College Lecturers Long for the Respect, Rewards of Tenure

Educational psychologist Jessica Revill loves teaching at Cal State Los Angeles, inspired by the chance to help struggling students, often the first in their families to attend college.

But the California State University system, she says, doesn’t love her back.

Revill was rehired to teach three courses this fall quarter. But on the basis of her experience over the last two years, she doubts she’ll get her own computer or even a listing in the online campus phone directory. As for faculty meetings, forget it--she’s never been invited.

Revill belongs to the growing, and increasingly testy, tier of perkless PhDs and other teachers known as lecturers. They are the teaching workhorses of the university world who often don’t receive the pay, benefits, security or prestige of tenured or tenure-track faculty.

In California, their long-held grievances have broken into the open.

Unionized lecturers staged a one-day strike last month at UC Berkeley, and two-day walkouts are planned for Riverside, San Diego, Santa Cruz, Davis and possibly other UC campuses on Oct. 14 and 15.

Meanwhile, the 23-campus California State University system released a plan this month to reverse a lecturer-hiring binge and instead bring more faculty members into the tenure pipeline. The plan, initiated by the California Faculty Assn., reflects the rising clout of lecturers in the union, which represents both tenure-track and non-tenure-track teachers.

Higher-education experts say the lecturers’ struggle for greater status has major implications, because lecturers often teach students’ introductory courses--the students’ first taste of college and unfamiliar fields of knowledge.

If teaching jobs increasingly are treated by colleges as temporary employment, “we really run the risk of creating a pipeline problem that discourages people from entering the profession,” said Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of Cornell University’s Higher Education Research Institute.

Full-time, non-tenure-track faculty--almost non-existent 30 years ago--accounted for 54.1% of new full-time hires at two- and four-year schools in 1999, according to research by Jack Schuster, a professor of education and public policy at Claremont Graduate University.

These types of appointments are everywhere, “at public and private and all types of institutions,” Schuster said. “The high-end, high-quality institutions are by no means immune.”

Flexibility and Diversity

College administrators say lecturers give them flexibility and bring diverse backgrounds and teaching skills that enrich academia.

“The teaching provided by lecturers is very high quality,” said Jackie R. McClain, a CSU vice chancellor for human resources, and they give campuses the ability to add extra class sections “at the last minute when we have enrollment surges.”

Both universities and tenured faculty also like lecturers because they free up professors to do research--bringing money and prestige to the individuals and the institutions.

And lecturers cost less. At the University of California, for example, tenured or tenure-track professors last year made an average of $93,754, versus $45,519 for lecturers, including some who have taught for more than 20 years.

To be sure, tenure-track professors often have vastly different qualifications. Top researchers with degrees from elite universities find it far easier to land tenure-track jobs than do teaching-oriented PhDs from less-acclaimed institutions.

“There’s a very limited market for great teachers, but there is a national market for great researchers,” Ehrenberg said.

Some lecturers aren’t looking for tenure or even full-time employment. They do the work for a little extra income, the love of teaching or to gain experience.

The more fortunate win titles such as “senior lecturer” and receive better benefits and longer-term contracts, though nothing like the career-long security of a tenured position.

Whether they are interested in tenure or not, they often see themselves as the educational underclass.

“The academic life is as carefully ranked as military life,” said essayist Joseph Epstein, who for 23 years was editor of the American Scholar, a quarterly journal published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. “The lecturer is comparable in some ways to the warrant officer. He’s a little bit out of the chain of command.”

Epstein, himself a part-time lecturer at Northwestern University since 1973 and author of the recently published book “Snobbery: The American Version,” said he never has pursued a tenured job. “I’ve had a base salary, benefits, and I could get a lot of writing done,” he said.

But he couldn’t help noticing lecturers’ second-tier status, especially the way they are saddled with introductory and low-level courses that some professors disdain.

“I don’t know of anyone saying, ‘This table is for full professors only,’ ” Epstein said, but tenured professors nonetheless sometimes regard lecturers with “mild contempt.”

“The more ‘academic’ a person is, the more quietly disdainful that person is likely to be about lecturers who are not at the top of this greasy pole.”

Revill, 39, as a part-time lecturer, is near the bottom of the pole, despite her PhD from UCLA. Etched in her memory is a comment from a tenured professor who absent-mindedly told her that, if academics don’t have full-time jobs within a couple of years of finishing graduate school, “you know they’re just no good.”

“You kind of have to take those comments on the chin,” Revill said.

‘Kiss of Death’

The longer a lecturer remains in a non-tenure-track job, the harder it can be to move up. If you want tenure, “it’s the kiss of death if you’re a lecturer, and it’s worse the longer you stay,” said Robert A. Hennig, a full-time lecturer beginning his sixth year teaching at UCLA.

Hennig said his colleagues in the political science department treat him cordially, and recognize that no one else on campus shares his specialty on the American judicial system.

Still, he said, he often feels isolated from the campus’ intellectual life. If he wants to attend professional conferences, he pays his own way, unlike tenured professors and even graduate students, who sometimes get travel money from the university.

“I’m a hired employee, not really a colleague,” Hennig said.

This after years of training. Hennig has PhDs in both jurisprudence and social policy and a law degree from UC Berkeley’s prestigious Boalt Hall.

To supplement his salary of $48,000 a year from UCLA, Hennig has tended bar to help pay off his college loans.

Now, after five years of giving lectures to 1,000 or more students a year, he is tired and unsure he even wants to wage the battle for tenure. He’s thinking about leaving academia.

The lecturers’ plight is evident even at Ivy League universities such as Cornell.

“In a research university, all of the status goes to the tenure-track faculty, and everybody else are peons,” said Rita Calvo, who holds a PhD in microbiology from Cornell and has taught as a part-time lecturer at the Ithaca, N.Y., university for 25 years.

“When you do a good job ... and the university gives lip service to teaching undergraduates, it’s a little insulting to be treated like a peon when you get to my age.”

The winner of a national teaching award and another from Cornell, the 60-year-old Calvo said she “fell into teaching, because it worked with my kids’ schedule, and I found that I really liked it and that I’m good at it ... [but] I would have never gotten a tenure-track job at Cornell because research isn’t my particular thing.”

Insecurity is part of the package, even for Calvo, who had enjoyed a series of five-year contracts.

She was told last year that she would not get another five-year deal and that, after next year, she would no longer have a teaching position. Though initially stung by the decision, she now accepts it philosophically.

In private industry, “almost nobody has job security,” she said. “It’s only an issue [on campus] because tenured faculty have job security, no matter how good or bad a job they do after they’ve gotten tenure. A lecturer, no matter how good a job she does, may or may not continue to be retained.”

The underlying grievances in an ongoing labor dispute within the UC system are this lack of job security and, to a lesser extent, pay. Lecturers have been working without a new union contract for more than two years and negotiations have bogged down.

UC lecturers typically work on one-year or one-term contracts until they have six years of experience. If they pass the six-year mark, they are entitled to three-year contracts, but the union complains that many lecturers are let go just before reaching that threshold.

Lecturers with CSU campuses have had similar complaints, but a contract approved this spring boosted the chances of moving into jobs with three-year contracts.

CSU also has pledged to seek state funding to boost the ratio of tenure-track faculty. The plan unveiled this month would, over eight years, boost the share of teaching jobs filled by tenure-track faculty to 75%, up from 63.8% last year.

Experts such as Schuster are worried that, along with deterring the most talented candidates from going into academia, the increased reliance on lecturers also inhibits academic freedom. They question whether lecturers hired on a contract basis are as likely to speak freely about sensitive social issues.

Although many students don’t recognize the difference between tenured professors and lecturers, some say the disparity affects their college experience.

John C. Williams, a 32-year-old psychology student at Cal State Los Angeles, said he appreciates lecturers because “sometimes they’re a little more enthusiastic, less dogmatic.” But Williams said it often is difficult to develop strong relationships with non-tenured lecturers because they spend less time on campus.

“Tenure-track professors seem to be around all of the time, whereas it’s kind of hard to get a hold of non-tenured people,” he said. “They seem to shuffle around.”