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1 Organizing for Equality within the Two-Tier System TheExperienceofthe CaliforniaFacultyAssociation Elizabeth Hoffman and John Hess On November 15, 2006, a sunny day in Long Beach, California, 1,500 faculty and students marched across a bridge and assembled in front of the entrance to the chancellor’s headquarters on Golden Shores. We had come to harass the California State University (CSU) chancellor and board of trustees, and that is what we did. The marchers carried banners large and small and even an enormous puppet of the chancellor. The crowd became more and more boisterous, students banged on the outside of the windows and held up banners to the windows so the trustees could see them, and a group of the protesters went inside the board of trustees’ meeting room. Eventually, twenty-one faculty leaders sat down in the middle of the room and locked arms. Seven of these faculty were lecturers, people with little or no job security . They all began chanting, supported by other faculty and students inside and outside the trustees’ chambers. Finally, the chancellor and the trustees fled the room and the CSU became what we had long been calling it: The People’s University.1 When the faculty and students went back to their campuses , they began to make preparations to go on strike. The faculty eventually voted overwhelmingly to do so. Had this happened, it would have been the largest faculty strike in the United States. The chancellor, however, threw in the towel and conceded nearly everything we had been asking for at the bargaining table. How did this happen? What does it mean? How is it that CSU lecturers played an important role in this fight with the chancellor? We hope to answer these and other pertinent questions in this article from our special perspective as contingent faculty activists. To begin, step back with us to another time. “Throw the lecturers out of the union,” shouted one of the leaders of the California Faculty Association (CFA). To the two lecturers in the room, hear9 ing this was a low point in their union experience and proof of the contingent faculty axiom that one is never more than fifteen seconds away from total humiliation . The setting was a retreat held by the CFA in the early 1990s, and the hired facilitator had directed the participants to brainstorm as honestly as possible about what the CFA should do to build a strong and effective union. This comment was certainly honest, and it brought out into the open some depressing realities. Although the CFA was the legal representative for all the faculty in the California State University, the union did not well represent almost half the faculty members—those with full-time or part-time temporary appointments. These faculty, the lecturers, were marginalized in their teaching positions and marginalized—even rejected—in their own union. Now, some twenty years later, the CFA has become a very different union, far more democratic and inclusive and committed to protecting the needs of all the constituents in the bargaining unit. It’s not perfect and certainly the university itself remains a status conscious and exclusionary environment. And despite improvements in job security provisions, lecturers still lead insecure lives. However, the mean-spirited “throw the lecturers out” comment is unimaginable in today’s CFA. We’re a big union, representing more than twenty-three thousand faculty at twenty-three campuses, and there is a clear understanding that we need every hand on board, not only to protect our own interests, but to protect the institution of higher education itself. Higher education is the key both to producing the innovative professionals needed for the twenty-first century and to rebuilding a middle class whose members can expect respect for their contributions, job security, a livable wage with health benefits, and a retirement with dignity. It’s a cruel irony that the majority of the faculty preparing this workforce of the future have few of these benefits themselves. The contingent, temporary nature of their faculty appointments undermines not only their working conditions but also the academic freedom that ensures the integrity of the profession. This labor system results in an academic workforce with over half the faculty members marginalized from democratic decision-making and governance processes. The contingent nature of these appointments does not just negatively impact the faculty holding such positions. In a 2008 issue of Academe devoted solely to contingent issues, Gary Rhoades, general secretary of the American Association of University...

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