Beneath It All, the Tenure Issue

Monday’s decision by UCLA teaching assistants to join a labor union is understandable given their increasing workloads and diminishing job prospects. The TA system was conceived as a way of helping graduate students hone their knowledge and their teaching techniques through close partnerships with professors. At UCLA, however, as at many other campuses, TAs have become cheap labor, providing 60% of the face-to-face contact between instructors and undergraduate students.

Throughout the country TAs find themselves threatened in a job market that’s sinking as quickly as the Titanic, to paraphrase an assessment made last year by the president of the Modern Language Assn. The association predicts that fewer than half of those who get PhDs in the humanities between 1996 and 2000 will land full-time, tenure-track jobs within a year of graduation.

Joining the United Auto Workers is not likely to improve the TAs’ immediate prospects. At the 12 universities nationwide with recognized unions, wages are lower than what UC offers--$13,000 a year and a $2,000 cut in the TAs’ annual fees paid to the university. And unionization can only harm the collaborative ideal of the TA job and the promise of professorial mentoring.

UC leaders should make more of an effort to enhance the TAs’ postgraduate job prospects. Reforming the system guaranteeing lifetime job protection, or tenure, for professors should be the first step.

Since a 1994 federal law abolished a mandatory retirement age, professors who once would have retired at 65 are now likely to hold onto their appointments for life. Universities nationwide are thus being deprived of new blood in a time they need it the most: an information age when students and teachers must freshen their skills almost daily.

The UC system should model its tenure reforms after those outlined in “Facing Change,” a report issued earlier this year by the American Assn. of State Colleges and Universities. Key recommendations include instituting periodic reviews of tenured faculty to make it “easier to remove chronic nonperformers” and closer monitoring of faculty sabbaticals.

The chairman of the association’s report team was California State University Chancellor Charles B. Reed, whose recent experiences underscore that reforming tenure won’t be easy. Last week, Reed was blasted by Cal State’s faculty union after he decided to base 40% of future faculty raises on merit.

Reforming tenure is the only way UC officials can create the academic opportunities that TAs desire and deserve. The UCLA TAs’ decision is expected to motivate TAs at UC’s seven other campuses to consider joining the UAW. That should have a more significant effect: motivating UC officials to begin fundamental reform.