Letters to the Editor: Cal State’s underpaid lecturers make the system work. They deserve better

To the editor: Growing up, job security loomed large in my family, so it was with great satisfaction that I accepted a tenure-track position in 1969 at Cal State Dominguez Hills, where I spent 40 rewarding years teaching students from under-served neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

Over the years, non-tenured positions began to creep into the system, a response to budget problems that at first appeared temporary. Now, as your article on Cal State lecturers teaching on short-term contracts shows, it’s permanent.

I never liked it, and I don’t like it today because of the profound inequity between the job experiences of revered colleagues.

My one regret is that I didn’t assume a role of aggressive advisor to my non-tenured colleagues in counseling them that if the institution could not offer them a tenure-track position, they should say goodbye and go elsewhere to get the job security and professional rewards they deserve.

Oliver Seely, Lakewood

The writer is a professor emeritus of chemistry at Cal State Dominguez Hills.

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To the editor: Sadly, the problem of perpetual short-term employment is not just confined to academia. Throughout the workforce, many businesses don’t have “employees,” but rather independent contractors and gig workers.

Ours is not a healthy society when executives earn hundreds of times what their workers earn.

Sara Schmidhauser, Isla Vista, Calif.

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To the editor: The story on lecturers lamenting a lack of predictable raises or a promise of consistent work highlighted one lecturer in the Cal State L.A. Department of Chicana(o) and Latina(o) Studies, another set to teach an African American history class at the same school, and a third who is a lecturer in the university’s philosophy department.

Is it possible that the subjects they teach make them more prone to experience the problems they lament? My guess is that there are far more people trained to teach those subjects than there are jobs available.

Perhaps if they had pursued specialties such in STEM fields or economics, they would face less competition for available jobs. Econ 101 tells us that those possessing scarce skills can demand higher pay and more secure work.

This is not to diminish the fields the three lecturers chose to pursue. Rather, it merely recognizes the economic reality of being a seller in a crowded marketplace.

Gerry Swider, Sherman Oaks