University Articles
University Articles
News for lecturers and librarians working at the University of California.
State issues reopening guidelines for higher education
Include areas of note for community colleges
California released its reopening guidelines for higher education on August 7.
While most of the guidance is geared to four-year colleges and universities, there are also some significant areas of note for the community colleges, which are summarized here.
Now – yes, now – is the time for contingent faculty to organize
If we don’t fight now, we may not get another chance
By Josh Brahinsky and Roxi Power, UC-AFT Santa Cruz
When graduate-student workers at the University of California at Santa Cruz voted overwhelmingly in December to reject their statewide union contract and follow the West Virginia teachers’ model of a wildcat strike, the precarious lives of academic workers became a news story once again.
What does the transition to “remote learning” mean?
For classroom faculty with traditionally scheduled on-campus classes
Note: This helpful article was written for a local community college audience, but many of the principles apply to all of higher education as well as K-12 education.
By Jim Mahler, President, AFT Guild, Local 1931, San Diego and Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community Colleges
Thousands of UC lecturers mobilize for job rights, fair salaries
Academic and blue collar workforce fight back against university’s substandard pay
When Josh Brahinsky isn’t teaching “Academic Literacy and Ethos” and “Brain, Mind, and Consciousness” classes to new students at UC Santa Cruz, the lecturer is researching bio-cultural anthropology at Stanford University, teaching at San Jose State, or leading online classes at Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania.
“UC only pays me $19,900 yearly,” Brahinsky said. “That’s not enough to live on, so I have to make up the difference somewhere else.”
How one career lecturer’s medical crisis is helping others win paid sick leave
UC-AFT fights for what’s right in healthcare
It’s not often that a personal medical ordeal results in a positive outcome that helps many other people, but that’s what happened when Andrew Tonkovich, a lecturer at UC Irvine, had to receive treatment for a brain tumor.
Telling, Not Being the Joke
A personal essay by Andrew Tonkovich
Q: Tell me, how long have you been working here?
A: Ever since they threatened to fire me.
That old cornball joke still makes me laugh, 50 years after I read it in a kids magazine. I understood it then as honest if everyday acknowledgement by the presumably once-lazy worker of his or her required acquiescence to power, and of isolation. But its splendid trick syntax and on-the-nose calling out of the coercive relationship of management to labor suggested more, even to a 10-year-old: cognizance of at least the potential inherent power of the worker — all workers? — to apprehend, to subvert, to jest, however fatalistically, cynically or — my own favorite — insubordinately.
Campus Equity Week 2019
Fund the Future by fighting for equity
It is not a level playing field in the world of higher education. The longstanding and systematic underfunding of higher ed has to a crisis in which 68 percent of California community college faculty now work as part-time, or temporary instructors.
California contingents unite to find “Common Ground”
In an event which channels the spirit of Campus Equity Week, leaders from the Peralta Federation of Teachers, San Mateo Community College Federation of Teachers, UC-AFT, and San Francisco State will host a free conference on the future of higher education at Berkeley City College on October 25.
How unionizing the Lusty Lady has influenced faculty members
Novelist and poet works to organize faculty in creative departments
When Aya de León started as a lecturer in African American Studies at UC Berkeley and director of its Poetry for the People program, she was excited to join AFT Local 1474. She’s been working since she was a teenager, de León says, but this is the first job where she has a union to represent her.
When she was younger, the idea of being in a local seemed very adult to her, and now being a member of one makes her feel she has arrived, she says. That’s just one reason she’s excited to be a union member.
UC lecturers take bold stand with university in negotiations
Momentum has built activism and organizing success
Eighty UC-AFT members and their allies showed up at the first bargaining session at UC Davis as lecturers began their contract negotiations last spring. The impressive number of rank-and-file members in the room to support the team helped them win open bargaining, says UC-AFT President Mia McIver.
UC-AFT likens teaching conditions of lecturers to gig labor force
Teachers support UC staff in fourth strike, oppose privatization of services
By Mia McIver, President UC-AFT
On May 16, the 24,000 workers of AFSCME 3299, the University of California’s largest employee union, conducted their fourth strike of the 2018-19 academic year.
UC-AFT recognized on Assembly Floor
Assemblyman Jose Medina, D-Riverside, Chair of the Higher Education Committee, recognized the University Council-AFT on the Assembly Floor during UC-AFT’s first group lobby day at the State Capitol on April 1.
Students need more mental health support on campus, faculty too
By Mia L. McIver, President UC-AFT
In a recent survey of UC-AFT faculty, members highlighted mental health as an issue that deserves our union’s attention and energy. UC students experiencing psychological challenges often seek support from lecturers and other contract faculty, who are sometimes the only faculty with whom they can develop a one-to-one relationship.
Librarians are determined to win a better contract
UC librarians and their union, the University Council-AFT, has three priority issues in the negotiations of their contract with university administrators: salary and economic issues, academic freedom, and temporary librarians.
CFT faculty leaders to testify on California’s Master Plan for Higher Education
The Assembly Select Committee on the Master Plan for Higher Education has scheduled a public hearing on Friday, May 4, at UC Riverside to examine how to meet the needs of faculty and staff to best support our students.
University Council-AFT: Bringing dignity to UC lecturers and librarians
Download a single-sheet illustrated history of the University Council-AFT
In September of 1978, Gov. Jerry Brown made good on a promise to the CFT and signed the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act, authorizing employees of the UC and CSU systems to engage in collective bargaining.
Student assessments unreliable for evaluating instructors
Biased opinions may effect reappointment for contingent faculty
Evaluation can be a harrowing experience for any educator. But for non-tenured faculty in the UC system, the emotional drain is compounded by the critical role that evaluations play in whether a lecturer continues to work at all.
Building a member-driven union at the university
An effective site rep structure reaches lecturers, librarians where they work
At UC Berkeley, 16 lecturer site representatives are fanning out across the sprawling campus. In Davis, the union is fielding at least 15. In both places, the effort to meet the challenge of a new era in public sector labor relations is part of an even larger move to change the culture of the union.
Unions get full and timely access to new employees
New law leads to union negotiating rules for employee orientation
In April 2016, Julia Troche applied to be a lecturer in Egyptology at UCLA. “It was my alma mater as an undergrad, so this was a special position for me, a chance to give back to the institution that gave me so much,” she says. She’d received an email from the department chair of Near Eastern Language and Culture asking her to apply. “She told me there was no guarantee of continuing employment, but it would put me in a good place while I looked for a tenure-track appointment.”
Contingent faculty and academic freedom in the age of Trump
Organizing the disenfranchised is the key to success
By Bob Samuels, President UC-AFT
Now that more than 75 percent of the instructors teaching in higher education in the United States do not have tenure, it is important to think about how the current political climate affects those vulnerable teachers. Although we should pay attention to how all faculty are being threatened, non-tenured faculty are in an especially exposed position because they often lack any type of academic freedom or shared governance rights.