Image of Caroline Luce, a history lecturer and member of the University Council-American Federation of Teachers. The growth of lecturers has outpaced the growth of tenure-track faculty at UC in 9 of the last 10 years, and the growth of part-time positions among these lecturers has also outpaced the growth of full-time positions over the same period. This is consistent with the historically volatile nature of state funding of higher education. representatives noted an increase in lecturer turnover after the onset of COVID.
An extensive secondary literature on the "privatization" of the American university has emerged over the past thirty years. Finally, the "gig academy" analogy highlights what the university workforce was like. Most of this expansion of the teaching workforce occurred on the newly institutionalized tenure.
There was initially an adjunct faculty model within these two-year institutions. Many of these were "adjuncts" in the truest sense of the word: often active practitioners in a particular field who supplemented their own. While the transformations in the composition of the academic workforce that have occurred at UC do fit into a larger national story of.
About the knowledge industry, Kerr wrote: “The university and parts of the industry are becoming increasingly similar. By 1980, the ratio of ladder faculty to non-ladder faculty at UC had fallen below 3 to 1 for the first time since the adoption of the Master Plan. Within five years, the CSUs' professors united under the umbrella of the California Faculty Association.
Such a significant expansion would siphon money from the state's higher education budget to support growing prison populations themselves. The share of the state's general fund that went to California's colleges and universities fell from about 17% in the late 1970s to 10% in 1994. overall budget provided by the state stood at 33% percent, compared to 67% in 1950 (Douglass & Bleemer 2018).
The government share funding these core operations of the university fell from 72% to 36% in the same period, while the tuition fee share grew from 16% to 35% (Budget for current operations 2020-21). The funding cuts of the early 2000s prompted Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to enter into an agreement, the "Higher Education Compact," with the UC and CSU to establish funding models for both systems in the coming years. Although the percentage of UC lecturers receiving health care through the university has decreased by 2% since the start of the COVID pandemic (Fregozo & Kever 2021), the 55% of UC lecturers who do so still surpass the 41% of lecturers nationally for whom this is the case (AFT 2020).
Likewise, the terms of employment of other segments of the UC workforce are in flux.
Policy Suggestions
To mitigate the two-tiered academic labor system, the Senate should work more directly with the unions representing the university's academic employees who work outside the service time system, and share data and resources. The rapid expansion of management positions at the UC relative to both student populations and teaching ranks represents an area of cost increase to which relatively few contribute. In order to both reduce university costs and ensure that spending contributes to the university's core functions, the university must establish benchmarks for its ratio of instructors to administrators.
The insecurity for educators at UC is inextricable from decades of disinvestment at the state level. State leaders should recommit to higher education, not just as a way to prepare students for good jobs in the future, but also with the recognition that education. Danforth (2021) has outlined some legal avenues for reform, but the structure of the law itself militates against this approach.
Proposition 15, which was narrowly defeated at the ballot box in 2020, would have reined in some of the worst excesses of the Prop 13 regime. As of Q3 2021, there is nearly $1.6 trillion in outstanding student loan debt in the United States, most of it on the feds' books. Steps must also be taken to reduce the cost of participation to prevent excessive debt burdens in the future.
As proposed in the College for All Act of 2021, expanded federal support for universities should be coupled with an early guarantee that 75% of courses are taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty. To understand these data, we turned to oral histories as well as primary and secondary literature on the UC. The University of California system is among the largest in the country and has had an outsized cultural impact on American university life.
Some of those historians who study the system are, moreover, involved in its governance through the UC Academic Senate. Reports produced by the Senate in the Schwarzenegger years, detailing possible future funding patterns and outcomes for UC, provide important precursors to our work with the Luskin Center—. Much of the wisdom concerning the history and possibilities of the university is of course held by those on whose labor the university depends.
Interviews and Works Cited
AAUP, 2020 https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/Dec- 2020_Data_Snapshot_Women_and_Faculty_of_Color.pdf. Monetary compensation for full-time faculty at US public regional universities: the impact of geography and the existence of. Negotiation of Faculty Compensation at Community Colleges." Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy, No.
The Current Context of Faculty Work in Higher Education: Understanding the Forces Affecting Higher Education and the Changing Faculty." Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century: Moving to a Mission-Oriented and Learner-Centered Model, edited by Adrianna J . How Austerity Politics Led to Tuition Fees at the University of California and the City University of New York." History of Education Quarterly, vol. Included at https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/reports/MC2Yudof_Campus%20st ratification_FINAL.pdf.
Board of Trustees and Alumni Institute for Effective Governance, 2021, https://www.goacta.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/The-Cost-of-Excess- FINAL-Full-Report.pdf. Reflections on the possibilities and limitations of collective bargaining.” Professors in the Gig Economy, edited by Kim Tolley, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018, pp.
