UBC’s Lecturers 400+ are the heroes of the undergraduate curriculum at UBC. Without their teaching expertise and important service, UBC’s curricular offerings would be unsustainable. And yet these academics remain precariously employed and lack many of the rights and benefits of their tenured and tenure-track colleagues. Lecturers are full-year, usually full-time faculty who are hired to teach and undertake service and administrative duties. They are integrated fully into the affairs of your departments, and our long-term colleagues, having successive appointments of up to 8 years each. Nevertheless, these positions all lack the protections of tenure. Over the last three rounds the Faculty Association has made significant gains in our efforts to protect and improve the working conditions for Lecturers. These include the presumptive right to reappointment, longer appointments contracts, and the right to specified terms after extended periods of service. Together, these wins have helped integrate Lecturers more fully into the fabric of the University and recognize the important role played by these faculty at this institution.
Despite these important changes, there is still much to be done, and the Association is proposing a number of changes in this round to continue strengthening the terms and conditions of employment for Lecturers. These include:
- Clarifying and limiting the application of the “Excellence Test”, which the University has indicated it intends to apply at the end of each and every appointment, in perpetuity. The Association believes that this review is only necessary as Lecturers are getting established in their work at UBC. Thereafter, a Lecturer’s performance should be reviewed in the same manner as their tenured and tenure-track colleagues. It is, after all, not likely that any of us forget how to do our jobs from one year to the next.
- Clarifying the steps required when and if layoffs are necessary, and clear provisions for Lecturers that recognize their long service and their precarious circumstances should layoffs be necessary.
- Reducing the maximum full-time load (eg. from 8 courses to 7 courses in Arts), to recognize the unsustainably high teaching load currently expected of Lecturers in most units. Many of our colleague report Sisyphean levels of work required to maintain full time employment, leading to “clinical levels of burnout” and the constant feeling of being “on the verge of total breakdown.”
We will continue, this round and in the future, to fight for the working conditions of our Lecturer colleagues who contribute so much to this university.
