Lecturers Fear for Their Jobs : Education: Part-time teachers who help ease the class load at public universities and colleges believe budget cuts will put them out of work.

They are known as “freeway flyers”: college lecturers who zip from campus to campus, teaching students everything from basic writing to psychology and business management.

They are the front-line soldiers who grease the education machine, taking on the overflow and specialty classes that tenured faculty cannot cover at California’s public colleges and universities.

They are also the first to feel any budget pinch. Now, with Gov. Pete Wilson slashing $1.2 billion in state support for higher education and campuses cutting course offerings, many of the more than 36,000 lecturers across California fear they will not have jobs next fall.

“You open the calender (of classes) for next year, it’s as if we died and there is no trace,” said Gail Reisnan, a part-time lecturer in Cal State Fullerton’s teacher education department, where only tenured faculty now are carried on the fall schedule. “It’s as though we were never around.”

Lecturers have become indispensable to California public universities and colleges as a way to keep up with the phenomenal growth in student enrollment over the last several decades. Because funding for full-time positions tends to come behind the spurts, administrators historically have looked to cheaper part-time employees. Now, in the Cal State system, part-timers represent about half the 23,000 total faculty, and on many campuses teach one-third or more of classes.

This has created a cottage industry of sorts for talented Ph. D.s willing to brave the freeways and the year-to-year uncertainties to work and live in California.

Sharon Presley, a psychology lecturer who has cobbled together five classes and two lab sessions this semester at Cal State Fullerton, Cal State Northridge and Glendale Community College to make ends meet, said the job market for college lecturers is the worst she has seen in her four years in Southern California.

“I’m going to be cut back to two classes at Fullerton, and Northridge is still up in the air,” said Presley, 48, who earns almost $30,000 and has worn out two used cars commuting from her Long Beach home. “I’m pretty mad because it’s my feeling that education isn’t really valued.”

Craig Bowman believes he will lose the two psychology classes he teaches each semester at Cal State Northridge, but he is hoping to keep his three courses at Cal State Fullerton because he has a little seniority among the hired guns there.

“The anxiety was so thick around here you could cut it with a knife,” said Bowman, who expects a 40% drop in income next year. “We all thought we were being thrown to the wolves. . . . It makes it really tough to get fired up for a job with an uncertain future.”

Living in lecturers’ limbo was too much for historian John Barzman, who has been shuttling between Cal Poly Pomona, Cal State Fullerton and his apartment in Los Angeles’ Westlake district for the last two years.

Barzman had hoped the part-time lecturer positions would lead to a permanent job at one of the universities. This fall, budget cuts and a decline in the number of history majors mean there will be little need for part-time history instructors at either Cal State campus. So, Barzman has accepted a tenure-track job at a university in Texas.

“I’m bitter,” said the 44-year-old specialist in modern European history. “I really feel the (Cal State) system is pretty rotten because many, many classes--more than 30% of them--are taught by lecturers year after year. They are competent, needed and liked, and are rehired every year. But they have no security.”

Ironically, beginning July 1, lecturers with at least six years of experience at Cal State campuses are entitled to two-year contracts and priority status for available jobs. At some campuses, the budget crisis is so severe that such contracts are all but meaningless.

“At San Diego State, people are getting two-year contracts and layoff notices in the same letter,” said James Semelroth of the California Faculty Assn., which represents the Cal State system’s 12,000 tenure-track and 11,000 temporary faculty.

“We don’t know how many people are not going to have jobs because the state deficit projections are getting worse by the day,” he added, referring to last week’s revised state revenue shortfall of at least $14.3 billion.

At the beginning of the year, when the deficit was projected at $7 billion, the governor offered the three public higher education systems $1.2 billion less than they had asked for. The budget plan still is stalled in the Legislature amid battles over proposed cuts and tax increases.

Despite the uncertainty, colleges and universities have had to plan for the fall semester. Using Wilson’s first budget plan, they are raising student fees, freezing job openings, cutting operation and maintenance costs, and increasing class sizes even as they reduce the number of courses.

Of the state’s three higher education systems, even the Legislature’s analyst, Elizabeth Hill, has said the 20-campus Cal State University system is the hardest hit by the budget crisis. Because of a projected $400-million shortfall, the Cal State system has advised employee unions that it may lay off more than 600 faculty and staff members. But those figures do not include lecturers, who are contract employees.

San Diego State is the hardest hit, so far. Cal State officials said the university expects to let go 279 faculty and 21 staff. Add to that the part-time lecturers whose contracts will not be renewed, and the university will cut more than 600 of its 2,100 faculty, said Semelroth, assistant to general manager for the California Faculty Assn.

“I’d like to know how they are going to teach 30,000 students with one-third less people,” he said.

No tenured faculty are among the seven who may be laid off at Cal State Fullerton. But if the university cuts 10% of its 4,000 courses as planned, union officials say as many as 200 of the university’s 700 part-time lecturers will not have jobs in September.

Cal State Fullerton President Milton A. Gordon worries about the impact of personnel cuts. “The morale factor can be just horrendous,” he said. “People who aren’t laid off wonder: ‘Could it happen to me?’ ”

Morale is already low, say freeway flyers at Fullerton and elsewhere. The budget crisis has further polarized relations between the professorial haves and have-nots.

Many tenured faculty are unhappy that they will have to take on the extra classes formerly taught by lecturers, as well as continue their research and serve on academic committees.

Lecturers who have strived to give that something extra to get a dean’s notice and another year’s contract--or the next permanent position--feel unappreciated, some even discriminated against.

“I think many administrators and tenured faculty have the perception that we’re second-best and can’t hack a full-time job,” said Bowman, the psychology lecturer at Northridge and Fullerton. “That’s completely erroneous. . . . For most of us, there are extenuating circumstances, like in my case, having to stay in the area so my wife can finish her Ph. D. program.”

Two years ago at Northridge, the prejudice against part-timers took the form of an edict against lecturers doing any research without a faculty member’s sponsorship, Bowman said. Such policies can further hinder lecturers from earning the research credentials to land a tenure-track position, especially in competitive fields such as psychology, he added.

Many administrators and faculty members worry that efforts to achieve diversity in faculty ranks will be set back.

“Part-timers are the last hired and the first fired, and a lot of them are women and minorities,” said Reginald Clark, who teaches two classes in Cal State Fullerton’s department of Afro-Ethnic Studies.

Last year, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury awarded Clark, 41, of Montclair $1 million in his lawsuit against Claremont Graduate School. Clark had alleged he was denied tenure because he is black. The school has appealed the verdict.

Clark, who has a doctorate in education, teaches at Fullerton and does education consulting work for school districts and government agencies. Because another part-time lecturer is retiring at Fullerton, Clark probably will keep his two classes even with cutbacks in ethnic studies, department Chairman Emery Tolbert said.

Juggling competing schedules is hard enough without having to worry about next year or their future marketability, say freeway flyers.

“It’s very unsettling. Sometimes you don’t know which campus you’re at or what you said last week in class,” said Bowman, 35, who lives in South Pasadena, roughly equidistant from Northridge and Fullerton. “It’s tough to feel at home. At Northridge, especially, I feel like I’m just the hired help. I don’t feel connected to the department.”

For Judy Ramirez, chair of Fullerton’s child development program, it’s hard enough to make staffing decisions in the best of times. During a budget crisis it’s all but impossible because it means telling good people among the roster of part-timers that she may have nothing for them.

“I have students coming up to me and saying (about individual lecturers) ‘She’s wonderful,’ and I agree,” Ramirez said. “I just keep telling (the lecturers), I hope I have something for you.”

Ramirez probably will not be able to do much for Jean Crawford, though.

The 70-year-old Anaheim woman had been teaching a full load of sociology classes at Fullerton since she got her doctorate from UC Riverside in 1979. Gradually, as enrollments have slipped in sociology, she added classes in child development and human services.

This fall, all sociology courses will be taught by tenured faculty, and Crawford has too little seniority to compete for the 10 classes Ramirez expects to have for part-timers. Crawford hopes to be rehired for at least one human services class she teaches at Fullerton’s satellite campus in Mission Viejo.

Retirement is not really an option for Crawford. As someone who started her teaching career late in life, the pension she would draw would “pay the gas bill, but not much more,” she said.

Crawford’s future may be uncertain, but she has decided it is pointless to fret. “I’m not worried about it because ill health wouldn’t help at all, and worry would make me dysfunctional,” she said.

Resolutely, she went back to marking up papers and preparing for her next class.