The following is a transcript of the remarks delivered by UC-AFT Local 1966 field rep Sandra Baringer at the UCR teach-in.

UCR Teach-in Nov. 16, 2009
Statement of Sandra Baringer, Ph.D.
Lecturer, University Writing Program

What I’m going to try to do today is explain why the budget cuts are unfairly impacting the undergraduate curriculum and particularly the lower division courses.

About half of the undergraduate courses are taught by lecturers or graduate students. Most of that is in the lower division. Virtually all of the general education requirements in math, writing, and foreign languages are taught by lecturers and grad students.

Many of you are not familiar with the difference between a professor and a lecturer. Professors, also called tenure-track faculty, ladder faculty, or Senate faculty, have both teaching duties and research duties, and the right to participate in shared governance through the Senate. They are usually hired for a 6-year probationary period and if they pass their reviews, then they get tenure. Lecturers, on the other hand, are hired by the quarter or by the year, with some form of job security after 6 years. Roughly half of them are part-time.

A full-time teaching load for a professor is usually 5 courses. A full-time teaching load for a lecturer is 8 or 9 courses. Average salary for lecturers in the UC system is $56,000, and the average for professors is $106,000. Thus it doesn’t take much math to see that lecturers are an extremely cost-effective way for the university to deliver high quality teaching of lower division courses, and that the cost per course is much less when taught by a lecturer than when taught by a professor.

But lecturers are what is known in higher education as contingent faculty: they have little to no job security their first 6 years, and even after that, they are subject to layoff. I don’t have time to talk about the astronomical rise in the use of contingent faculty over the past 30 years, but nationwide studies indicate that from 50 to70% of undergraduate instruction is now provided by contingent faculty, in other words, those who do not have tenure and are not on the tenure track.

This makes it very easy to get rid of lecturers to deal with short-term cash flow problems. The use of contingent labor is a common business model that is supposed to be used for fluctuating needs, but in the case of higher education, that is not how it’s used. Is the need for teaching required general education courses fluctuating? No. Freshman math, writing, and foreign language courses will always need to be taught. But lecturers are easy to fire, and so the courses they are teaching are the first courses to get cut.

And the students in those courses are the students with the least power: most of them are freshman and sophomores who are just learning their way around the campus. They do not even realize that the budget cuts are being taken out on them through reduced class access, because they don’t have past years to compare to.

While professors at UCR have been subjected to 7% salary reductions through furloughs on non-teaching days, lecturers have simply not been rehired. In fall of 2008, there were approximately 162 FTE lecturers at UCR. In fall of 2009, that fell to 131.5. That’s an astronomical drop: a 20% drop in FTEs and a minimum of 300 cancelled courses for this academic year (headcount: 232 dropped to 190). And there are more layoffs and course load reductions coming in winter and spring 2010, and still more the following year. As of winter 2011 the University Writing Program, which last fall employed 56.5 FTE lecturers, will be expected to deliver writing instruction with 23 FTE lecturers. That isn’t a 10% cut, or a 20% cut – it’s cutting the teaching force by more than half.

And the expectation that students can go to summer school or community colleges to get the writing instruction they won’t be getting next quarter with English 4 and 5 disappeared off the class schedule is enormously irresponsible: thousands of courses have been cancelled in the community colleges this year and they cannot meet the needs of their own students. As for summer school, that costs money; it is not generally part of students’ financial aid packages.

The basic concept of the Chancellor’s response to the budget cuts is to impose a 10% across the board cut on all campus units, with an additional 10% next academic year, and an additional 10% for the following year, for a total of 30%.

But as I’ve shown, the actual impact you get when you cut the most cost-efficient form of instructional staffing is a disproportionate loss of the teaching of lower division courses. This is a flawed model of budgetary planning, and somebody needs to think it through a little more carefully.


Source for salary averages: ucpay.globl.org, using data obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle with public record requests
Source for FTEs: weekly payroll data provided by UCOP to UC-AFT