While lecturers at the University of California are engaged in
an ongoing fight for improved benefits, a number of a lecturers
remain seemingly unaffected.
Aiming to gain publicity for their demands for better job
security, higher salaries, and more respect, over 1,000 lecturers
went on strike at five UC campuses last month.
But not every lecturer is up in arms.
Michael Suman has been a lecturer in the communication studies
department at UCLA since 1995, and he is satisfied with his
job.
Suman said he feels fairly removed from the complaints of his
fellow lecturers. In his personal experience, he said he has not
come across the problems many other lecturers bemoan.
“Personally, I think I’m quite well-treated,”
he said. “Sadly, that’s not true for all
lecturers.”
He credits his positive experience to the communications
department, though he recognizes that things aren’t perfect.
He said it would be better if lecturers had a little more input,
and is debating whether or not to participate in a possible
lecturers’ strike, which the union has said will likely
happen in January.
But overall he’s happy with his position.
Suman said he enjoys the freedom the job provides since he is
able to separate his teaching from his research.
“I have the best of both worlds; I can do both (research
and teach) and I’m not under the gun to do research for my
department,” Suman said. He said he doesn’t want to
have to deal with the intense “publish or perish”
attitude he’s encountered in some departments.
Suman, who earned his Ph.D. in sociology at UCLA in the 1980s,
said he does spend a considerable part of his week focusing on
research at the UCLA Center for Communication Policy where he is a
research director focusing on the social effects of the Internet.
He has published articles and books, but at his own pace.
“I just have to satisfy my bosses (at the Center for
Communication Policy) from year to year,” he said.
Suman added that he has found that professors are under
day-to-day pressure to do research and publish, since that is what
advancement in their department is based on.
The rest of his week is spent teaching an introductory
communication studies lecture, an upper division class on the
effects of the Internet, and a few honors courses.
Suman recently came up for review and passed in a process
similar to a review that would grant a professor tenure. Another
key difference between a lecturer and a tenured professor, he said,
is that he is not “locked in for life.”
Being tied down wouldn’t suit Suman very well, considering
that before he settled down as a lecturer at UCLA, he taught at
University of Maryland campuses in Japan, Korea, China and the
Marshall Islands.
“It combined my love of travel and other cultures with
teaching,” he said.
Suman said he found teaching in Asia interesting since he not
only taught Americans, but people from all over the world as well.
When he was teaching in Seoul, for instance, he said his classes
were usually 50 percent Korean, 30 percent American and the rest
were from several other countries ““ Sweden, Argentina and
Yugoslavia, for instance.
Toward the end of his time in Asia, he was offered a job in
Tokyo, where he assumed he would spend the rest of his life. But an
old student of his who now works in the communication studies
department at UCLA called to offer him a position, and he was faced
with a difficult decision.
“(Teaching in Asia was) a job that I loved; it was
extremely difficult to break away from,” Suman said.
He said the opportunity to study mass media at UCLA was too
exciting to pass up.
Though Suman does feel the pull of his second home ““
he’ll be going back to Japan over winter break ““
he’s at UCLA for a reason.
“I’m here because I like my job. I think it’s
a very important job because university education is so important.
University education can change people’s lives,” Suman
said.
Not all of Suman’s students find that this attitude
surfaces in his teaching.
“He seems like a textbook teacher; it feels like he reads
what he says,” third-year communication studies student
Marina Merkouris said, but added that “he knows his
stuff.”
Suman’s lecture’s seem to reflect his attitude
toward his job, other students said.
“He does a really good job. He’s interesting and
entertaining,” said first-year English student Beth
Gollnick.
Some students recognize that presenting such a large amount of
information is not easy.
“He makes it pretty interesting even though it’s a
long lecture,” third-year communication studies student
Ricardo Vazquez said.
For a person who loves to travel and finds himself in a position
many would say has very little job security, Suman is quite
optimistic.
“I have a good set-up here,” he said. “I think
I’ll be here a good while.”