More than a decade ago, the California Legislature passed Assembly Concurrent Resolution 73, a piece of legislation that instructed the Cal State University to increase the percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty to a minimum of 75 percent.
Plans were drawn up by the CSU Academic Senate, the CSU Chancellor’s Office and the California Faculty Association on how to make that goal a reality. However, 12 years down the line, the CSU is now farther away from its goal than when it was first set.
Since 2001 the number of full-time equivalent (FTE), tenured and tenure-track faculty has decreased by 4 percent, according to “The Continuing Need to Hire More Faculty,” a report published in this month’s issue of the CSU Academic Senate’s newsletter.
According to the report, when ACR 73 was introduced in 2001, there were 10,029, or 63.8 percent, FTE tenured and tenure-track faculty in the CSU system, compared to 9,656, or 60.6 percent, in 2012.
Diana Guerin, chair of the CSU Academic Senate, said the decline in the number of FTE tenured and tenure-track faculty is a cause for concern because it translates to fewer resources for students and greater workloads for current tenured and tenure-track faculty.
“It’s a concern to us that the number of faculty that are full time, who are committed to working with students and developing and maintaining the curriculum, and serving on committees … and that kind of thing, have been diminishing,” Guerin said.
According to Guerin, over the past year the CSU has also been unable to retain its faculty. For every 500 tenured and tenure-track faculty that retire or leave the system, only 400 are hired to replace them, she said.
“One thing that is making it challenging for us and one reason that people are leaving is that it’s very expensive to live in California, and the faculty have not had a pay increase for five years,” Guerin said.
In addition to low tenured and tenure-track faculty numbers, the report found that the student-to-faculty ratio has been increasing as well. According to Guerin, in 2001 there were 27 students for every one tenured or tenure-track faculty member, and in 2012 that number rose to 37-to-one.
“Students get less percentage of time of full-time professors’ attention when you have 37 students instead of 27 students to worry about,” Guerin said. “Faculty have bigger and bigger loads in terms of advising, reading papers and grading and giving exams, that kind of thing.”
One factor, Guerin said, that has contributed to the CSU slipping farther away from the goal of ACR 73 has been an increase in hiring lecture faculty instead of tenured or tenure-track faculty.
“We have been hiring lecturers instead, because when you hire a tenure-track faculty member, that is a commitment for 20 or 30 years,” Guerin said. “If they live up to their obligation to teach and do research and provide service, then what we’re telling them when we offer them a tenure-track position is that ‘you have a job here for your career.’”
According to the report, the number of lecturers hired by the CSU system has increased by 10 percent since 2001. In 2001 there were 5,693 lecturers teaching in the CSU system, and in 2012 that number increased to 6,274.
Guerin said the increase of lecture faculty as opposed to tenured and tenure-track faculty is worrisome since lecturers are not responsible for developing new courses or providing advising to students.
“When we hire people to teach classes only, all they do is show up and teach a class,” Guerin said.
CSU Spokesman Erik Fallis said hiring a full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty member is a time-consuming process. This, coupled with an uncertain budget climate, is largely responsible for the increase in lecture faculty in the CSU system, Fallis said.
“We are on a budget roller coaster right now,” Fallis said. “So, when we get one-time money, when we get dollars that we don’t know we’re going to have in the next year, what we have been doing with those dollars is that we have been investing them in student courses.”
When money is made available last minute and classes are added, Fallis said, the quickest option is to hire lecture faculty to teach those classes because hiring tenured or tenure-track faculty is a lengthier process.
Fallis said although the CSU would like to hire more full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members and reach ACR 73’s goal, it is all dependent on the budget.
“If we actually have a reliable funding source for faculty and we have some sense that four years from now we are still going to have the resources to offer those classes, then that is going to allow for more of those permanent hires,” Fallis said.