The Transformation of Academic Labor: Past as Prologue at the UC

Abstract

1. The University of California has experienced a long-term decline in state funding over the last forty years and persistent enrollment growth in the same period. Per-student spending has been allowed to substantially decline as a result. 2. State funding of higher education is historically subject to high levels of volatility. This volatility has been exacerbated by recurrent political and economic crises and competition for increasingly scarce state resources. 3. Successive policy decisions at the state and university level have created a situation in which an increasing proportion of the UC’s core revenues come from student tuition, fees, and private philanthropy, which are themselves subject to political pressures. 4. Though the Master Plan for Higher Education was premised on the assumption that both the teaching and research missions of the university were essential for it to function as a public good, the two have become decoupled. An increasing proportion of the teaching conducted by the university is performed by contingent and nontenured faculty (“lecturers”) with limited job security and little or no role in faculty governance. 5. The growth of lecturers has outpaced the growth of tenure-track faculty at the UC in 9 of the last 10 years, and the growth of part-time positions among these lecturers has likewise outpaced the growth of full-time positions in the same period. 6. Compared to tenure-line faculty, this workforce is cheap and flexible and has come to occupy a position of structural importance to the university’s core functions – but evidence suggests this flexibility hurts student retention and performance.