[lively music] at many universities, you are more likely to be taught by a part-time professor than one who is there for the long haul. these 'adjunct' professors are often struggling with hectic schedules and low wages. the life of a part-time professor on this edition of equal time. [intro music] welcome to the campus of san jose state university in this edition of equal time. i'm your host, journalism school director bob rucker.

more than half of the faculty in the california state university system are lecturers - faculty with full or part-time temporary positions. on this edition of equal time, correspondent jennifer gonzalez discusses the challenges that adjunct professors face. year after year, cal state institutions undergo drastic budget cuts and are expected to meet the needs of students, faculty, and administration. in a search to cut costs, institutions like san jose state hire a greater amount of adjunct professors. despite the advantages of part-time lecturers, adjuncts across campuses say they are faced with discrimination and exploitation. they are given low wages, little to no benefits, and a lack of job security. associate english professor andrew fleck says adjunct situations affect not only the individual, but they place a strain on a students' education. many students may not realize that the professor

that they have is, you know, teaching two classes here and three classes at another campus, and two classes some place else in order to try to make ends meet, and how difficult that situation is for them. the faculty to adjunct ratio used to be 75% full-time to 25% adjunct. today, adjuncts account for more than half the professors. nationally that has been a real trend. there is a real tendency to make use of adjuncts to do the teaching. although this affects professors campus-wide, adjuncts at smaller departments, like geography, have an easier time. i've been very lucky. i am very lucky. were in a small department and, because we're in a smaller department, i think the reliance on lecturers is important, and we teach a lot of, particularly the introductory, classes that meets the san jose studies requirements - and so they get large numbers, big interest,

and the full-time faculty are just not able to meet the needs of the higher-level undergraduate courses and teach those incoming student classes. [professor lecturing] but for professors like gloria collins, from the english department, simply teaching a couple of general education classes is not enough. the university relies a lot on what they call part-time work because they come in at a lower pay scale most of the time, uh... and th-they have to work their way up the ladder. in hopes of raising awareness, for the first time this year, campuses across the nation joined together in the national adjunct walkout day. although most universities held strikes, sjsu professors and california faculty association members were held back from the opportunity. well, here at san jose state we're having more of an awareness day because right now the faculty at san jose state-we've already negotiated our contract,

at least for one year. and so we're not, we're bound by law to not strike or have a walkout. so we can't do that. it's illegal to do that. despite the university's restrain, professors handed out stickers and discussed the issue in class, leaving many students stunned by the issue. while the situation may not be getting better there is still hope of improvement among the community of lecturers at san jose state. we'll show you how professors are raising awareness of their plight. now, when we come back, more on the plight of the adjunct professor. [music] as the number of tenured professors has fallen,

universities and colleges are hiring more contract-based professors because it's more cost efficient. jennifer gonzalez continues our coverage. the life of an adjunct professor can be difficult. universities strapped for money often squeeze their part-timers

to the breaking point. a possible solution? prioritizing and properly allocating money to what directly impacts students. increasingly here, at san jose state, more money is going to athletics and administration instead of hiring more professors. to try and raise awareness, many adjunct professors joined the california faculty association. through this organization, members try to improve their own working conditions, as well as add more tenure-line faculty. cfa has been pushing as long as it's been around to increase the tenure line from the low levels that it's sunk to, and will continue to do so. so other than-but this requires a commitment on the part of the state to adequately fund the csu. and we're currently about a billion dollars underfunded from where we should have been. we're actually educating more students with less money in 2015 than we were in 2007. anthropology professor and cfa board of directors member jonathan karpf says there is a

responsibility from the state, the people of california, and the csu to help fund higher education. he says the money could bring back public education to the high stature that it once had. spending money on professor hiring instead of the high-tech phone system that was integrated into the university the past couple of years. that was a huge amount of money that could have gone to faculty salaries, the campus equity raises that were bargained in the last contract. it could have gone to hiring more faculty. those adjuncts left behind teach as best they can, although their professional future is a bit uncertain. low wages. low morale. those are just some of the problems our panel of professors will discuss, along with jennifer gonzalez. now that's coming up next. [music] welcome back to this edition of equal time,

[music] welcome back to this edition of equal time, in the school of journalism and mass communications at san jose state. and mass communications at san jose state.

our focus today is underpaid and overworked adjuncts or part-time faculty, in the csu system. let's meet our guests. hi, i am kevin moore. i work in the linguistics department. i've been a lecturer here for fourteen and a half years. hi, my name is elena dorabji and i was a lecturer in political science since 1990 and i have just recently retired

from the political science department. hi, my name is jonathan karpf and i've been a lecturer in the department of anthropology at san jose state for 25 years. i'm also, because we're unionized faculty, i am the elected lecturer representative for san jose state university. hi, i am gloria collins. i am a lecturer in the english department. i have been a lecturer here for 35 years and i have also taught at local community colleges, san jose city college, evergreen valley college and for many years, west valley college. hi. my name is jennifer gonzalez and i am the correspondent for the show. i want to thank all of you for being here today and i think it would help the audience if we started by explaining the differences in terms. in the academic world we have professors who are tenured, we have professors who are part-time or adjunct. so jonathan, i know you are good at helping me explain that. just explain to the audience the differences.

well if you go back 40 years, the majority of the faculty in the cal state university system like most universities, were full-time tenured faculty. and tenure provides job security, provides due process rights, provides academic freedom. and then because of a series of economic decisions underfunding, especially public universities over the last 50 years, there's been a decline in tenure line positions and an increase in the number of faculty of the tenure line, known by different terms at different institutions: adjuncts, in the csu, lecturers, who lack structural job security and often times they are much lower paid and have different working conditions then the tenured faculty. right. good. and many of these, adjuncts or lecturers come from our professions. they bring us the latest and newest thinking and approaches and styles. so how would you describe more of the value of lecturers from our community coming to teach? well we're all valuable.

you know, all of us who teacher, i think we're all valuable in the same way. you know, coming from my discipline which is linguistics, we could have some one fresh from graduate school who is really in touch with the field and then someone who's been teaching here for forty years who is in touch with the field in the same way. so we are all, you know, we're all basically the same and the issue that's most important to me here is this artificial division between the lecturers on the one hand and the people on the tenure line on the other hand. alright. very good. english department is your home base though? yes. and how long have you seen this notions of adjuncts or part times faculty not being fully appreciated in the system. [laughter] that's a nice way of putting it. thank you, bob. [laughter] i have to say in my own english department i've been very well treated over the years but we do teach a lot of general education classes, a lot of lower division classes,

and i've seen over the years, actually, that deterioration of the full time... tenure... the tenure line positions and sixty lecturers was twenty tenured professors. that can be a problem, in terms of having a university with phds in tenured faculty. but the lecturer certainly take up a very heavy load in the english department because we teach composition classes, we teach a lot of lower division general education classes, a very work intensive courses. very good. and elena, you taught at variety of schools here in the bay area. i did, yeah. can you tell me from your perspective, the impact of lecturers on campus. well, because i was a single mother starting out teaching at the age of 40, i had to have more than just the three or four classes that i can get at any one university, and so i started off at santa clara university teaching two sections. then i got another one or two sections at de anza and then i got another two sections at san jose state

when one of their faculty suddenly died and i literally have been doing six classes at three universities, i did that for about 14 years. and i mean thank god i lived in cupertino which was central so that i could leave a class at san jose state at 12:45 and teach a 1:30 class at santa clara university. hoping the traffic will be good. well in those days the traffic was better. and we could park right in front and it was all a little more congenial. but it..i mean it was because i'm of germanic background and super organized that i was able to do this. but i mean, can you imagine when i tell tenured faculty about this, they cannot fathom, you know, that i had a) six classes and then at the end of my career, i was teaching 500 students per semester. do you teach 500 students per semester? no, and that's extremely... that's very confine... that's exactly the point. and we are ask to do this with good graces, scale, not hoining,

not being prima donna's, you know, not demanding any compensations. and then let me say one more thing before i, i stop is, we don't get a lot of support in terms of you know, extra money to do preparation for new classes, to you know, go ahead and maybe get a sabbatical and sort of go back and really improve on our pedagogy. we need to do this on the fly. and i'm just, you know, really grateful that so many lecturers are able to do such super...superhuman... you know capabil...i mean that... that superhu...superhuman capability. absolutely. and jennifer, as the correspondent on the story, you as a student at san jose state, get the benefit of working with full-time faculty as well as adjunct faculty. how do you see this story? you wanted to do this story. i just feel that it's important for students to know who's teaching the class because i know that a lot of lecturers-- they don't have offices or they have a difficult time like meeting with their students

because they are teaching a class and then they have to go to santa clara university or they have to go san jose city. so it's difficult for them and it becomes difficult for the students and i don't think the students understand how important it is to know who their professors are and, "where is your money going to?" as well. like you are paying so much money in tuition, why isn't it going to your professors, that's what matters. absolutely. but it is important to distinguish between the individuals doing the teaching and their working conditions, right? the problem is not adjuncts not being effective teachers. the problem is..is too many adjuncts don't have the working conditions that are conducive to provide quality education. what do you mean? well i mean for example, the issues facing adjuncts across the nation, and one reason why seiu adjunct action has been so successful in unionizing adjuncts at non-unionized colleges and universities, is because with the..the churning of adjunct faculty and with inadequate compensation, it's hard to provide the quality education. i mean, before we were able to bargain some modicum of job security for lecturers in the csu, only because we're unionized.

when i was first hired back in the late 80s, as soon as somebody got a few couple of raises, got more expensive, they'd be let go. they hire a new lecturer, fresh out of grad school. when they got a couple of raises, they got a little more expensive, they'd be let go. that's called churning of lecturers. how does that serve the mission of the university? how does it serve the students if, you know, they wanna come back 3 years latter for a letter of recommendation and that person is gone? or, as jennifer cited, i mean i've been fortunate to have an office for as long as i've been here but..but not all lecturers even here have offices. how are lecturers supposed to meet with students and students meet with their faculty if they're not provided the basic necessities of-of-of being an... you know, an effective teacher. an office, a desk, a phone , a computer, a place to meet with students, because so much learning happens outside of the classroom. because space is limited on the campus like san jose state, administration would say, "well, we're doing the best we can, we've never been able to say we guarantee a part-time faculty or adjunct faculty a separate office or a separate location," and yet we understand as faculty full-time as well as part-time,

if you don't have a private space to be able to sit down and talk with students about the concerns and issues of your class or their academics or their graduation planning, you miss the opportunity of connecting with them in the way they need to be connected with. would you agree? oh yeah. that's absolutely right and this..the same issue also has to do with the..the ability of the university instructor to be active in their profession. so, you know, not only do we sit down and talk to students but we share our research with them and it's a good thing if you have, you know, the instructor is also a prominent researcher in their field. and in order to do that in a university setting you need funding for travel and things like that. so, for example, in 2012, i want to a conference in poland where i was recognized among others scholars in my field and you know, did things, inspired other researchers

in their research and got inspired and found out about the different research so i could come back to the university and you know, share that with my students as a person who is prominent in their field. but all of this without any university support. so you know, i'm a person who is willing to sacrifice for that kind of thing but i shouldn't have to you know. i should have the support of the university as i do that kind of thing. and we are denied that extra support. so even though we're on the same salary scale, we tend to be hired lower on that same salary scale as a 10-year line faculty but we are only paid 80% of that salary scale because we are only hired to teach. and so we are not hired to do the other 20%... the research, the meeting... the research, the committee meetings, the shared governance. that all we either do gratis, and there is lot of pressure on us to do that gratis and in fact, for many years, the poor faculty who actually evaluated us, judged us, on our professional evaluation, based on our professional work

that we did outside of teaching. so we were kind of, you know, have a double whammy of not getting the money for it, not getting the institutional support and then being judged basis on, "so why didn't you go to conference x, y or z? why haven't you published? why haven't you done this other research?" thank god, cfar union has put that into our contract to at least make that somewhat more equitable. that's a very important point because... tenure-line faculty are given the faculty development funds, the travel funds, to remain current in their fields. many tenure-line faculty, if they are teaching a new preparation in the next semester, are given a course off the previous semester to prepare. lecturers are oftentimes initially hired a few days before the first semester begins. they come in, they're not integrated into the fabric of the university and they are expected to just you know, hit the ground running and its not uncommon for lecturers to be given a completely new class they have never taught before.

you know, with... with... with inadequate time to prepare and then expected to perform well and then when you add the fact that the evaluations uhm... for student evaluations... we have peer-evaluation, we have student opinion surveys. right. right and student opinion surveys tend to be privileged over the other ones. you know, this kind of customer driven notion of evaluation... what the students think have great deal of weight. yeah, and when you have faculty who lack social job security, you're gonna have lecturers who may be relaxed standards sometimes. not all of us do. i mean the ones here don't. but a lot of lecturers who are beholden to the students for their continued employment, it's going to affect the quality of the education they provide. oh, absolutely. we have a situation here in the school of journalism as you probably know. a person is coming from silicon valley, to teach about the new business to business communications and social media. and that's the hot new thing. and you really want that and you want to build on that and you wanna go forward with that. the challenge i have that students don't know,

so i am about the tell you, is that, i don't know always if i am gonna have the budget line to keep him. he is a popular teacher, he is doing a great service and a wonderful opportunity for our students to open up the future. but we may lose them because of all of this financial concerns. do students know about that? see, i didn't know about that but that disappoints me because like i come to the school expecting to get the best education that i possibly can and if the best professors are there and i enjoy them and the possibility of them not being here because of a budget thing, kind of disappoints me because i work hard to pay my tuition, i work hard to come to school and to know that that could happen that's pretty disappointing as a student. that happens all across campus. i would imagine in the english department you have issues where you really want to see your program move forward in a certain way but you hear that constant, "well we can't do that right now, we can't afford to bring in, we have to cut back." well we have cut backs on some course offerings that students need and we have the writing skills test here and we have a..a prep class, a class that if they're having trouble with the test, we have an alternative: you can take a class, 100a. and sometimes we cannot offer as many sections as we would

like to for those students. so in that case we can't meet demand for that. in fairness to the administration, i will at least say that they would say to me as a director or as the chair of a department, "do the best you can because we have limited resources. we don't get the support from the state that what we used to." but bob, all that is true but let's... let's face it, okay. it's about priorities, right. i mean when..when there are administrators that want to be hired in and have been given competitive market salaries there's no problem finding funds. when there is a new student union, when there is new health building, when there is other priorities, the proliferation of mpp's, administrators, the money is found, right. if the core mission of the university was really a priority to the university, they would adequately..there's..there.. both things are true. there's been a reduction in the state funding of public education, going on for a long time. but that said, there's also money in the csu, which..which if re-prioritized, would allow you to hire the people

that can provide the education you want to provide your students and provide them a..a salary with which allows them to live in a high cost living area like the bay area. i think that's a key factor...that's a very key factor whether its full time or part time faculty, living here in bay area... oh... oh this applies to full professors as much as it applies to lecturers. absolutely. this is not specific to lecturers. lecturers just happened to be worse off because they're much lower in the salary. can i be provocative for a minute? oh, absolutely. so, i teach political science, so maybe i am little more aware of this. but i think the university is doing exactly what the elite who run this country and maybe the entire globe, want from university students. they want technically skilled students who are not particularly critical thinkers, who don't have a lot of outside information about their..the environment in which they live or the world in which they live... or society in general... or society in general. and so when you have a churning faculty who is not primarily designed to teach critical thinking, is not,

you know, teach..even teach intellectual development, but only job skills and you teach, and your students believe, i don't know if you believe this, that the reason to go to universities is to get a good job making lots of money. i mean, i'm a political scientist. we believe the university is there for you to become intellectually sophisticated and enabled citizens, to be able to co-govern. oh yeah, i fully agree with that. and that's not really what a part-time faculty is able to provide. they can't do the pushback even with shared governance. yeah. i definitely understand that because i have taken a couple classes with a lot of lectures and some of them don't have the resources to, you know, give me that extra push. a lot of them didn't even have an office. i would have to meet them at the pomegranate cafe, to talk to them about like a test or needed help with an essay and it doesn't really provide that school environment. it makes me feel like i am paying for an education that i'm not really being given to. and i don't...i don't... education is being given to you as to what the powers that be

that actually control the funds want from you. to be a nice little technically competent worker bee that just basically does, you know, what the industrial machine needs from you. that's not what i came here. i came here to be more...like, i wanted to engage my mind. i want to be more understanding of the world. i don't want to be, you know, so close-minded. i think it is the question of an educated person who exits the university and is not just a person who is training in a particular field like you can be an accountant or a nurse but that you have that general education which i see attacks upon general education in the..in the push to get so many units and get the students out of here..get him out of here like it's a bus station, you know. but there is that educated student that you want to have a well-rounded education and not just be, like you say, a worker bee in a particular field. and in the short time remaining, i know a lot of these adjuncts we hire, come in with a great deal of passion and energy and new drives and excites the classroom,

excites the mind is our model of journalism. but if you lose that or if you can't keep them because they simply can't afford to continue being a lecturer, what's going to happen? what would be the future of programs in csu? well that's right. i mean, one thing we've always said in cfa is faculty working conditions are student learning conditions. you can't have over half faculty by head count, given inadequate, you know, not a living wage for many of them, many of us, not all, but many lecturers are not given living wage. not given instructor job security, not given the respect, not given the integration with university and not have it affect the quality of the education that's provided by the institution. and this situation also affects the tenure-line people because, if the higher percentage of the faculty is lecturers then all the committee were, all the things that only tenure line people do, now there's fewer people to do that. shared governance, you know co-co yeah right. its puts squeeze on everyone. i think the public perceives that now. i'm glad we've had opportunity to talk about it. there needs to be more discussion

because the public is better served when we have the faculty that we need to enable the young people out there coming to us, to have a future that they dream and hope for, like you. yeah, definitely. thank you all for being here today, and thank you for joining us. we hope you come back for another edition of equal time. [music] [music]

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