A Testimonial to the Negotiating Team
Six Sigma is the ethos that drives our modern economy — based on the idea that we are able to increase performance while effecting a decrease in process variation that will lead to a reduction in inefficiency or defects, and improvement in profits, employee morale, and quality of products or services.
The greatest tragedy of this socioeconomic paradigm for higher education is that it ennobles the fallacy of “psychic income” — the “nonmonetary or nonmaterial satisfactions that accompany an occupation.” Psychic income involves both an altruistic payoff, the idea that the recipient is serving the greater good — and the recognition factor, the idea that our work is more valuable because we serve the same higher cause. But, for the lecturers and faculty at UC, all of this ignores the economic needs that we all face, which are the foundation of modern existence.
It should not take a heroic feat for those of us who do work for psychic income, to meet the basic necessities of existence. Furthermore, it should not take two, three, or more jobs for an educator to earn the necessary income to sustain a minimally-middle class quality of life. And yet, that is what we face at every UC. None more so than UCSC.
This past summer a USA Today analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics found that Santa Cruz is the most expensive city for educators to locate housing, followed by San Jose and San Francisco. I am in the process of my third year teaching the Cowell College, College 1 course. My brief appointment (in Fall only) assures that I will need to find additional classes at other universities in order to earn the necessary income to live in the Bay Area. Furthermore, I commute from the East Bay— which functions as an affordable site of living, while adding an additional burden of commuting up to three hours to earn a living wage — not to mention, the fluctuating cost of gas.
At a certain point, as we add more students to our courses; as we add more metrics, assessments, and evaluations to (supposedly) track student progress; in addition to our traditional areas of excess work without pay that include writing letters of recommendation, adjusting lesson plans to account for increased “assessment” demands, student development, growing email burden, allaying student anxiety about grades, their academic progress, etc. — all of which demand extended office hours — we begin to lose site of the larger role that academia plays in our society.
This institution should not require that its Lecturers themselves be wealthy in order to teach here. We are not volunteers. Rather, we establish systems of higher learning, like the University of California in order to extend democracy, honor history, and incubate the totality of future leaders — to ensure that we provide an instructional space of growth and development. There is something disengenuous during these negotiations when we consider Cowell College’s motto, “The pursuit of truth in the company of friends”, an institutional tragedy. In fact this very motto demands that as faculty, lecturers, students and administrators, we have a communal responsibility — not of measures of austerity and personal financial enrichment — rather, to ensure that this institution is the forge where creative problem solvers and critical thinkers are galvanized in the historic continuum of Enlightened Reason.
If we are to truly hold this institution to the standard of its moto, Fiat Lux, , then we must hold the institution responsible for both its general Englightenment promise expressed by its motto — as well as to Cowell’s motto — for human development, intellectual inquiry, and social justice — and against more measures of austerity. Until we do question the very foundation of these measures, the Six Sigma emphasis on higher education will function as a black hole — gradually absorbing and eventually, negating, all light.
