The number of students at the University of Hawaii has grown during the last few years, but the number of tenured professors has not. Instead, the university is relying on a cheaper teaching alternative: lecturers. Professors say the university is saving money, but at the expense of its academic future.

“That’s not a way to build up a university,” said Michael Weinstein, a recently retired sociology professor at UH Manoa. “Lecturers are expected to teach courses, but they’re not expected to do full range of faculty responsibilities. They’re not meeting with committees, serving in leadership positions and researching. You have to have a lot of those people to create one full-time professorial job.”

In the last three years, fall enrollment within the university system increased by nearly 11 percent. The number of lecturers kept pace with enrollment, but the number of tenured faculty has hovered around 1,800 during that same time period.

‘Gypsy Faculty’

Growing enrollment and the routine retirement of faculty members means there is a growing need for professors to teach courses. The UH system enrolls about 60,000 students annually, spread across 10 campuses. But the administration seems to be relying ever more heavily on lecturers,¹ who are less expensive than full-time faculty.

“Lecturers are hired off the tenure track,” said Weinstein. “They’re hired semester by semester, so sometimes it’s a way of exploiting people, because they don’t get benefits or any security. They often call those people ‘gypsy faculty.'”

In some cases, even graduate students are teaching courses, said David Cameron Duffy, professor of Botany, Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology at UH Manoa. He serves on the UH Manoa Faculty Senate and the University of Hawaii Professional Assembly board of directors.

“We’re often dragging people in off the streets to teach math or something,” Duffy said. His department recently lost several faculty. “We’ve lost four or five faculty in the last couple of years and have only been able to replace one. Another we’re hiring now.”

Duffy said funding for faculty didn’t seem to be a priority for the university in the wake of budget cuts. (Duffy helped facilitate a financial accountability workshop for UH faculty in January so they could better understand the UH System budget.)

UH President M.R.C. Greenwood confirmed that the financial squeeze has led to different hiring practices, during a budget briefing before the Senate Ways and Means Committee in January.

“We are serving many more students with far fewer general funds,” Greenwood testified. “We have managed this by various means throughout our campuses.” Those methods included “deferred hiring and hiring of lecturers to fill instructional positions,” she said.

That happened when Weinstein retired from his job with the sociology department. There has been no discussion of or movement to replace him yet, he said.

“The concern is that the UH budget is so tight that we don’t get to automatically replace people,” he said. “We do what we can with whoever is here.”

The focus on money over academics also diminishes the faculty’s influence over the direction of the university.

Save Money Today, Lose Out on Research Funds Tomorrow

But while the university may be saving money in the short term, professors say it could be losing out in the longer term.

Full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members are required to conduct research and publish — both of which bring dollars, credibility and new ideas to the university. The tenure and tenure-track faculty at UH received $452 million in outside funds for research last year.

Weinstein said that even though it’s possible for the university to hire more lecturers than tenure-track faculty for a lower price, he said, “You’re not going to get the same results.”

A lecturer-heavy faculty isn’t all bad though, said Academic Affairs Director Joanne Itano.

“I think lecturers provide some unique contributions to campuses, because some of them have particular expertise that you can only get by hiring someone from the field to teach it,” she said.

Lecturers are especially attractive to administrators during times of economic uncertainty, because the university can hire them and let them go as needed. Lecturers are also a relatively inexpensive way to help the university system reach at least one of its goals: producing more graduates.

“We want to increase the number of individuals who earn degrees and certifications from UH,” Itano said. “We need a more educated citizenry, and more people with college credentials in our state.”

In the scramble to increase its graduation rate, the university system’s faculty choices may have a negative impact on some of its other goals — among them increasing UH patents, disclosures and licenses, and becoming a key driver for Hawaii’s economy. Patents and publications are the work of tenured faculty.

A higher graduation rate and a vibrant academic community don’t have to be at odds with one another, though, Itano said.

“They’re not competing initiatives, because they’re all important. Research is important to our statehood. We want to create knowledge, but we also want to produce more college graduates who can help create that knowledge.”

But some faculty members feel the university would benefit from being more selective about its goals and aligning its policies with them.

“Of course we can’t be all things to all people, so we have to decide what we want to be,” said Duffy.