BY HANK REICHMAN
“The University of California could not function without the labor of lecturers. In a given year, UC employs more than 6,000 of these educators, who are hired on short-term contracts and lack the stability of tenure. All told, they teach roughly a third of courses offered across the system. Since 2011, the number of lecturers at UC has expanded at more than three times the pace of the tenured professoriat.”
So begins an excellent article published this past weekend in the San Francisco Chronicle by Sammy Feldblum and John Schmidt, graduate students at UCLA and research fellows with the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. The article goes on to recount the gains won by lecturers in the agreement reached last month between UC administration and UC-AFT, the union representing non-tenure-track instructors in the system. That agreement came after lecturers came to the verge of striking (see here and here) and was hailed by the union as the “best contract in its history.” It will raise salaries by some 30% over six years and significantly improve job security protections. UC Lecturers will no longer have to apply for their jobs each year for the first five years, a level of stability the union was looking for. The new contract also expands eligibility for retirement, health care benefits and paid family leave: four weeks at 100% pay.
“However,” Feldblum and Schmidt remind us, “while the contract is a big win for UC-AFT, more needs to be done. So long as it continues to rely on lecturers to carry out its core responsibilities, UC needs to incorporate efforts to stabilize this essential workforce in the medium and long terms.”
“So, how did we arrive at this point,” the UCLA authors ask. I suggest reading the entire piece, but since it’s probably behind a paywall for non-subscribers, I’ll provide some of their account here:
The move toward contingent academic labor at UC reflects broader nationwide trends in higher education. Nearly a million more people teach in universities than in 1969, but the number of those with tenure has remained roughly constant. The other two-thirds of all faculty across the country mostly lack the security of employment protections offered by tenure.
The specific situation at UC, however, can’t be separated from California’s specific political and economic history — and to the retreat from a model that assumed higher education to be a public good from which the state and its residents would benefit.
The foundational moment for the modern UC was the 1960 drafting of the California Master Plan for Higher Education. This plan formalized the relationship between UC, the California State University system and community colleges, laying the groundwork for everything from instructional focus to enrollment numbers to physical footprints. At the time, public institutions were supported overwhelmingly through state appropriations, which allowed community colleges, CSU and UC to remain tuition-free to state residents. . . .
[Governor Ronald] Reagan’s 1966 election triggered a shift in thinking about higher education in California that still reverberates today. Reagan used [student protests] as a wedge to introduce an “educational fee” to supplement public financing of the university. T he fee began its life as a $250 charge levied on students (approximately $1,700 in 2020 dollars). It has since ballooned at many times the rate of inflation and now represents approximately half of the UC’s core revenues — bringing in over $3 billion in 2020 alone.
Reagan’s fee went into effect in February 1970. Since that pivotal moment, heightened competition for state resources has contributed to a decline in state appropriations for higher education. The passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, which cut property tax collection in half, exacerbated this pattern and heavily curtailed the ability of local governments to raise revenue.
Spending priorities were shifted too. Through the 1980s and ’90s, state funding for prison construction rose far more quickly than did higher education funding. In the years since this carceral turn, a succession of economic crises — the drawdown of defense contracts in California in the early ’90s, the dot-com bubble bust in the early 2000s and Great Recession of 2008 — has reduced public spending on higher education further. All the while, California’s student body has grown significantly, tripling from 87,087 the year of Reagan’s election to 291,239 in 2021 and becoming increasingly diverse in the process.
The result is a long-term decline in per-student funding in a system that is more dependent than ever on tuition and private funding streams — through industry partnerships and private philanthropy (which often leads to outlandish results, as the recent controversy over a planned mega-dorm that critics have likened to a prison, gifted to UC Santa Barbara by billionaire amateur architect Charlie Munger, makes plain). . . .
The last time that UC-AFT’s members struck, in 2002, they achieved “continuing appointments” for long-term lecturers who have taught six years’ worth of classes, a status that came with a pay raise and security of employment through indefinite contracts.
This stability, however, remains elusive. According to the union, fewer than 20% of UC lecturers have achieved this status, and the average term of a lecturer’s employment is only two years. In fact, 25% of all lecturers are “churned” out of the UC system each year, only to be replaced with new hires.
The number of lecturers employed by the UC has grown since the 2002 strike. And while the recent contract was an important step toward fair labor practices for this population, it is only a beginning. Contingent faculty members are still excluded from shared governance within departments, and it remains difficult and rare for them to achieve continuing appointments, partially because teaching credits do not transfer between departments. [For a discussion of the conditions of non-tenure-track faculty at UC Berkeley, see my 2018 post, “Must We Accept a Two-Tiered Faculty?“]
The authors conclude: “UC is aiming to graduate an extra 200,000 students atop the estimated million that were to complete their degrees between 2015 and 2030. This ramp-up will necessarily depend on the further expansion of lecturers as well as on the work of postdoctoral scholars, graduate researchers and teachers, and non-faculty staff. UC needs a new compact, like its original 1960 Master Plan, to enshrine excellence, fairness and access to all, including the teachers on which its very existence depends.” And, I would add, that new compact must also rebuild the ranks of the tenure-track faculty and strengthen the university’s — and the state’s! — commitment to advancing the public good.
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 recently been published.
