Faculty Of Arts And Sciences Adds Senior Lecturer To Policy And Planning Committee For First Time

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02 May, 2022

5:21 PM

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By Talia Traskos-Hart Zachary Schermele, Columbia Daily Spectator • April 15, 2022, 10:05 PM The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has overwhelmingly approved the addition of a senior lecturer seat to the Policy and Planning Committee, the powerful nine-person body charged with faculty governance. The change comes after years of advocacy by lecturers, who have long sought more political power in a university that disproportionately relies on its contingent faculty. The amendment will eventually expand the PPC to 10 total members following the next committee election in May. The addition was approved by 91 percent of Arts and Sciences faculty with 57 percent turnout, according to an email sent to faculty on April 8. The change has been approved by the provost's office. Rhiannon Stephens, the chair of the PPC and an associate professor in the history department, said she was "thrilled with the outcome" and called the change a "really important step forward for faculty governance." "It's not a revolutionary change; it's an incremental change," she said. "But I think it's one that will be really meaningful and will help benefit all of us." The senior lecturer will be an elected voting member of the PPC, a committee that serves as "both a sounding board for new ideas and a source of creative ways to respond to Arts and Sciences challenges." Currently, all members of the PPC are tenured faculty, and six of them are elected each year by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to three-year terms. Of the elected members, two come from each of the three divisions—humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences—in the Arts and Sciences, while the other three are chosen by and from department chairs in each division. The new member can come from any of the three divisions in Arts and Sciences, but cannot be a lecturer in the School of Professional Studies because of its separate faculty governance structure. Although the work of lecturers often overlaps with that of ladder-rank faculty, lecturers shoulder a greater share of the teaching burden in undergraduate and master's courses. Many lecturers teach six courses per year, whereas the number for ladder-rank faculty ranges between two and four. In Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization classes, approximately 60 percent of instructors this semester are non-ladder faculty—whose contracts make them ineligible for tenure—with Core lecturers and lecturers-in-discipline making up roughly a quarter of all instructors in those courses. Nicole Wallack is a senior lecturer in the English department and the inaugural chair of the Lecturer Advisory Committee, a group created to "provide a standing forum" for lecturers and "articulate lecturers' concerns." Wallack explained that representation in the PPC has been a main goal of lecturers since the creation of the LAC in 2019. "It was one of the top priorities of the LAC to have a lecturer serve on the PPC," she said. "The goal was to have a voice to foreground the special situation of lecturers as faculty and to keep front and center questions that are of high priority for lecturers. " Wallack elaborated that lecturers face special challenges as non-tenured faculty. The issues that she hopes the senior lecturer may raise to the PPC include "issues of salary compression, clarity and transparency when it comes to promotion, the desire and need for lecturers to have professorial titles, [and] anything that the University can do to provide more security for those of us in non-tenure eligible positions." Babi Kruchin, a lecturer in English as a second language and a current LAC member, said that the lack of tenure for lecturers creates a more precarious workplace environment. "We don't have as much job security as professors have, that goes without saying," she said. The proportion of non-tenured faculty at the University has increased in recent years. Since 2010, the proportion of "special instructional faculty" has increased from roughly 16 percent to roughly 23 percent on Columbia's Morningside campus, according to the Office of Planning and Institutional Research. Further, many lecturers in the Core are hired for limited and non-renewable terms, creating even more instability in their positions. This rise in more unstable faculty positions has prompted advocacy by lecturers in the hopes of more representation. Lecturers were not formally recognized as faculty members until 2017, and the LAC was not created until 2019 in response to a PPC report that found broad dissatisfaction by lecturers with their jobs titles, roles in faculty governance, and compensation, thus concluding that "lecturers should be given an appropriate—and in general a larger—role in faculty governance." Wallack noted that the representation achieved in recent years has marked an important step forward for lecturers to advocate for their unique needs at a higher level than just within their departments. "In the past, … there was no place for advocacy at all," she said. The change in the faculty governance structure was also endorsed by the newly reestablished American Association of University Professors chapter at Columbia, whose platform recognizes the nationwide trend of increased reliance on contingent faculty in higher education. The job security of contingent faculty members, particularly when it comes to their involvement in faculty governance, has been top of mind for some since a controversy in summer 2020 that illustrated perceived pressure from University President Lee Bollinger, then-interim Provost Ira Katznelson, and Executive Vice President of Arts and Sciences Amy Hungerford to potentially require contingent faculty—which would have included lecturers—to teach in person in fall 2020. Sarah Hansen, a senior lecturer in the chemistry department and the current LAC chair, explained that the seat will give lecturers a voice and a path for representation not previously seen. "The lecturer community on campus is comprised of almost 200 faculty with renewable contracts who bring decades of experience, institutional memory, and pedagogical excellence to our campus," she wrote in a statement to Spectator. "We will now be in the room and have a vote when decisions are made." Deputy News Editor Zach Schermele can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ZachSchermele. Staff writer Talia Traskos-Hart can be contacted at [email protected]. Founded in 1877, the Columbia Daily Spectator is the independent undergraduate newspaper of Columbia University, serving thousands of readers in Morningside Heights, West Harlem, and beyond. Read more at columbiaspectator.com and donate here.