Spartan Daily - Serving San Jose State University since 1934

Issue date: 12/3/03 Section: Campus News

Some of your favorite professors might be lecturers.

There are more than 900 full- and part-time temporary faculty members and 800 regular faculty at San Jose State University, according to information provided by Faculty Affairs.

Lecturers provide a valuable service to students and to the institution, said Interim President Joseph Crowley.

"Their importance, and don't think I don't know it, has grown considerably over the course of the last 20 years because resource constraints have developed parallel to enrollment growth," Crowley said.

He said lecturers are used to teaching lower division general education courses because they are less expensive than full-time faculty.

"Typically these are people who do it because they love to do it," Crowley said. "So it's a dilemma because you have people who are committed and hired by the institution because of resource constraints and that number grows all over this country."

Karen Fjelstad, a lecturer in anthropology who's taught at SJSU for six years, said there are many myths about lecturers, including that some lecturers don't have doctorate degrees.

Fjelstad said she has a Ph.D in cultural anthropology.

"I think one myth is that lecturers are not as qualified. The assumption is that we don't have the same level of education or the same level of experience or more ... somehow we're not as committed, that we're going to move on, " Fjelstad said.

She also said lecturers are professionally active and publish.

One student said all his courses are taught by lecturers.

"I believe all of them have Ph.Ds. All of them are qualified individuals," said Yasir Khan, a sophomore computer engineering major.

Khan said he doesn't pay attention to whether his classes are taught by lecturers or tenure-track faculty.

"Probably the styles are different, I mean every teacher has his own style. Some are easy, some are hard, some believe in giving more than others, but that does not mean that they are not qualified to teach the course," Khan said.

Another student said she has a lecturer for her English 1A class.

"We call him Mr. Murphy, we don't call him Dr. Murphy. He's a good teacher ... I've learned a lot in that class already," said Jessica Loebig, a freshman biology major.

Loebig said she doesn't mind having lecturers for her general education courses but she might want to have tenured professors as teachers for her biology classes.

The academic senate's constitution was recently amended to allow lecturers who had completed one academic year of service at SJSU to become senators, said Annette Nellen, chair of the senate.

Until the amendment, lecturers were only allowed to participate in the academic senate's committees, Nellen said.

Extending senate representation to lecturers made sense, she said.

"Lecturers are a very important part of faculty on this campus ... for the senate to do its best work, addressing academic matters, seeing to the highest quality of programs and experiences for the students, we need to have senators ... who have all types of important interactions with the students. Lecturers certainly fall into that."

Beth Von Till, a lecturer in the communication studies department, and the first lecturer to also serve on the academic senate, said it's nice for lecturers to be included in the group.

"I think it's a real tribute to lecturers and to San Jose State that this has come to pass, especially in hard budgetary times, when it's an uncertain time for a lot of lecturers and part-timers," Von Till said.

Von Till has taught at SJSU for 17 years and said her experience as a lecturer has been positive.

"The (communications studies) faculty is very supportive. Lecturers are treated with great respect. Opinions matter, lecturers are encouraged to be active in the governance of the department, as well as active across campus."

Scott Rice, chair of the English and comparative literature department, said lecturers teach freshmen composition classes and some lower division literature classes.

"(They) enable us to teach more courses on our budget -- it's more cost effective for the department and the university and exploits the people involved," Rice said. "They are paid less to teach their sections than our tenure-track faculty."

Lecturers provide "a gift" to SJSU and the community through their teaching, Rice said.

"Many of them like the academic environment. Any number of them could have higher paying jobs -- some of them have given up higher paying jobs to come here. They like the environment, being around students and other teachers," Rice said.

In turn, Rice said lecturers are treated with respect in the English department.

He said the English department often hires its former master's students for lecturer positions because they are well trained in the art of writing.

Provost Marshall Goodman said lecturers are the "backbones of instruction, particularly in the lower division GE courses."

Lecturers are critical to SJSU because they have expertise in fields that many students are interested in, such as technology, Goodman said.

"We are in Silicon Valley ... the opportunity to have people from the very industries our students are wanting to join bring that knowledge into the classroom is a great opportunity," Goodman said.

Lecturers also help to maintain a diverse faculty presence on campus, he said.

"And that is diversity not just in terms of ethnicity, it's diversity in terms of experience, it's diversity in terms of gender, it's diversity in terms of political ideology," Goodman said.

The surrounding Bay Area community allows SJSU to draw part-time faculty to teach, which Goodman said adds to SJSU's knowledge base.

"And I think that brings a richness to our program that places like (UC) Davis and (California State University) Stanislaus and Chico (State University) and others that are in smaller communities would die for," Goodman said.

The use of cost-effective lecturers allows programs that may not have an ample supply of full-time professors to keep admitting students, Goodman said.

There are shortages of full-time faculty applicants in areas such as management information systems and nursing, he said. California's high cost of living and budget crisis can also make it hard to attract applicants to these positions at SJSU.

"I really credit the chairs in trying to find enough qualified staff to maintain and to grow some of their programs," Goodman said.

Lecturers may be at risk for layoffs during tight budgetary times, after other cost-saving measures, such as delaying purchases of major equipment and deferring refurbishment projects, are taken, Goodman said.

"The first commitment, of course, is to your full-time hires, especially those that are tenured," Goodman said. "But without question, if the cuts continue, everyone who is not on a full-time contract ultimately becomes at risk."

Goodman said that unlike a UC Berkeley, which relies heavily on doctoral graduate students to teach lower division courses, SJSU employs many lecturers with their doctorates.

He said some lecturers have either chosen that path because they didn't want a full-time commitment at a university or budget constraints meant there were not enough positions when those individuals wanted to be hired full time.

Budget constraints have another effect -- some SJSU lecturers teach at other local colleges to earn their living, Goodman said.

"I've run into a lot of lecturers who tell me you know they teach at Evergreen (Community College), they teach here, they teach at (Cal State) Hayward. It's a struggle for them, and certainly in bad budget times, there's a lot of uncertainty there," Goodman said.

Joan Merdinger, associate dean for faculty affairs, said lecturers don't have the same kind of job security as tenured faculty and aren't reviewed or recruited in the same way as tenure-track faculty.

She said lecturers are used to teach sections of additional classes and typically do not serve on university committees like tenure-track faculty because lecturers are not appointed with weighted teaching units to cover such assignments.

A weighted teaching unit is a three-unit course, and a tenured or tenure-track faculty member must have 15 weighted teaching units, Merdinger said.

Three of those units are for service, such as sitting on a committee.

Merdinger said if lecturers had to teach 15 weighted units, they would teach five classes, not four.

"We don't have many people who do that. (Lecturers cover) a real wide range, anywhere from supervising a small number of students to teaching four classes," Merdinger said.

Fjelstad said she teaches four classes at SJSU and two classes at Cabrillo College in Aptos -- for a total of 300 students.

She said because of budget cuts, her department at SJSU had warned her that there may not be enough classes for her to teach. So she arranged to teach at Cabrillo College to supplement lost income.

"But then they (SJSU) had two more classes for me. If I turn those classes down, I won't be offered as many next semester, so I had to say yes. But I couldn't turn down Cabrillo because they had already counted on me teaching those classes."

Fjelstad said being a lecturer is like foraging for work because she never knows where she'll be teaching classes.

"I have to keep Cabrillo because it's my buffer against unemployment," Fjelstad said. "My choice is either to live with a wildly fluctuating income and no guarantee of classes or to take the risk that I may overdo it one semester."

She said the anthropology department is very supportive and understanding about her situation.

"A lot of this is about the budget forces beyond the department. They don't always know, the thing is that lecturers are the ones that are assigned the classes last. When there is uncertainty about the budget, it hits lecturers first," she said.

Fjelstad said she never knows where she's going to work or if she's going to have health insurance.

"We're always foraging for jobs, have to be very flexible, willing to teach anything at any time at any place," she said.

She did say there are benefits to being a lecturer, including teaching a variety of classes, which makes her a better role model for her students because anthropology majors are encouraged to be holistic in their anthropology interests.

Another perk is not having to sit on university committees like tenure-track faculty do.

"I'd rather spend time teaching students than sitting on committees," Fjelstad said.

Patricia Evridge Hill, an associate professor of history and the SJSU chapter president of the California Faculty Association, said lecturers are covered by the union's collective bargaining agreements.

She said the goal of the union is to be inclusive so that lecturers are taken into consideration with the policies and governance of the union.

"We're not able to change basic inequity of some faculty having security and some faculty not," Hill said.

Although the union has worked to lighten the amount of classes lecturers must teach to receive medical benefits from three to two, there are issues at the CSU administration level that cannot be easily changed.

"I don't want to sound like I'm saying the union has made things OK because we don't have the power to have made things OK. We have the power to organize and make things better, not OK. Still consider a situation where we have hundreds of people being exploited," Hill said.

She said that some lecturers at SJSU are exploited because they have all the qualifications, including a Ph.D., to teach at the university level, but are given a one-semester contract to teach at SJSU.

"There's no security beyond (that) one semester. If somebody hires you to teach one or two classes, at $7,000 or $8,000 a class, can you live in the Bay Area?"

Hill said some lecturers have jobs outside of academics and teach one night class a week at SJSU to maintain their professional affiliations.

"Students would have no way knowing of whether his or her instructor is driving around to three or four or five institutions to string together an income in a high cost of living part of the country."

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