Part-Time Faculty Members Deserve a Break From UC

Two recent study commission reports, one by a group of UC faculty members led by Berkeley sociologist Neil Smelser and another by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, agree that the quality of undergraduate education in this country is diminishing. Both cite as reasons the lack of career rewards for good teaching, chronic underfunding of core liberal-arts areas and creeping vocationalism. But neither report adequately confronts an equally serious factor: the ways in which universities as employers treat part-time and temporary faculty members who do a large share of the undergraduate teaching.

This is an especially serious yet underplayed issue in the University of California system, where job insecurity, excessive course loads and lack of say in making education policy have made it difficult for part-time and temporary faculty members, who teach the majority of lower-division courses, to do their best work.

Lack of job security has been the worst problem. Until recently no formal guidelines existed for evaluating the work of part-time and temporary faculty members. Many found their job security depending more on ability to get along with a department chairman than on ability to teach. In the absence of proper evaluations it was not always the best teachers who were rewarded with continued employment.

Job security has also been undermined by administrators wanting to preserve “flexibility” in budgeting and scheduling by hiring large numbers of lecturers on a course-by-course basis--sometimes immediately before the start of a term, leaving them little time for preparation.

The tenuous nature of this kind of academic employment forces many lecturers to take positions at several colleges. These “freeway flyers,” as they sometimes call themselves, may be teaching at as many as three institutions and, in some cases, teaching as many courses in one term as a regular UC faculty member teaches in a year. They do this to earn enough to get through periods of unemployment and to stay in favor with alternative employers. The quality of instruction can only suffer when part-time and temporary faculty members must stretch themselves so thin.

In some instances full-time course loads for lecturers have been only slightly greater than full-time loads for regular faculty members. This is reasonable, since non-senate faculty members are not subject to the publishing demands placed on regular faculty members. In other cases, however, full-time loads for lecturers have been nearly double those for regular faculty members. This is not only unreasonable, it is also exploitative and shameful.

Problems with excessive course loads developed in part because part-time and temporary faculty members have had no voice within the bureaucratic structure of the university. Consequently, their concerns have seldom been seriously discussed, let alone adequately addressed. It seems ironic in light of this that the Carnegie Foundation report calls for drawing undergraduates into university governance; a large segment of the faculty ought to be included in governance first.

Because of these problems, this group of faculty members--collectively known as “non-senate” faculty because of exclusion from the academic senate--has organized to bargain collectively with the university on a systemwide basis. Last spring, after two years of talks, the University Council-American Federation of Teachers and the University of California administration signed the first faculty labor contract in the history of the UC system.

The agreement represents the first concrete step taken in the UC system to solve problems of non-senate faculty members. It provides for job security thorough evaluations of teaching performance and limitations on course loads. And in an informal addendum to the contract the university has agreed to establish committees to ensure non-senate faculty members a voice in policy-making on each UC campus.

University administrators, department heads and regular faculty members should heed that voice now. To make proposals for improving the quality of undergraduate education without considering the special problems of non-senate faculty members is unrealistic. It is just as unrealistic, and ultimately unproductive, to do as some administrators would like--deny the role of the union in resolving these problems.

Significant improvements in the quality of undergraduate education may now depend more on what occurs at the bargaining table than in the ivied towers occupied by the faculty elites who are appointed to study commissions. What will be most important is the university’s instruction by improving the working conditions of those who are deeply committed to doing it.