BY MARC STEIN
As the academic year begins for California State University, the largest public university system in the United States, it’s a good time to review last year’s faculty-tenure-density report card for the state’s twenty-three campuses. The results—one B, seven Cs, twelve Ds, and three Fs—suggest that CSU administrators might need to work harder in their accounting, economics, education, labor studies, and public administration courses this year. Meanwhile, prospective students may want to consult this report card before making their application decisions, since tenure density affects educational quality, student success, academic freedom, workplace equity, and more.
Tenure density is the percentage of full-time equivalent faculty members who are tenure-track, meaning that they are paid better, have more job security, teach fewer and smaller classes, have more academic freedom, are compensated for engaging in university service, and have more paid opportunities to engage in research, scholarship, and creative activities than do their lecturer faculty counterparts. Over the last two years I have been sounding the alarm about declining tenure density in the CSU system with articles published in Inside Higher Ed and Academe. Overall, tenure density in the CSU system improved from 2021 to 2022, rising from 54.4 percent to 55.3 percent. CSU tenure density in 2004 was 66.6 percent, meaning that if last year’s improvement is a sign of things to come, it will take thirteen years to get us back to where we were in 2004 and twenty-two years to get us to the 75 percent target set by the state legislature in 2001.
Academic bureaucrats love rubrics, so here’s the one used for grading the CSU campuses. Note that I’m definitely grading on a curve.
For a B, a campus had to have a tenure density rate of 70–80 percent.
For a C, a campus had to have a tenure density rate of 60–70 percent or a rate that improved significantly from 2021 to 2022.
For a D, a campus had to have a tenure density rate of 50–60 percent or a rate that declined significantly from 2021 to 2022.
For an F, a campus had to have a tenure density rate below 50 percent.
I generally do not support announcing grades publicly, but in this case the common good outweighs the embarrassment and humiliation that some institutions might experience.
The results:
| Campus | Tenure density rate | Grade |
| Bakersfield | 52.2% | D |
| Channel Islands | 52.6% | C+ (most improved) |
| Chico | 61.3% | C |
| Dominguez Hills | 47.9% | F |
| East Bay | 61.7% | C |
| Fresno | 53.1% | D |
| Fullerton | 55.4% | D |
| Humboldt | 62.0% | C |
| Long Beach | 49.9% | F |
| Los Angeles | 50.5% | D |
| Maritime Academy | 73.5% | B |
| Monterey Bay | 54.7% | D |
| Northridge | 55.7% | D |
| Pomona | 52.8% | D |
| Sacramento | 56.6% | D |
| San Bernardino | 55.1% | D- (largest decline) |
| San Diego | 56.5% | D |
| San Francisco | 58.7% | D |
| San José | 51.2% | D |
| San Luis Obispo | 63.8% | C |
| San Marcos | 49.6% | F |
| Sonoma | 67.5% | C |
| Stanislaus | 60.3% | C |
| CSU system | 55.3% | D |
For their underfunding of Cal State, their unwillingness to address faculty tenure density, and their failure to achieve their own 75 percent tenure-density goal, the governor and state legislature earned Fs in 2022. I encourage state political leaders to register early for Cal State classes in the fall. If they study hard, put in the effort, meet with their professors for tutoring, and avoid plagiarizing from states that are destroying their colleges and universities, I am confident that their grades can improve.
Marc Stein is the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of History at San Francisco State University; the director of the OutHistory website; the coeditor of Queer Pasts; and the author most recently of The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History (2019); Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism (2022); and Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement, 2nd edition (2023).
As one who has fought this battle in the CSU for decades (see https://academeblog.org/2023/02/09/my-fight-for-tenure/), I heartily applaud Professor Stein for this effort. He’s not a tough grader, but, sadly, an all too honest one. Most depressing is that in 2004 the tenure density rate in the CSU was more than ten percentage points above what it is now. And back then I and many others were already raising the alarm that it was far too high. That’s what led to the 75% target, long ignored by the very legislature that once adopted it, as Prof. Stein points out.
Thank you for your vigilance on these matters, Professor Stein. At seven CSU campuses enrollment has fallen 10% or more below target: CSU Channel Islands, Chico State, CSU East Bay, CSU Maritime, Cal Poly Humboldt, San Francisco State and Sonoma State, with resultant budget reductions. Cuts to lecturer faculty course loads is the primary way budget reductions are being effected. This may produce the perverse result of higher tenure density, not through more enlightened managers or legislators, or any positive initiatives such as converting incumbent lecturer faculty into assistant professors, but from the core premise of the two-tier faculty labor system that lecturer faculty are disposable.
Calculating tenure density as a percentage of full time equivalent faculty elides both the scale of the decline of tenure and the human cost of its harms. Each faculty member is a whole human being, their lives are not prorated to their employment time base. At San Francisco State, nearly 60% of faculty are lecturer faculty, 94% of them part-time, each one of them denied a living wage, the security of tenure and the attendant protection of academic freedom, ability to participate in shared governance, and support for scholarly and creative activity.
Should we calculate tenure density as the percentage of courses taught by ladder faculty, the percentage may drop even lower. Lecturer faculty at SFSU must teach five courses per semester for full-time pay while most ladder faculty teach three courses per semester. And because lecturer faculty typically teach larger, introductory courses, if we calculate tenure density as the percentage of students taught by ladder faculty, the state of tenure may appear bleaker still.
Prof. Erickson’s analysis is correct. Prof. Stein’s grading is indeed resulting in grade inflation. As a SJSU senior lecturer I teach 5 classes with a minimum of 225 students per semester.
My tenure line colleagues teach 3 classes with between 45 to 60 or so students. If we so the math each campus utterly fails when we calculate tenure density by both classes and students taught.
But this is really not the core of the problem. That has to do with the dismantling of public higher education by transforming the vast supermajority of faculty like myself into contingent gig workers who do much more work for far less pay, a lot of unwaged service and scholarly work, few resources, and with no job security. Let’s not also forget privatization in/outsourcing and the drive to increase productivity and lower labor costs to produce more self-disciplined trained workers.
I called this the entrepreneuralization of higher education in my dissertation and 2.5 decades later I and our students live it everyday. The question is who is willing to fight it? It’s far larger than tenure density, wage gaps and workload.