Shirin Vossoughi Vossoughi is a
fourth-year history and international development studies student
who encourages you to speak your mind at [email protected]. Click Here for
more articles by Shirin Vossoughi
Last week, a talk on the educational priorities of the
University of California sparked my interest in a little known but
essential part of higher education: lecturers.
After finding out that UC labor negotiators were to meet with
the union representing lecturers ““ the University Council of
the American Federation of Teachers ““ to negotiate salaries
and job security, I decided to check it out.
Introducing myself as a concerned student and a Daily Bruin
journalist, I attempted to cover the meeting. Instead, I was shown
the door.
The union members were eager to have a student tell their story.
The UC negotiators, however, were afraid of student coverage and
were reluctant to make the negotiations public. Sensing that my
presence as a student was highly threatening, I realized that
undergraduate education is disturbingly low on the UC’s list
of priorities.
Unbeknownst to many UCLA students, lecturers are responsible for
half of undergraduate instruction. At first, these temporary
professors were used to fill in for permanent faculty. By the
1980s, they became a lasting fixture of the university, although
paid much less than the rest of their colleagues.
In the quest for bargain scholars, both public and private
universities across the country have increased the number of
lecturers, recognizing the cost-cutting potential of this
plentiful, cheap crop of instructors.
In many ways, this trend has greatly enriched undergraduate
education. Unlike other faculty, lecturers do not have the
pressures of research or various committee obligations and can
focus on the quality of teaching. Some of my most engaging classes
at UCLA have been taught by lecturers, who put effort into
fostering critical discussion and a diverse range of
perspectives.
But despite the quality of education they bring to the UC,
lecturers are underappreciated and treated as expendable temps.
Taking into account the coverage of registration fees, lecturers
are actually paid less than TAs. Since the UC can terminate them on
a whim to save money, their jobs are not secure. According to
UC-AFT, only about 30 percent of lecturers have contracts.
After six years of teaching at a university, the UC should show
commitment to a lecturer by granting them a contract. Since April
of 2000, the lecturer’s union has been negotiating for
increases in salary and job security. But the UC insists on being
able to terminate a lecturer anytime if some undefined, abstract
notion of “excellence” is not met. A lecturer can also
be dismissed if there is a lack of work or because of
“budgetary considerations,” (i.e. getting someone
cheaper). This clearly reflects a money-driven mentality that has
no place in a public university.
According to the university’s negotiators, lecturers
should be content with what they get. Peter Chester, manager of
Labor Relations rebuts the lecturers’ feelings of
underappreciation:
“A lot of lecturers would prefer to be faculty and would
prefer to have more time to do research.” Justifying the
drastically lower incomes, the UC argues that professors are
recruited with competitive salaries while lecturers are not.
However, along with increasing student fees and the denial of
tenure to exceptional professors, the mistreatment of lecturers
reflects a general disregard for teaching . As Jeremy Elkins of the
UC-AFT asks, “If we are paying six-figure salaries to get the
best administrators and the best researchers but we don’t
feel the need to attract the best lecturers, who do so much of the
teaching, what does that say about the value placed on
education?”
Increasingly, the UC reflects a university system that upholds a
hierarchical structure, preferring faculty that churns out research
over quality education. While Chester suggests that lecturers are
upset because they would like to do more research, many of them
actually accomplish a lot outside of teaching.
As for the bitterness lecturers feel, Elkins responds that it
exists, but for another reason. “It’s a bitterness that
comes from being hired to teach and then treated as if you are not
a part of this institution.”
As George Leddy, a lecturer and last year’s UCLA
Distinguished Faculty award honoree, reflects, the unions’
position is weakened due to a large labor pool of fresh Ph.Ds eager
to teach at the UC. “I consider students here (as) colleagues
who are excited and challenging.” The university can refuse
to meet the lecturers’ demands without worry about the pool
running dry since so many lecturers would love to teach UC
students.
With such praise comes responsibility. Students are responsible
to show the university that we care about undergraduate education.
Since students are most directly affected by lecturers, we should
support their demands for better salaries and job security while
pushing the UC to implement standards for teaching. If lecturers
are short-changed, so are undergrads.
Students have a right to receive the quality education they were
promised, a right that is inextricably linked to demanding that the
university treat our teachers with appreciation and respect.