National New Majority Faculty Day, Thursday, April 30

National New Majority Faculty Day flyer
Non-Senate Academics at UC
Librarians

New Majority Faculty Day- April 30, 2009

Lecturer's explanation to students: Making the Connection Between Budget Deficits, Lecturers, and Student Access to Courses

Thursday, April 30, is New Majority Faculty Day, a day to recognize that non-tenure faculty are the large majority of faculty teaching at universities and colleges nationally. On this day, we are raising awareness about the fact that lecturers and graduate student instructors teach over 60% of the undergraduate courses in the UC system.

I am one of 3,000 lecturers in the UC system. Unlike professors, lecturers are hired and promoted for their teaching, and so lecturers are crucial to your undergraduate education. Lecturers teach many of the skills courses on campus, like writing, foreign languages, music performance, architecture studio, physical education, and art practice. They also teach many large and small introductory courses like world history, international studies courses, chemistry, biology, and literature surveys, and they teach graduate courses and supervise internships in the professional schools in education, business, law, technical writing for engineers, social welfare, and chemical engineering.

Since lecturers’ positions are paid for by temporary funds, their classes are often the first to be cut when there is a budget deficit. For students, the lack of job security for these teachers means that even as your tuition fees are rising fast, you may not be able to enroll in the classes you need for your major or for your general education. For example, the Physical Education program is being cut by 50% for next year, while students are already being turned away from that program's classes this year, and in many other classes taught by lecturers.

If you have trouble enrolling in courses, you might want to contact the following administrators and let them know:

Chancellor Robert Birgeneau: chancellor@berkeley.edu
Executive Vice-Chancellor George Breslauer: bresl@berkeley.edu