake on Tuesday, urging him to “prioritize labor peace and job stability for lecturers.”  Other lawmakers have issued their own letters with the same sentiment, such as Dr. Richard Pan, a former UC faculty member who’s now a Senate Democrat representing Sacramento.  “I do believe it’s the UC administration’s fault for not coming to a resolution sooner, and for not ending this impasse,” said Assembly member Kalra.

As of today, 770 tenure-track UC faculty members from all ten campuses have signed on to the UC Academic Senate Faculty Pledge of Solidarity with Lecturer Colleagues.  In an email message, Constance Penley, Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara and President of the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), wrote that the group would “today send a letter to UC President Drake saying that more than 750 Academic Senate faculty members have signed the pledge, with the great majority agreeing to respect the picket line.  We will urge him to bargain in good faith for a fair and just settlement to avert a strike.” [UPDATE: The letter is here.]

According to Cal Matters, UC

now proposes three types of contracts of increasing length that add up to six years: a one-year contract, then a two-year contract and finally a three-year contract.  That’s more stability than the UC’s previous offer of two one-year contracts followed by two two-year contracts.  None of those came with any promise of evaluations.

The UC is also proposing a formal review before the three-year contract, the first such offer in these negotiations and a big win for lecturers.  But UC is proposing just an “assessment” before the two-year contract.  And the union doesn’t really know what that means. Lecturers don’t have clarity on what factors upon which a review would be based.  . . .

The formal offer’s language on a review after the first year “doesn’t even come close to the robust evaluation after the third year,” said Mia McIver, president of the lecturer union and herself a lecturer.

But even the new review process after three years comes with asterisks that alarm the union.  One says that a lecturer who passes their evaluation and is owed a three-year contract can still be hired for just a year if the department thinks the class the lecturer is teaching won’t be around the following year.

McIver said that may look fair, but what happens if the department decides to keep the class anyway?  The lecturer still won’t be able to have the class back, she added.

I hope that everyone has noticed that it is not the university administration that is fighting for rigorous reviews; it is the union.  Apparently, UC doesn’t really care about regular evaluations of the work quality of those it hires to teach up to 40% of its classes.  Apparently, they just want them on a never-ending employment treadmill anyway.  Those instructors and their union do care about quality, however.  “I want my teacher to be someone that knows what they’re doing,” Sofia Stuart, a second-year biology major at UCLA who took part in last week’s protest, told Cal Matters.  Without lecturer reviews, the UC could just hire inexperienced lecturers or renew ineffective ones, she said.

So much for those so-called educators who claim that faculty unions debase “quality.”