The administration says it, too, is concerned. He declines to say which departments he is worried about, but he goes to great lengths to explain how the university got where it is. He notes that Hayward did not lay off any tenured professors during California's fiscal crisis, but did lose about 10 per cent of its professors through attrition. As part of an agreement to deal with the budget crunch, administrators and professors agreed that departments would no longer have a guaranteed number of faculty positions. When a professor retires, that post is essentially given back to the university, to be allotted to a department that most needs a new hire.
Administrators hope to hire nine new professors to begin next academic year.
In 1995, full timers, including full-time lecturers, accounted for 74 per cent of the total faculty, down from 89 per cent in 1989. It quite simply isn't. Whether Hayward is an anomaly in academe is debatable, professors here say, and beside the point. Departments with a heavy reliance on lecturers are losing clout on the campus and stature in the larger academic community, they argue. Tenured professors say their fight is with the administration.