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Letting Lecturers Go to Expand the Tenure Track

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By Jennifer Jacobson

At the end of this academic year, the winner of a major teaching award last year at the University of California at Davis will lose his job.

Victor P. Squitieri, a lecturer in English who won the university's Academic Federation Excellence in Teaching Award, saw his contract go unrenewed thanks to an administrative plan to reduce the number of non-tenure-track lecturers in the English department and to hire more tenure-track faculty members instead. Graduate-student activists around the country have been clamoring for institutions to take that very step, but at Davis, it has backfired, angering some students and faculty members who say that experienced lecturers will be replaced by rookie faculty members.

The paradox of his receiving the award but being dismissed "is kind of humiliating," Mr. Squitieri says. "It makes me wonder about the value of my teaching, how the administration perceives the value of what we do for undergraduates."

Since the mid-1980s, unionized lecturers in the College of Letters and Sciences could reapply for their jobs annually and receive one-year contracts. Once they had taught for six years, they would be eligible for a comprehensive review; if they withstood the scrutiny, they could be awarded three-year contracts.

But in the spring of 2000, Elizabeth Langland, the new dean of the college's division of humanities and cultural studies, decided that she would be far more restrictive in offering three-year contracts to lecturers. By hiring fewer lecturers, she hopes to be able to use some of the money from those positions to hire more tenure-track faculty members in English, although that won't cover all of the bill since assistant professors cost more than lecturers. "It's important for the future of the academy that we promote and enhance the number of tenure-track positions," Ms. Langland says. "We all know there's been an erosion of them in past years."

When she first came to the college, the English department had 28 tenure-track faculty members, 24 lecturers working under three-year contracts, and six lecturers on one-year contracts. In the next eight years, Ms. Langland hopes to reduce the department's reliance on lecturers, and increase the number of tenure-track faculty members in the English department to 45. Another facet of her plan would create job opportunities for a pool of graduate students that Ms. Langland says Davis should be focusing most of its attention on anyway -- its own Ph.D.'s. To that end, she has created eight postdoctoral positions to hire Davis Ph.D.'s as instructors for two-year stints to help them "build their teaching and research portfolios" and thus be better prepared for the job market. She plans to establish three to five more postdoc slots next year.

While the dean's intentions may be to improve the job market for Ph.D.'s, critics say the end result will be to hurt those lecturers -- most of whom hold doctorates -- who will be pushed out of the department.

Ms. Langland first angered these critics in the spring of 2000, when she tried to find a way to move quickly on reducing the ranks of the 24 lecturers on three-year contracts. She renewed the contracts of eight of those lecturers -- some of whom had been at the college for more than 20 years -- so that by the third year they would not be allowed to teach a full course load and would not be eligible for health benefits. After the contract ended, the eight would be let go. When critics objected, the dean says she was persuaded to reconsider the move. All 24 now have full three-year contracts and full health benefits.

This spring, the dean is in hot water over her decision not to rehire two lecturers on one-year contracts -- Mr. Squitieri and Amy M. Clarke -- who were scheduled to come up for their six-year reviews in the fall of 2000 but never got the chance. By then the dean had decided to limit the granting of more three-year contracts. After negotiations between the faculty union and the administration, the university allowed the two to stay in the department one more year, enough time to look for work elsewhere. In January, Ms. Clarke, a finalist last year for the same teaching award that Mr. Squitieri won, left the university to become an assistant professor of English at Sierra College. Mr. Squitieri's last day will be June 30. But many on campus aren't letting him go without a fight.

More than 1,200 undergraduates have signed a petition this year to keep the "experienced" and "dedicated" lecturers from "being replaced not by experienced top professors but graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who will not provide the same experience, ability, or devotion to the UC Davis undergraduate." And 167 faculty members -- 31 of them lecturers and 92 either tenured or on the tenure track, such as Peter L. Hays, a professor of English -- have also signed a petition this year protesting what Mr. Hays says is the dean's "inhumane" decision.

It's been difficult for Mr. Hays to rally faculty members to the battle. Many professors, he says, seem to view the conflict as an English department issue, he says, even though the dean plans to reduce lecturer positions in the Italian and Russian departments as well. Besides Ms. Clarke and Mr. Squitieri, two other lecturers on one-year contracts -- one in Italian and another in Russian -- saw their contracts go unrenewed. In addition, a third lecturer in English, who had taught on the campus for six years, will not be rehired after her contract expires this year.

Despite the opposition to the plan, including editorials and articles in The California Aggie, the student newspaper at Davis, and threats of a strike by lecturers, Ms. Langland stands by her decision. Lecturer positions, she says, are by definition "temporary." At most institutions, lecturers turn over every two to three years, she says, adding, "The whole point of the lecturer position is to provide a university flexibility in meeting its instructional needs."

Even with the new postdoc positions and the increased tenure-track hires, Ms. Langland says that Davis will always need a certain number of full-time lecturers, although she doesn't know the exact number. "We have to let that balance evolve." But for now, she says, Davis relies far more heavily on lecturers than do its peer institutions.

Gary Sue Goodman, director of composition at Davis who has been a lecturer there for 17 years, finds the dean's argument "specious." At many universities, she says, the teaching assistants who teach composition aren't counted as faculty members of their departments. At Davis, lecturers teach composition and are counted as part of the department's faculty because they are professionals with full-time appointments. Lecturers at Davis, she says, teach seven courses a year compared with tenure-track faculty members, who teach four courses a year, hardly any of them in composition.

Part of the difficulty at Davis, Ms. Goodman says, stems from a longstanding problem in English departments nationally of how composition is taught. "It's its own discipline," she says, but at most universities, "it hasn't been given the faculty positions. It's just been taught by part-time lecturers" or teaching assistants. At Davis, the full-time lecturers are composition specialists who have taught graduate students how to teach the subject over the years, and have maintained continuity in the program. That's a positive thing, she says, but the dean "is just looking at the numbers" of tenure-track faculty members. "If we're out of balance," Ms. Goodman says, "we're out of balance in a good way."

Under the dean's plan, Ms. Goodman says, "we are trading a long-term person experienced in composition for a new grad student."

Ms. Langland disputes that notion: "I've never seen any evidence that lecturers are better teachers than graduate students or faculty. Our faculty are excellent teachers. Our graduate students are excellent teachers. When they become postdocs they've already been teaching for five or six years. They're very experienced teachers."

The situation has left faculty members in English in an awkward position. The department is being revitalized through the hiring of some new assistant professors, but faculty members are saddened by the prospect of losing some experienced lecturers, says Linda A. Morris, the chairwoman. "Everyone agrees it's unfortunate that in this transition there are good people who won't be able to have quasi-permanent positions they would have had 5 to 10 years ago," she says.

Outside the university, opinions about the conflict at Davis are just as mixed.

"As painful as this might sound, it's a step in the right direction," says Henry J. Morello, president of the graduate-student caucus of the Modern Language Association, and a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "We need more tenure-track positions in the humanities. We can't rely on lecturers, people who have to concern themselves with whether they're going to be hired back year to year. That's got to be a stressful existence."

Cary Nelson, a professor of English at Urbana-Champaign and a longtime activist on employment issues in English, says that Davis should take care of its long-term lecturers. "Even if you have a lecturer on a 15-second contract, after a certain number of decades of a 15-second contract, you have a responsibility to that person," he says. "You can't just say to a person, You're out of a job tomorrow. I do feel strongly that a university acquires a responsibility to provide continuing employment to a one-year appointee at some point in time. I don't know if it's 6 years or 10 years. It's something we need to think about a lot."

He recommends that an institution like Davis collapse its lectureships into tenure-track positions at the rate of normal attrition: That way, he says, "you're not assaulting the lecturers, you're just replacing them with tenure-track faculty at their own rate of attrition. Even with people who've been there 20 years, eventually there's going to be some attrition. They're not going to teach 100 years."

As an increasing number of students attend California institutions, Davis's need for instructors will increase, which means the university "probably should keep the lecturers, institute these postdocs, and hire more tenure-track faculty members," Mr. Nelson says. But doing so "might mean in the end paying less to an assistant professor of accounting and less to the football coach and less to the president's assistants."

Ms. Langland says that Mr. Nelson's remarks sound consistent with what her division is doing. "We agree with him," she says. "We have people who have been with us for six years or more, and we're saying, Yeah, we have an obligation. But we can't continue creating that obligation for new people." She continues: "Once people go past the six-year mark, we no longer have any flexibility at all. As dean I have a certain obligation to the future. We've got to have some flexibility for change."