"A longer-term issue, brought into prominence now, is the university’s increasing reliance on lecturers to teach undergraduates, particularly in CLAS. Brutally put, lecturers are cheap and are treated by administrators as dispensable. Though any large teaching institution must have some short-term teaching staff to fill in when regular faculty are ill or on leave, current use of lecturers goes well beyond that. In seeking to achieve budgetary “flexibility,” CLAS employs scores of lecturers who undertake crippling teaching loads, work for low salaries, and who may then be cast aside with little or no notice. From a management point of view, the obvious attractions of that arrangement, along with the deep pool of talented and highly accomplished PhDs in the Iowa City area, have made over-reliance on lecturers too seductive to resist. Now CLAS administrators are exercising their flexibility by failing to renew lecturer contracts, without regard to the human cost or the gaps in the curriculum that will result. Yet as other colleges such as the Carver College of Medicine have demonstrated, ways exist of sharing the sacrifice more equitably, such as temporary salary reductions or reducing the salaries of highly paid faculty and administrators, without loss to the educational program.

"True, UI President Bruce Harreld and other representatives of the central administration met with Faculty Senate and Faculty Council a number of times to inform us of their deliberations and answer our questions. However, it quickly became clear that they had already decided to move forward on this risky scheme. [...]

The main concern which faculty raised at every meeting, and to which no one from president on down had a satisfactory response, was how this scheme would affect state appropriations. What’s to stop the Legislature from reducing them in proportion to the millions of dollars we will now be competing over in the coming years? The answer: Nothing. 

Indeed, insofar as the scheme was originally proposed by the governor, it would appear likely that such deappropriation was part of the plan.

While COGS has successfully negotiated reductions in fees through past contracts, the University continues to manipulate how fees are classified to keep increasing charges. Fees like those facing international and first-year graduate workers are not covered by this scholarship because, while required, they do not fall under the University’s official, but seemingly arbitrary, category of “mandatory fees.”