Economic pressures lead to fewer full-time faculty

The likelihood of being taught by a full-time lecturer at UCLA is steadily decreasing.

Economic and enrollment pressures have caused UCLA to replace retiring full-time faculty with part-time faculty, said Robert Cox, manager of the Office of Analysis and Information Management at UCLA. The shift parallels a national trend in the declining number of full-time faculty.

Part-time faculty are often given preference because they are significantly cheaper to hire than ladder-rank faculty. Ladder-rank faculty are on a tenure-track career path or have attained tenure. In 1975, part-time faculty constituted 24 percent of the college faculty population in the U.S. By 2009, that number rose to 41 percent, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Education.

Fewer full-time professors work at UCLA because the universityisn’t hiring professors fast enough to replace those who retire, and a smaller fraction of those replacements are being hired on full-time contracts, said Chris Tilly, director of the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.

“After the 2008 economic failure, something had to give,” Tilly said.

UCLA has had to hire part-time lecturers instead of full-time faculty because of the recent recession and cuts in state funds, Cox said.

“Trends in the allocation of faculty are often driven by the need for flexibility to ensure the highest quality of classroom experience,” said Carole Goldberg, vice chancellorof academic personnel.

The university considers entering class size, budgetary changes and strategic changes when hiring a proper balance of teachers, Goldberg added.

Part-time faculty members aren’t hired on long-term contracts, and they frequently renegotiate their contracts, Tilly said. Conversely, tenured faculty have more job security because they can’t be laid off. UCLA officials likely wouldn’t fire tenured faculty even if they could because it would send the wrong signal to professors they’d like to hire, he added.

“(The amount paid to part-time faculty) is obviously less due to the realities of the job,” Cox said.

However, part-time faculty are paid differing amounts because of the unique hiring policies of departments, Cox said.

Both full-time faculty and part-time lecturers spend years getting doctorate degrees, but they earn significantly different pay when working at universities across the country. In a time when funds for faculty have been reduced, part-time lecturers are a more cheap and flexible option, Tilly said.

“Informally I’d like to teach as many courses as I could, but I’m teaching one course because of the school’s budget,” said part-time English lecturer Megan Stephan. She said that the job market for faculty was bad when she got her degree 10 years ago but is even more competitive and difficult now.

Similar to part-time lecturers, adjunct faculty are hired on short-term contracts, said psychology adjunct professor Dahlia Zaidel. Zaidel’s contract is re-evaluated every year, and in 2008 she lost a course assignment because UCLA could no longer afford it.

Zaidel said that although she knows the university recognizes her research work, she doesn’t feel completely secure because of the brevity of her contracts.

Anthropology professorPaul Kroskrity, who is a full-time faculty member, said he sees the decrease in full-time work and long-term contracts as mostly a negative trend.

“You want long-term investments in a school’s culture … of course in some places maybe you need to cut in the name of efficiency,” Kroskrity said. “But we should be seeing a stable maintenance of full-time professors.”

Part-time faculty may go the extra mile to do more than what’s required of them because they lack job security, Kroskrity said. But some don’t necessarily want to teach full time because they’d like to simultaneously pursue projects other than teaching.

Several students, however, said they are indifferent about whether part-time lecturers or full-time faculty teach them, while others described their experiences as negative.

“During (my instructor’s) office hours she was busy on her computer and being quick with the students who needed her help,” said Alejandra Torres, a third-year Spanish and Chicana/o studies student.

Torres said that her part-time instructor teaches at another school and is also looking for another job, leading her to pay less attention to what the students had to say.