Return of the Loyalty Oaths

A lecturer at California State University at Fullerton was fired because she refused to sign a loyalty oath.  Now, first being a lecturer sucks.  You have no security, very little if any academic freedom, are evaluated at the whims of a department chair who prefers to hire their friends... shall we go on?  It sucks.

Being a lecturer normally means the position is not a permanent job in any way, shape, or form.  While this has been a bonanza for universities as it has fueled the growth in the number of students who can attend, alas it brings a form of indentured servitude to the lecturers and adjuncts who teach the classes.   

For the university it is a huge win because non-full time personnel are cheaper and health insurance is not required.  It allows them to pay administrators and researchers more while staffing classes with cheap readily available labor.  Make no mistake these are the instructors who will be teaching your children soon, if not now.

So, being a lecturer is no longer simply the indignity of hard work for very little pay and virtually no respect, now several schools are forcing these educators to sign loyalty oaths that go back to the cold war years.

The lecturer at California State University at Fullerton has been fired because she refused to sign a loyalty oath to “defend” the U.S. and California Constitutions “against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

Wendy Gonaver, a Quaker and a lifelong pacifist, was set to teach American studies at the institution this academic year. She told the newspaper that she had offered to sign the oath if she could attach a short statement expressing her views, but Fullerton wouldn’t allow that.

Of course, what many academics don't realize is that their institution may already have loyalty oaths -- when teachers and researchers sign those "letters of appointment" there are riders and more to the contract that are not spelled out except in documents in the President's and Provost's offices that include... yup, you guessed it among other things... old loyalty oaths from the cold war. 

And, if these administrators wanted to do so, they can fire teachers, professors, researchers, adjuncts, and lecturers for failure to abide by that part of their contract.  A part of their contract that in most cases they were never even given to read. 

Oh where, oh where has my academic freedom gone?  Oh where, oh where can it be?