Part-time employees make up a majority of California State University, Long Beach’s faculty.
As of fall 2014, there were 1,304 part-time faculty members versus 979 who had full-time commitments, according to demographic information compiled by CSULB Institutional Research and Assessment.
Norbert Schurer, a member-at-large of the Academic Senate Committee, said that alumni who return to campus because they need a letter of recommendation or advisement might find that their professors are no longer work at the university. He said that turnover for lecturers is about five years.
“It is in a student’s long-term interest to have faculty who have a long-term commitment to the university,” Schurer said.
Most of the part-time faculty consists of lecturers with temporary contracts for about three years. After that, universities renew these temporary contracts, depending on performance evaluations and departmental need. Budget constraints and enrollment also factor into the decision of renewing a lecturer’s contract. The increasing number of lecturers who are on temporary contracts has no way to directly advance into tenure-track status.
A decrease in tenured professors hurts students because tenure preserves academic freedom by protecting professors from censorship, Boak Ferris, a lecturer in the English Department, said.
The difference between part-time lecturers and full-time tenured professors is not based on their teaching abilities or performance, Ferris said.
“A lot of times [part-time lecturers] are geniuses in their fields,” Ferris said.
The reliance on contract lecturers has increased throughout CSU institutions. Since 1998, lecturers with temporary contracts at CSU institutions have outnumbered full-time tenure or tenure-track faculty, according to an opinions article printed in the Sacramento Bee in February.
According to the CSU website, lecturers make on average $40,000 less than full-time tenured professors per year. Due to this pay disparity, part-time lecturers often find themselves shifting between jobs at two or three different campuses, earning them the nickname “freeway flyers” and leaving them with less time to interact with students outside of class, Schurer said.
CSULB Executive Director of News and Digital Media Michael Uhlenkamp said he attributes the current hiring trend on the recent recession and budget crunches.
A recent report published by the California Faculty Association, a union that represents CSU faculty, found that regardless of whether state funding was up or down or whether tuition rose or not, spending on faculty salaries remained the same.
In 2001, the California State Legislature passed ACR 73, a resolution urging CSU to raise the proportion of faculty who are tenured or tenure-track to 75 percent. This process is known as tenure density.
In a recent speech to the Academic Senate, President Jane Close Conoley said that the current tenure density for the university is nearly 54 percent. She also said that she was committed to increasing tenure density at CSULB.
Uhlenkamp said he agreed with Conoley’s position to increase the ranks of tenure or tenure-rank faculty, adding that it will make a positive impact on student success. He said that there are currently 63 ongoing searches for tenure or tenure-track positions.