The Hidden Reason Behind the Lack of Access to California Post-Secondary Education

Being a post-secondary teacher, I am very concerned with preserving the American brain trust and providing for the next generations to come. As a teacher, I am in solidarity with educators at every level, advocating for proper resources for them and their schools. Educating our youth is how we ensure that an ample knowledge base is there for us in the future to run our society and to confront problems that concern the world.

Unfortunately, California is reflective of a major social problem that is seen throughout the nation. The post-secondary level, the last opportunity to remediate and cultivate young minds, is a train wreck in motion. Californians have been decrying the lack of access of our college-aged youth to post-secondary educations in our state (THE LINK HERE www. collegecampaign.org). An important part of the constraints leveled against our children is the way that post-secondary teachers are treated in this state and in other states. For nearly three decades, university managers have increasingly diverted funds from the salaries and benefits of post-secondary teachers. In doing this, they have devalued the university professor, increasingly hiring them into an untenured (adjunct, lecturer, contingent, part-timer, temp) caste system and hiring only a few into tenure-track jobs. In the meantime, the university management cadre has swollen into many tiers of managers and sub-managers with high salaries, rich benefit packages, and other interests besides enabling teaching and scholarship that produces innovation.

This is completely the opposite of how the American university operated many years ago. It used to be the norm to hire mainly tenure-track professors and reserve a few “adjunct professor” positions for experts from industry, government, and the community, often retired, to come in and teach students from a real-world standpoint. In turning this system on its head, for the sake of their own high salaries and gorgeous projects to secure their legacies, university management devalued professors and created an under-class of post-secondary teachers. Except for a few universities in the United States, this topsy-turvy system is in force today. If our university knowledge workers are the troops in the field facing the challenges of the 21st century like global warming, disaster preparedness, cultural conflicts, pandemics, and post-petroleum economics, they are troops in the field without adequate body armor and without ammunition for their weapons.

A majority of the professors who teach our children are paid by each college course they teach, often with no benefits, like medical and dental insurance. The salaries are typically low. Post-secondary teachers find themselves commuting long distances in the course of the day or the week to as many as two and three campuses, attempting to string together enough money to scrape together enough for a paycheck-to-paycheck existence. When they get to their campuses, they often have no office space in which to see students or telephone access to them. They have no stability in what they can expect to teach from term to term. It is a migrant worker’s life. I call it the “Pieceworker Professor, Sweatshop University” model.

This train wreck in motion is almost invisible on the national radar screen. One reason is because migrant workers have few resources and little leisure time to complain about their plight. These migrant professors, who in large part teach our children, have precious few resources and little time to prepare lessons and make advances in their fields. It is hard to provide the nation with innovations when these professors are literally often operating out of the trunks of their cars. Another reason is that faculty unions representing post-secondary teachers are still finding their muscle. There are several of them in operation in California with greater and lesser degrees of clout. In many cases they have promised not to strike. A third reason that allows this social problem to fester in the dark is that university managers “divide and conquer:” granting concessions to the smaller percentage of tenure-track and tenured professors at the expense of untenured professors. A fourth reason is that those organizations that attempt to lobby for post-secondary teachers on the national scene talk to politicians in such a way that make it sound like an elite part of the American work force is whining about high-brow or trivial issues, rather than freighting the problem in language that the average person can understand. Rather than talk to lawmakers so much about the loss of academic freedom, for example, they need to argue persuasively about the dismantling of the American brain trust.

Restoring tenure or tenure-equivalency to those who can teach in our colleges and universities will go far toward solving the problem of our youths’ access to post-secondary education in California. For, it will force a re-negotiation of the “world order” that we have come to know in our college and university systems. The problems of high tuition, few courses being offered, access to faculty, and the like will go away. It will also hedge against the loss of innovation in this country and our falling behind in our capacity to meet world-class challenges. At the end of the day, restoration means that those who are untenured must be converted to tenure-track or tenure-equivalent jobs. We must come up with a process for conversion. This process cannot be done willy-nilly by a handful of legislators, college and university managers, and other elites. It must be a process tailored, in large part, by those who have labored at the bottom of the barrel for so long. This is a major way that California can help itself and also make a difference in the nation. If we institute conversion here, the rest of the country will follow in due time.

Author's Note

My introduction to this problem was a “baptism under fire.” For most of my postsecondary teaching existence in the states of Alaska and South Carolina, when I worked as an adjunct professor, I was under the impression that I was one of those “experts” who were brought in from the community to impart my expertise to students. I usually had resources like office space to meet with students, I was generally provided as much salary as my institutions could pay, in some cases, I had benefits competitive with the California public systems, and in all cases, I was treated with dignity and respect. I was cultivated in making the innovations I created in my fields and enjoyed national and international reputations for them.

That changed when I came to work for the California State University system. For the first time in my life, I found myself working in an academic setting where I was treated like a lower-class teacher where it was almost taboo to refer to me as “professor” or “colleague.”

Finding this situation atrocious, I readily threw myself into my work as a Sonoma State University faculty senator when the opportunity presented itself for me to serve representing the untenured faculty on that CSU campus. And, in March 2003, as the California state budgetary crisis amped up and Sonoma State president, Ruben Armiñana, threatened to mass lay off up to 51% of the university’s faculty, all of the untenured professors, we took action. Several colleagues, both untenured and tenured, co-authored what our union, the California Faculty Association (CFA), began referring to as “the Sonoma Model.” (LINKS HERE TO WWW.CALFAC.ORG AND THE PRESS-DEMOCRAT ARTICLE.)

Although my own untenured job was not spared in its entirety, many untenured jobs were spared on the Sonoma State campus, and the threat of the Sonoma Model was brandished by the CFA and may have likely saved thousands of untenured jobs collectively in the California State University system.