Golden State Solidarity

In the California Faculty Association, Contingent and Tenure-Track Faculty Stand Together.

By Mayra Besosa

—Séamus Ó. Tuama, Administration, v. 53, no. 3 (2005)

At the seventh conference of the Coalition for Contingent Academic Labor, which took place in August 2006 in Vancouver, Canada, Raúl Gatica, a member of the Mexican delegation, observed that Canadian and American professors “are looking more like Mexicans every day.” In the United States and Canada, as in Mexico, over 60 percent of the faculty in higher education are hired off the tenure track. The AAUP estimates the U.S. percentage at 65 percent, or around three-quarters of a million nationwide.

In Mexico non-tenure-track faculty members are known as maestros de trabajo precario; in Canada, they are called sessionals; and in the United States, they are known as adjunct, contingent, or temporary faculty. What they all have in common is the precarious nature of their work. The institutions that hire them do not offer contingent faculty the same long-term support extended to tenure-track faculty in terms of appointment and promotion, wages and benefits, allocation of time and resources for research and professional development, inclusion in shared-governance structures, and academic freedom protections.

Many observers of higher education have sharply criticized the application of corporate models of management to higher education. (See, for example, “Minding the Academy’s Business” in the November–December 2006 issue of Academe.) The best way to reverse the trend toward corporate-style management is to make issues concerning contingent faculty the center of the struggle. My union, the California Faculty Association (CFA), an affiliate of the AAUP, has done just that. In 1981, the California Public Employment Relations Board determined that all California State University faculty members share a “community of interests,” and it placed non-tenure-track faculty (lecturers) in the same bargaining unit as tenure-track faculty. This was a fortuitous decision for CSU part-time lecturers, whose appointments are contingent upon budgetary considerations and enrollment, and for full-time lecturers, who do not hold contingent appointments but who are also off the tenure track, because it established that the faculty union has a legal obligation to represent them.

Solidarity and Collective Action

As a public-sector union, CFA has the distinct advantage of having the influence to affect legislation. This influence permits the union to use political and legislative strategy effectively to confront problems. For example, by promoting the introduction of a California State Assembly bill in 2002, CFA helped to extend eligibility for health benefits to CSU part-timers teaching at least six units during a term. Furthermore, CFA is adept at implementing an “inside-outside” approach to organizing, to borrow a term from Chicago activist Joe Berry’s 2001 book, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower. The strategy builds solidarity by striving to unite “all who can be united in practice,” inside and outside of our institutions. For example, when California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called a special election for November 2005, CFA joined forces with the Alliance for a Better California, a coalition of nearly 2.5 million teachers, firefighters, nurses, police officers, and health-care workers, to campaign against proposed legislation that would have severely cut funding for state public services, including $4 billion for schools, and restricted the ability of public-sector unions to financially support political candidates and ballot measures. The campaign included buying television advertising, registering voters, distributing leaflets, submitting articles to newspapers, and organizing mailings, phone banks, and major demonstrations. California voters soundly defeated the initiatives at the polls.

Corporatization and Contingency

Since 1998, the corporatization of the CSU has had a face: that of Chancellor Charles Reed, who refers to himself as the system’s “chief executive officer.” Between 1995 and 1998, Reed was chancellor of Florida State University and a member of the state’s Business–Higher Education Partnership, whose board of directors consisted of twelve private-sector CEOs and twelve university and college presidents and chancellors. For the stated purpose of increased productivity and cost-efficiency, the partnership developed a plan to push Florida’s universities toward the corporate model of management through deregulation, privatization, and decentralization of decision making. (See “New Public Management” for details about the application of private-sector management models to the public sector.) The plan called for giving university presidents and deans “the chance to be entrepreneurial in managing their education businesses”; conferring on presidents the authority to increase funding for their own campuses by raising tuition, cutting expenses, creating additional revenues from research and development, and selling services; and increasing faculty workload and aggressively challenging tenure. The partnership welcomed the opening in 1997 of Florida Gulf Coast University, a new campus in the state system, where multiyear contracts would replace tenure.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Chancellor Reed should favor hiring contingent faculty over tenure-track faculty. According to CSU system-wide faculty employment data, the percentage of contingent faculty at CSU rose from 49.5 to 58 percent between 1998 and 2002, while the percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty dropped from 50.5 to 42 percent.

This development was a wake-up call for the CFA. Union leaders realized that they had to move the issue of contingent faculty to the center of CFA’s agenda. They thus began a campaign to persuade the union’s constituency of the need to organize contingent faculty. To gain the support of tenure-track faculty, the union drew on the language of academic citizenship, stressing the idea that faculty members must protect the conditions of fellow workers because their futures are tied together.

A Stable Faculty

Through its Statement on Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession, the AAUP establishes an ethical foundation and a strategy for the eventual elimination of contingent status in both the private and the public sectors. The statement explains how the inequities between contingent and tenure-track faculty undermine the academic profession by destabilizing the faculty and threatening academic freedom and due process. As a result, the faculty’s ability to serve the public good is diminished. The statement recommends ways institutions might move faculty  currently off the tenure track into part- or full-time tenurable positions “while minimizing the costs of change to current contingent faculty.” The statement notes that responsibility for converting positions should be placed under the authority of “duly constituted faculty bodies,” not administrators, and that contingent faculty should participate in the process. The CFA has applied the AAUP’s guidelines as principles in its own efforts on behalf of its contingent faculty members.

The CFA addresses the lack of status among contingent faculty in the academy through example. It unites lecturers and tenure-track faculty within its own leadership and governance structures at the statewide and campus levels. Today, lecturers actively participate in all of the union’s decision-making bodies: the statewide and campus executive boards; the Delegate Assembly, which adopts budgets, sets policy, and authorizes actions; and the CFA bargaining team, which conducts all collective bargaining negotiations with the CSU board of trustees.

The one organ directly responsible for and most successful at improving the working conditions of contingent faculty members is the Lecturers’ Council. It consists of the twenty-three lecturers who represent each of the twenty-three CSU campuses and is chaired by the CFA associate vice president for lecturers. The council’s activities are fully funded by the statewide union in conjunction with the campus chapters.

The Lecturers’ Council is, in practice, a quasi-autonomous body and, as such, must get much of the credit for its own success. It supports all top-down union efforts, but it also develops its own initiatives, builds its own alliances (such as that with COCAL), and defines its own functions—so effectively that it has become indispensable to the union and can mobilize the organization’s leadership on behalf of lecturer concerns.

As officers of their chapters, lecturer representatives are elected by their campus CFA colleagues and act as campus delegates at the biannual Delegate Assembly meetings. As voting delegates, they represent both lecturers and tenure-track faculty, as do the other three representatives of each campus: the chapter president, the affirmative action representative, and the at-large representative. The Lecturers’ Council also meets separately each fall and spring and participates in monthly conference calls. The statewide officers of the union take part in these meetings and calls, through which the participants exchange important information; recommend policy to the board of directors and bargaining team; discuss lecturer concerns regarding, for example, evaluation processes, unemployment compensation, and health benefits; and plan events such as Fair Employment Week (also known as Campus Equity Week).

Lecturer representatives forward important information to their campus constituencies, distribute the lecturers’ handbook, report contract violations, help plan events, contribute to their chapter newsletter, and exchange information with student organizations. Some lecturer representatives are members or even chairs of the CFA faculty rights committees on their campuses, which deal with contract enforcement through the grievance process. Because of the range of practices on the twenty-three CSU campuses, the council, thanks to the initiative of individual lecturers, has established subcommittees on lecturer evaluations and lecturer participation in shared governance. These subcommittees collect, share, and compare data and recommend practices for the lecturer representatives to bring to their campuses for consideration.

The Academic Senates

The CSU Academic Senate and some campus senates have supported CFA’s advocacy on behalf of lecturers. However, as the table above demonstrates, eight of the twenty-three campus academic senates still lack dedicated lecturer seats.

Among the senates, there are additional variations. At Cal State San Marcos, for example, full-time lecturers who have a one-year appointment are considered “eligible faculty” and can run and vote for senate positions with tenure-track faculty. Part-time lecturers cannot. In 2003, encouraged by the work of the Subcommittee on Lecturer Evaluations and with the support of the campus chapter executive board, the San Marcos Lecturers’ Council successfully proposed an amendment to the senate constitution and bylaws that allowed for a dedicated lecturer seat in the Faculty Affairs Committee, which deals with policy on the evaluation of lecturers among other matters. In 2005, the system-wide CSU Academic Senate passed the Resolution on Service of Lecturer Faculty in Academic Senates to encourage the development of common best practices throughout the system.

By incorporating lecturers into the full range of union activities and providing compensation in the form of stipends and release time, the CFA is providing a model for campuses, especially its allies in the academic senates, based on the best practices recommended by the AAUP.

Contract Bargaining

The issue of lecturer appointments is one of the most contentious items in the CFA/CSU collective bargaining agreement. While the CFA negotiates for improvements, the CSU tends to bargain for take-backs to give the administration greater corporate-style discretion. The CFA bargaining team includes the union’s president, vice-president, general manager, and chief negotiator, a vice president for lecturers, and three lecturers and six tenure-track faculty members appointed by the president.

Our most recent contract, ratified in 2002, significantly improved lecturer job security. It introduced three-year appointments and provisions that recognize seniority in the appointment of lecturers. Specifically, after six consecutive years in one department, lecturers are eligible for three-year contracts, and when there is “new or additional work” for lecturers in a department, the work will be offered to qualified part-time lecturers according to a specified order of seniority. Ideally, this practice would elevate part-time lecturers to full time, though still non-tenure-track, status. The CFA hopes to strengthen reappointment rights in its next contract.

Some faculty members and administrators have criticized our current collective bargaining agreement as a “lecturer contract,” calling three-year appointments “pseudo tenure” because seniority provisions cut into corporate-style discretion in hiring and assigning work. However, the CFA remains a long way from eliminating contingency and the inequities it brings. The current contract states that “an appointment for a less than full-time temporary employee may be on a conditional basis,” and the administration will not readily agree to eliminate that language. Over the years, the CSU has applied this provision as the rule rather than the exception.

Eliminating or restricting the ability of the university to offer a contingent appointment to a faculty member who has been employed for a reasonable period would encourage academic senates to push for conversion of non-tenure-track positions into tenurable appointments. Lecturers with six consecutive years of service in a department could move into non-contingent three-year appointments and afterward be considered for transition into tenure-track positions.

Inside-Outside Organizing

In Reclaiming the Ivory Tower, Berry points out the following strategies of inside-outside organizing:

• Understand the power structure of your own institution. 
• Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your opponent and of your own group.
• Educate colleagues on the nature of the problem.
• Develop a network of colleagues inside and outside the institution, including groups such as the Coalition for Contingent Academic Labor, and link up with organizations from the larger labor movement.
• Build these alliances under the most representative and democratic structures possible to ensure the unity required for bringing about change.
• Apply consistent pressure on the administration, gradually raising the stakes.
  
  I urge contingent faculty also to consider the following recommendations:
   
• On campus, claim your right to inclusion in the full range of faculty responsibilities.
• Participate in university life in whatever way you can, even if you have to start out with what Berry calls “a committee of two.”
• Form a system-wide or campus-based contingent faculty council and develop a contingent faculty handbook.
• Make the AAUP Statement on Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession your “bill of rights” and work toward the ultimate goal.

In organizing, seek the support of the AAUP (www.aaup.org).

Ideally, establish or join a union that represents all faculty. When necessary, remind leaders of their duty to fairly represent and effectively advocate for you. Better yet, become part of the union leadership.

As tenure-track faculty members become a smaller percentage of the professoriate, contingent faculty will increasingly have to carry the torch in the struggle to save higher education. It is imperative that contingent and tenure-track faculty maintain a united front to ensure that contingent faculty members are treated fairly. Together, we can challenge the notion that anyone should have to sacrifice human dignity and respect to the needs of cost-efficiency.

Mayra Besosa is a full-time lecturer in Spanish and a California Faculty Association (CFA) lecturer representative at California State University–San Marcos. She is also a member of the CFA’s 2005–07 bargaining team and of the AAUP’s Committee on Contingent Appointments. She dedicates this article to CFA regional staff representative John Hess for his important contribution to the CFA Lecturers’ Council. Besosa’s e-mail address is mbesosa@csusm.edu.

Comment on this article .

 Printer-Friendly Page