Good News, Bad News

Let's start with the good news. CSUSB's first ever lecturer rep election has concluded, and while we're hearing reports of some irregularities (ex. some people never receiving ballots), CSUSB Lecturers for Equity honors the election results. We always knew that tenure track CFA members outvote lecturer members by a large margin, and we always knew that our chapter president and vice president would set out to campaign heavily for whichever candidate played no role in forcing them to hold the election in the first place. We fully anticipated this outcome. However, the good news is that this whole rep election has opened many eyes to a number of disturbing truths about the treatment of lecturers on our campus, and that is good because we can't fix what people don't believe exists. 

Unfortunately, the most unsettling news is that this is not a great time for lecturers to have an entire faculty rights team with so little faculty rights experience and training. There is a lot more at stake for lecturer faculty in these budget troubled times than for tenure track faculty. Lecturer issues are much more complicated and time-consuming, and sadly, it is the opinion of many CL4E lecturers that in the past year, the CFA has been ineffective in ensuring we receive the same quality representation that our tenure peers receive. 

The best news is that this first ever lecturer rep election saw lecturers mobilizing for the first time and engaging in self-advocacy. This is a wonderful and promising new development. While many of us have been turned off to our union by the events of this past year, we have turned to each other and that's where we will always find our greatest strength.

CSUSB Lecturers for Equity has many future plans for ensuring changes that do not require any help from our union. We will start with biweekly posts curated specifically to show CSUSB lecturers the different professional resources available to us. We will include guest posts that range from informational pieces to opinion pieces. We're sure we won't always agree on everything, but we will always agree that lecturers deserve the professional support they need to serve their students well. 

Our next step is to educate CSUSB lecturer faculty on the conditions that we don't have at CSUSB that the other 23 CSU campuses offer to their lecturers. Some of these conditions should be easy to change, others not easy, but one thing is clear: it's a new day for CSUSB lecturers and we're pretty darn excited about that.