Reform Debated : Campuses Part With Part-Timers

Anthropology teacher Joan Barker’s days as a “freeway flyer” are ending.

After shuttling between part-time jobs at various universities and community colleges around Los Angeles for 18 years, Barker will start a full-time, tenure-track teaching post at Santa Monica College this fall.

“The insecurity has been the killer,” she said of her career as an itinerant instructor. “You never quite know when or where or what you will be teaching.”

Barker is part of the first large wave of full-time hirings at California’s community colleges in a decade, officials say. As many as 1,500 new full-time jobs may be created over the next two years because of a reform law aimed at cutting the colleges’ controversial dependence on faculty who are not fully part of campus life.

‘Lost a Generation’

“We have really lost a generation of new (full-time) faculty during the past 10 years,” said David Mertes, statewide chancellor of the community college system. The new reform law and a large number of expected retirements, he said, are “very fortuitously creating a window of opportunity for a great number of possible hirings.”

But those openings will not end the use of the traveling teachers. Community colleges, the California State University system and, to a lesser extent, University of California campuses could not--should not, some officials insist--function without part-timers.

Also unlikely to stop is the debate over whether those part-timers are exploited and whether their use hurts the quality of education.

Vocational and technical courses are well served by part-time teachers whose other jobs keep them up to date, college administrators say. Schools can respond quickly to changing demand for courses by hiring or dropping part-time teachers instead of making a commitment to a full-time person.

Cheaper to Hire

And part-time teachers are simply cheaper to hire. That is the main reason the situation has gotten out of hand at California’s community colleges, according to teachers unions and many state legislators.

“We solved our fiscal problems on the back of part-timers,” said Patrick McCallum, executive director of the community colleges’ Faculty Assn.

Part-timers last year taught about 35% of credit classes in community colleges statewide. In some districts, they taught more than half of all classes. The reform law uses strong financial incentives to get that share down to 25%, the national average, by 1992.

Critics say reliance on too many part-timers creates a demoralizing caste system on campuses. Typically, community college part-timers earn about half the hourly pay of full-time teachers--$28.38 compared to $53.36, according to the California Postsecondary Education Commission. Although recent contracts in some districts have narrowed that gap somewhat, part-timers often receive no benefits. Because they have little job security, some may be fearful of presenting unorthodox views.

Even more important, some educators believe, is the impact on students of the use of part-timers. Because part-timers sometimes are assigned to classes at the last minute, they have little time for planning. In hurrying from campus to campus to earn a living, some do not have time to counsel students or participate in school activities.

A mathematics instructor who racked up 711 commuting miles a week teaching at eight different campuses was named a “champion freeway flyer” by the teachers union in the San Mateo County Community College District. Not surprisingly, the bumper of the man’s car bore a colorful array of campus parking stickers.

Barker, the Santa Monica College instructor, taught as many as seven courses a semester at three different schools, including Cal State Northridge, West Los Angeles College, Pierce College, Moorpark College and UCLA. At the time, full-time openings in anthropology were rare.

Happy Ending

“People were always very gracious to me and tried their best to be as humane as possible within what is an inhumane and exploitative system. . . . But I would do almost anything to teach, so I roamed the freeways,” said Barker, who won an award for outstanding teaching this year at Santa Monica College.

Her story has a happy ending, but that is not the case for an army of other teachers around the state.

“There are a lot of hard feelings,” said Roselle Lewis, who has taught English at Los Angeles Valley College for 20 years but never landed a full-time job.

Last semester, Lewis told students not to seek her for out-of-class help because she does not get paid for those office hours. Eventually, she changed her mind, but she still feels exploited. “It’s a disgrace,” she said. “I think both the students and the teachers are hurt by that policy.”

For Bob Grill, industry consulting work has subsidized part-time teaching of computer technology at College of Alameda for the last six years. He expects that arrangement to continue until he finds a permanent teaching post in the Bay Area.

“I’m a prisoner of my addiction,” Grill said. “There’s nothing I care about more than teaching. There’s no recreational drug that can get me as high as teaching does. . . . The fact is, I’m part of a class of people who are ripe for exploitation because of who we are and what we want to do.”

Surveys of the Los Angeles Community College district show that about half the part-timers, even those with full-time jobs outside of education, want full-time teaching jobs. But others with outside careers do not. For them, and the colleges and students who are delighted to have the expertise of detectives teaching criminal justice, editors teaching journalism and physicians teaching public health, the system works.

Engineer Raymond Shield, for instance, has taught electronics or computer courses two nights a week for 25 years, most recently at Glendale Community College. The $3,000-a-semester pay is nice but not as crucial as the job satisfaction, he explained.

“I don’t want to blow my own horn,” Shield said. “But teaching what you do during the day is a lot more effective than reading out of a textbook. I feel the students are getting real practical experience.”

Ronald Mendleski, a lighting designer and manufacturer, agrees. He even has hired promising students who have taken his lighting courses at Santa Monica College and the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.

“I feel like I help people and change their lives,” Mendleski said. Moreover, he said, interior lighting is so narrow a field that it would not merit a full-time instructor.

But even in more general subjects like math and English, the prospects for full-time jobs were bleak until the omnibus reform law aimed at improving the overall quality of community college education took effect last month. Under the law, an extra $140 million in state funds is expected to be disbursed over the next two years. A district that now has more than 25% of its credit courses taught by part-timers could lose more than a third of its share of the money if it does not hire more permanent instructors.

At Santa Monica College, about 40% of the teaching load was carried by part-timers last year. To earn the reform money, the school this fall is hiring 28 new full-time professors, only one of whom replaces a retiree, according to college spokesman Bruce Smith. “We are sure this is one of the biggest groups we’ve ever had,” he said.

Saddleback Hiring

Orange County’s Saddleback Community College District, where 39% of courses were taught by part-timers last year, plans to hire 33 new full-time instructors this fall. About half of them will be financed by the new state funds.

Yet, some college administrators complain that the new push for full-time staff will make teachers unions stronger without necessarily improving education.

James Duke, superintendent of the Lake Tahoe Community College District, where about half of the courses have been taught by part-timers, argues that the Legislature did not recognize that small and rural colleges often lack the enrollment to support a full-time teacher in certain disciplines. He and others fear being forced to cut programs.

“I’m running the college to provide education in an efficient manner, not to provide a guaranteed job to people who have gotten degrees and feel they deserve a job,” Duke said.

In fact, some part-timers may be forced out of teaching altogether as new full-time teachers absorb their course loads.

“Frankly, that will be healthy for them and for education in general,” said Karen S. Grosz, until recently president of the community colleges’ statewide Academic Senate.

At the nine UC campuses, graduate students handle most of the teaching chores that part-timers do at community colleges. In May, graduate teaching assistants at UC Berkeley, who handle an estimated 38% of undergraduate courses, went on strike for two days to focus attention on allegations of exploitation and on the university’s refusal to recognize their union.

At the 19 Cal State campuses, full-time faculty taught 73% of the course load last year, down slightly from previous years, according to a system report. Union leaders claim that the system’s central administration and several campuses, particularly those in San Bernardino, Long Beach and San Jose, are trying to decrease the number of full-time teachers to limit costs and teachers’ independence.

Jacob Samit, Cal State’s vice chancellor for employee relations, denies that the university makes excessive use of part-timers and says the system is on par with the national average.

But Sherna Gluck, vice president of the Cal State faculty union, said a large part-time roll poses “real, serious implications for education” and gives administrators too much say in course content.

“There is no guarantee of academic freedom,” she complained, “if you are constantly under the threat of not getting rehired.”