Nobody Ever Voted for This

The Judicial Error and Legislative Inaction That Created California’s Two-Tier Faculty System

By Scott Douglas, Southern California Regional Representative

1. The Pre-1967 Framework
2. The Temporary Classification Framework
3. The Recodification (1976)
4. The Courts (1974–1983)
5. AB 1725 (1988)
6. The Observable Consequence
7. The Band-Aids
8. Conclusion

Introduction

The California Community College system employs tens of thousands of part-time instructors who have delivered over 40% of credit instruction statewide for decades.¹ These faculty members have no tenure, no path to permanent status, no statutory right to pro-rata compensation. Though some districts have negotiated rehire preferences through collective bargaining, no statutory right to reappointment exists. They are classified as “temporary” employees — a classification that, under a judicial interpretation of the Education Code, has persisted for most of them for years or decades.

The conventional assumption is that this arrangement reflects a deliberate legislative policy choice. This paper demonstrates that it does not. The two-tier system emerged from a judicial misreading of a coherent statute, a recodification error that removed a compensation mandate, and a half-century of legislative failure to correct either. No legislator ever voted for the result.

I. The Pre-1967 Framework

From the enactment of California’s first junior college legislation in 1907 through the mid-1960s, junior colleges (now community colleges) operated as extensions of K–12 school districts. Faculty were certificated employees governed by the same Education Code provisions that applied to elementary and secondary teachers.²

Two provisions matter for this paper.

First, the three-month rule (former § 13337) limited temporary classification to the first three months of a school term. If duties continued beyond three months, the employee “shall be classified as a probationary employee” — that is, tenure-track — by operation of law. Reclassification was automatic.³

Second, the pro-rata mandate (former § 13503.1) required pro-rata compensation for part-time certificated employees who were not classified as temporary. The California Supreme Court confirmed that this provision applied to community college districts.⁴ Since temporary status lasted at most three months under the three-month rule, the exclusion affected only truly short-term hires. Any part-time instructor who taught beyond three months became probationary and was entitled to pro-rata pay.

II. The Temporary Classification Statute (1967)

In 1967, the Legislature enacted the temporary classification statute (former § 13337.5) through SB 316, as part of the broader separation of the community college system from K–12 governance under the Stiern Act (SB 669).⁵

The Bill as Introduced

SB 316 was introduced on February 8, 1967. It contained three paragraphs.⁶ The first two authorized districts to hire instructors as temporary employees to meet specified short-term needs — enrollment increases, leave replacements, and long-term illness vacancies.

The third paragraph imposed a time limitation:

Employment of any such teacher shall not continue beyond two semesters or two quarters within any period of three consecutive years.

The bill relaxed the existing three-month window, extending it to two semesters for specified short-term purposes — not for ongoing, regular instructional needs.

The Fourth Paragraph

A fourth paragraph was added through amendment during the legislative process. As enacted, it read:

Notwithstanding any other provision to the contrary, any person who is employed to teach adult or community college classes for not more than 60 percent of the hours per week considered a full-time assignment for permanent employees having comparable duties shall be classified as a temporary employee, and shall not become a probationary employee under the provisions of Section 13446.

(The 60% figure was increased to 67% in 2008 by AB 591. Throughout this paper, “60%” refers to the original statutory language.)

The paragraph classifies employees at 60% or less of full time as temporary and blocks one specific reclassification mechanism: the three-month automatic reclassification rule (former § 13446), under which any temporary employee not dismissed within three months would otherwise become probationary.

How the Fourth Paragraph Came to Read “60%”

The fourth paragraph was not in SB 316 as introduced. The Senate’s local government committee added it. Neither author of the original bill belonged to that committee.⁶ As initially drafted, the fourth paragraph applied to “any person who is employed for 15 hours or less per week to teach adult or junior college classes.”⁶

Since fifteen hours was a full-time teaching load, the committee’s language covered virtually every community college teacher, including full-time faculty.⁶ At that scope, every new hire would be classified as temporary and would serve up to two semesters before gaining probationary status. On the Assembly floor, the bill’s authors — including Senator Grunsky — offered an amendment narrowing the threshold from “15 hours or less” to “not more than 60 percent of the hours per week considered a full-time assignment.”⁶ The Senate concurred. Governor Reagan signed the bill.

The 60% threshold exists because of this floor amendment. By drawing the line at 60%, the amendment removed full-time hires from paragraph four’s temporary classification, ensuring they proceed directly to probationary — that is, tenure-track — status without serving a mandatory temporary period. The threshold protects tenure expediency for full-time hires.

How the Provisions Work Together

The statute contains four paragraphs, each doing its own work. Paragraphs one and two define purpose: temporary hiring for specified short-term needs. Paragraph three defines duration: two semesters in three years, ensuring that hiring authorized for short-term needs requires a permanent solution when the need persists. Paragraph four defines scope: employees at 60% or less of full time are classified as temporary, and the three-month reclassification rule (former § 13446) is named and blocked, leaving the two-semester limit as the operative durational boundary.

III. The Recodification (1976)

In 1976, the Legislature enacted a complete recodification of the Education Code (Stats. 1976, ch. 1010, effective April 30, 1977). The old code was repealed and replaced with a new structure: Title 2 (Elementary and Secondary Education) and Title 3 (Postsecondary Education).⁷

The temporary-employment provisions were carried forward. The three-month rule (former § 13337) became § 87480. The temporary classification statute (former § 13337.5) was distributed across §§ 87482 and 87482.5. Education Code § 3, the general recodification provision, states that recodified statutes “shall be construed as restatements and continuations, and not as new enactments.”

Despite this directive, the pro-rata mandate was not carried forward into Title 3. It was recodified as a K–12-only provision (§ 45025 in Title 2). The general cross-references in the original statute — broad enough to cover both K–12 and community college faculty — were replaced with references to specific K–12 schoolday definitions. No equivalent provision was created for community colleges, which measure workload in FTEF load percentages rather than schoolday minimums.⁸

The pro-rata mandate had never applied to temporary employees; it excluded them by its terms. The mandate applied to part-time faculty who had passed through temporary status and gained probationary or permanent classification. The rights at stake in the recodification were those of reclassified faculty.

This was a genuine drafting failure. The original pro-rata mandate used general language that — as the Supreme Court later confirmed⁴ — covered community college districts. The recodification replaced that general language with K–12-specific cross-references, narrowing the provision’s application in a way that Ed. Code § 3 does not authorize. Whether the technician who performed the rewrite understood the substantive effect is unknowable. The result was that a pro-rata mandate covering community college faculty was removed from the code — not by debate and vote, but as a byproduct of recodification. Education Code § 3 provides that recodification does not alter substantive rights. But, unwittingly or not, this one did.

The recodification failed to preserve pro-rata rights for faculty who would gain probationary status after 1976 because Title 3 no longer contained the mandate.

IV. The Courts (1974–1983)

Balen v. Peralta Junior College District (1974)

The first case to address the temporary classification statute — decided before the 1976 recodification, under the original code — confirmed what the pre-1967 framework provided. In Balen v. Peralta Junior College District (1974) 11 Cal.3d 821, a part-time instructor had taught at Peralta for four and a half consecutive years beginning in 1965, never exceeding 40% of full time.⁹ The district had classified him as temporary throughout. The Supreme Court held that under the pre-1967 three-month rule, Balen had acquired probationary status.

The district argued that the 1967 statute reclassified Balen as temporary under paragraph four. Although the court had already resolved the case under the three-month rule, it addressed the district’s argument and identified the two-semester limit as a constraint. The court noted that the statute “specifically limits such a classification to persons employed for not more than ‘two semesters or quarters within any period of three consecutive years’” and that the district, “failing to consider this limitation, … selectively relies on the last paragraph of the statute alone.” Because Balen had served over four years, the court observed he could not be classified under the temporary classification statute for more than two of those years, “a circumstance which would leave him unclassified the remainder of the time” — an “anomalous result.” The Balen court read the statute as a whole and treated paragraph four as subject to the time limitation.

The Balen opinion also documented the district’s practice: in 1970, Laney College alone dismissed over 230 part-time instructors at the end of the term and rehired them the following term — a routine practice in itself, but one the court characterized as “routine blanket dismissals to circumvent proper classification” when used to reset the classification clock. The court found the practice improper — end-of-term dismissals could not be used to avoid the reclassification the statute requires, confirming that the district understood recurring employment across terms would not avoid the time limitation.

Balen’s case concerned dismissal rights, not compensation — he was fighting wrongful termination, not claiming underpayment. Whether he was already receiving pro-rata pay is not addressed in the opinion. The question of whether pre-1967 employees like Balen were entitled to pro-rata back pay would be resolved seven years later in CTA v. San Diego (1981) — they were.

The Lower Courts and the Court of Appeal (1977)

The question of the time limitation’s applicability to paragraph four’s population was raised again in Peralta Federation of Teachers v. Peralta Community College District. The faculty prevailed in the lower court, consistent with Balen’s treatment of the time limitation as applicable. On appeal, the Court of Appeal affirmed, (1977) 69 Cal.App.3d 281.¹⁰ The court read the section as a whole, honored the plain meaning of “temporary,” and held that the time limitation applied to paragraph four’s population. Under this reading, the statutory path from temporary to tenure-track status remained intact.

The Supreme Court (1979)

The district petitioned the Supreme Court for review of the appellate court’s holding. The court chose to hear the case, and in Peralta Federation of Teachers v. Peralta Community College District (1979) 24 Cal.3d 369, it reversed.¹¹

The faculty had served as temporary employees for years and sought reclassification. The district argued that paragraph four authorized their continued temporary classification. The court sided with the district.

The court held that the fourth paragraph operates independently of paragraphs one through three. Its reasoning: the fourth paragraph begins with its own override clause (“notwithstanding any other provision to the contrary”), contains its own classification command, and references the three-month reclassification rule specifically rather than the three-month rule in the pre-existing statute. The court read this as a self-contained provision and concluded that the time limitation in paragraph three does not apply to paragraph four’s population. The Legislative Counsel’s digest supported independent operation. A contemporaneous letter from the bill’s co-author to the Governor, explicitly stating that the time limitation applied, was dismissed as “offset” by the digest.¹¹

Where the Court’s Reasoning Fails

The court’s holding that paragraph four operates independently — that it establishes its own classification mechanism — is supported by the text. But the court did not stop there. It held that the time limitation in paragraph three does not apply to paragraph four’s population. This second conclusion does not follow from the first, and the court provided no analysis connecting them.

The court collapsed two separate questions — independence and duration — into one. Its stated basis for dismissing Grunsky was that the digest “offset” his letter. But Grunsky and the digest were not addressing the same question. The digest described paragraph four as independently operative — a statement about the classification mechanism. Grunsky stated that the time limitation applied — a statement about duration. These positions are compatible. The digest could be correct about independence, and Grunsky could simultaneously be correct about the time limitation. The court treated them as contradictory when they are not.

The court read “notwithstanding any other provision to the contrary” as overriding paragraph three’s time limitation, but did not analyze whether the time limitation is a provision “to the contrary.” It is not. The time limitation defines temporary classification; it does not contradict it. A provision that says how long an employee may be classified as temporary is consistent with a provision that classifies the employee as temporary. The fourth paragraph names the provision it overrides — the three-month reclassification rule (former § 13446). It does not name paragraph three. If the Legislature had intended to override the time limitation, it could have said so, as it said so for the reclassification rule.

The court did not address the plain meaning of “temporary” as a constraint on its interpretation. It did not apply the canon of statutory construction that requires statutes to be read to avoid absurd results. And it did not explain why the fourth paragraph’s specific reference to the three-month reclassification rule — naming the provision it blocks — should be read as also blocking paragraph three, which it does not name.

Nothing in paragraph four contains its own duration limit. Once the court held paragraph three inapplicable, the statute supplied no endpoint for the classification. Yet paragraph four contains no language authorizing indefinite service. Indefinite service arises only by inference from the absence of a remaining limit — not from anything the Legislature enacted. The question is not whether the time limitation applies. The question is: where in the statute did the Legislature authorize permanency? The text never says it. The text only says “temporary.”

The Confirming Evidence

The textual reading does not require extrinsic evidence — the statute is clear on its face. But three contemporaneous sources confirm what the text provides.

Senator Grunsky, the bill’s co-author and the drafter of the floor amendment, wrote to the Governor that SB 316 “allows the district to use hourly teachers without having them become probationary employees no matter how many months they are employed, provided such persons teach less than sixty percent of the hours considered a full time assignment for permanent employees, and provided they do not employ such person more than two semesters or quarters during any three year period.”¹² “Hourly teachers” refers to part-time faculty, who are paid by the hour rather than on salary. “No matter how many months” apparently refers to the three-month reclassification rule: these part-timers could serve as temporary beyond the three-month threshold, but not beyond two semesters. An individual legislator’s statement is not controlling evidence of legislative intent. But Grunsky was not an ordinary legislator on this bill — he was its co-author and the drafter of the floor amendment that produced the 60% language. His explanation of how the bill operates is highly probative of how it was understood at enactment. Grunsky stated two conditions governing the same population: the 60% load limit from paragraph four, and the two-semester time limit from paragraph three. He applied both to paragraph four’s population, not by implication but by direct statement. He made no effort to explain or justify the connection between the two paragraphs — evidence of how universally the relationship was understood. If the connection had been uncertain, it would have required argument. It did not.

The Governor’s press release upon signing described SB 316 as: “Authorizes junior colleges to hire teachers as temporary employees for a semester or quarter of the school year if such additional teachers are needed because of higher enrollment of students during that semester or quarter. The bill limits such employment to a total of two semesters or quarters during any consecutive three-year period.”¹³ The 60% provision is not mentioned separately. The temporary hiring the Governor described is part-time hiring by operation of law — the floor amendment ensured that full-time hires are not subject to paragraph four’s temporary classification. The Governor’s description of time-limited temporary hiring is a description of part-time faculty employment, subject to the two-semester limit.

It is worth noting that had the floor amendment to 60% not been adopted, the court’s interpretation would have classified all community college faculty — including full-time hires — as permanent temporaries. The 60% threshold, enacted to protect tenure expediency for full-time hires, is the only reason the court’s reading did not produce that result for the entire workforce.

The Legislative Counsel’s digest described paragraph four as independently operative. As noted above, this is compatible with the time limitation applying. Independence and duration are different questions.

Haase v. San Diego (1980)

One year after Peralta, the Court of Appeal in Haase v. San Diego Community College District (1980) 113 Cal.App.3d 913 characterized the consequence:

“[C]ertificated employees hired after the effective date of the statute may perennially be classified as temporary, providing they teach ‘less than 60 percent of the hours per week considered a full-time assignment for permanent employees having comparable duties.’”¹⁴

“Perennially” is Haase’s word. Peralta held that the time limitation did not apply to paragraph four’s population. It did not analyze whether “temporary” imposes any constraint on the duration of the classification beyond the time limitation it held inapplicable. That question — whether a statute can authorize indefinite employment under a classification called “temporary” — was never addressed.

Haase’s characterization was never challenged in court. The standing problem explains why. The direct challenge — asserting entitlement to probationary status after two semesters — is foreclosed by Peralta itself. And the only remaining challenge would amount to asserting that the employer should have terminated the employment sooner — a claim no part-time faculty member in a precarious employment situation would bring. Even if one did, demonstrating individual harm would be difficult, since the claim is self-defeating on its face. The harm to tens of thousands of permanent temporaries as a class is evident; the harm to any individual plaintiff, in the form such a suit could assert, is not.

The permanence of “temporary” became settled practice through the absence of challenge, not through adjudication.

CTA v. San Diego (1981)

In California Teachers Association v. San Diego Community College District (1981) 28 Cal.3d 692, the Supreme Court confirmed the pay consequences.¹⁵ Pre-1967 teachers reclassified as permanent were entitled to pro-rata compensation under the pro-rata mandate (former § 13503.1). But the mandate excluded “any person classified as a temporary employee under Section 13337 and 13337.5.” Because the temporary classification now had no defined endpoint, the exclusion from pro-rata pay had no defined endpoint either.

Ferris v. Los Rios (1983)

In Ferris v. Los Rios Community College District (1983) 146 Cal.App.3d 1, the Court of Appeal confirmed the recodification consequence.¹⁶ The recodified pro-rata provision (§ 45025), as rewritten with K–12-specific cross-references, applied only to K–12 instructors. “This conclusion,” the court wrote, “is compelled by the language of section 45025, if not by its singular placement.” It was the rewritten cross-references, not merely the placement in Title 2, that made the provision inapplicable to community colleges — confirming that the recodification error lay in replacing general language with K–12-specific language without creating a community college equivalent.

The Ferris court noted that pro-rata rights might derive from other legal sources — collective bargaining, contract, or constitutional equal protection theories.¹⁷ But the statutory mandate was gone from Title 3.

What Was Never Decided

The Peralta decision has been treated for nearly five decades as having settled the question of permanent temporariness. The court was aware its holding meant long-serving part-timers would remain temporary — that was the case before it. But what the court decided and what was subsequently assumed are not the same thing.

Peralta held that paragraph four’s classification mechanism is independent and that the time limitation does not apply — but provided no analysis connecting the two conclusions. The time limitation remains in the statute. It was not repealed. Independence and the time limitation are separate questions, and the “notwithstanding” clause does not reach a definitional provision. The court answered one question and assumed it had answered both.

V. AB 1725 (1988)

In 1988, the Legislature enacted AB 1725, widely regarded as the most significant community college reform legislation since the Stiern Act.¹⁸ AB 1725 responded to the growing reliance on part-time faculty by treating the symptom without identifying its cause — the court’s reading of the temporary classification statute.

AB 1725 established the 75/25 goal — that 75% of credit instruction be performed by full-time faculty (Ed. Code § 87482.6) — never achieved statewide. It also authorized districts to set compensation for temporary employees classified under the statute — employees who, as temporary, were already excluded from the pro-rata mandate by its own terms. The authorization formalized the absence of any parity obligation rather than creating it. The statute did not mandate sub-parity pay. It gave districts discretion. But discretion without a floor is permission, and the absence of a mandate for parity left no legal obligation to provide it.

AB 1725 also recodified the override language. The original “notwithstanding any other provision to the contrary” became “notwithstanding any other provision of law.” The broader formulation does not change the analysis. No override clause — however broadly phrased — nullifies the entire code. Both formulations are conflict-displacement devices: California courts construe a “notwithstanding” clause as a declaration of legislative intent to override conflicting law,¹⁹ and a provision can operate “in spite of” only what would otherwise impede it. The time limitation does not prevent paragraph four from operating. Paragraph four can classify, block the three-month reclassification rule, and do everything it says with the time limitation still in place. To find a conflict, one must first assume that paragraph four grants indefinite temporary classification — but indefiniteness is the very question in dispute. The conflict appears only if Peralta’s answer is presupposed. And rewording in the course of revision is presumed nonsubstantive: a change in phraseology is not construed as changing the law absent evidence of intent to alter meaning, and there is none here — the change was a standardization of drafting language. The time limitation does not conflict with paragraph four under either formulation. But even if the broader language were read to reach the time limitation, the consequence would be the same: the fix is legislative, and the 1988 change would represent one more instance of the Legislature entrenching the Peralta reading without examining it.

AB 1725 also marks the point at which the low-cost correction was lost. A one-sentence clarification to the recodified temporary classification statute, restoring the time limitation’s applicability, was available at any point between 1979 and 1988, while the system’s reliance on Peralta-era staffing was still shallow enough for conversion costs to be absorbed incrementally. The Legislature did not make it. Instead, AB 1725 built an elaborate remedial structure on top of the Peralta reading — accepting it as the foundation rather than examining it. What closed in 1988 was not the possibility of correction. It was the era in which correction would have been cheap.

The 75/25 goal acknowledged that part-time employment would be a structural feature of the system — and some temporary hiring is legitimate: enrollment fluctuates, specialists teach niche courses, evening programs require flexibility. But the scale of the system’s dependence on part-time faculty far exceeds what these legitimate needs would produce. The Legislature sought the 75/25 goal precisely because the overuse of part-time faculty had become a recognized problem — an overuse that Peralta made possible by holding the time limitation inapplicable.

VI. The Observable Consequence

Today, over 40% of credit instruction in the California Community College system is delivered by part-time employees classified as temporary — and has been for over two decades.¹ This figure is not consistent with a statute that authorizes temporary hiring for temporary needs.

A district with a stable, ongoing need for instruction — one that does not fluctuate meaningfully from term to term — has a permanent need, not a temporary one. Enrollment fluctuations, leave replacements, and illness vacancies might justify temporary hiring for a small share of instructional capacity. They do not justify 40% of instructional capacity.

The two-semester time limitation is the provision that would have prevented this. It forces the question every two semesters: is this position meeting a temporary need or a permanent one? If the need has persisted for two semesters, the statute’s answer is that the need is permanent and should be met with a permanent position. The district must either create one or stop employing the person. Under that constraint, a system delivering 40% of instruction through temporary employees cannot develop, because the positions would convert before the accumulation could occur.

The court’s reading rendered this mechanism inoperative for paragraph four’s population. Without the time limitation applying, districts never face the question and the conversion never happens. Temporary hiring, being cheaper and more flexible than permanent hiring, becomes the default staffing model — not because the instructional needs are temporary, but because no legal mechanism compels conversion. The 40% is the measure of how far that default has gone astray.

A careful reader may note that the time limitation constrains the individual’s classification, not the position itself. A district could theoretically comply by cycling through a different instructor every two semesters, keeping the position temporary while rotating the people. In practice, this is operationally impractical and educationally destructive — recruiting, onboarding, loss of institutional knowledge, disruption to students. The time limitation makes it irrational to staff permanent needs with rotating temps. In practice, districts would convert because conversion is better than cycling.

VII. The Band-Aids

In the decades since AB 1725, the Legislature has returned to part-time faculty conditions repeatedly. It has funded parity pay programs (without mandating parity). It has funded office hours. It has enacted reemployment preference provisions. It has required reimbursement of health care costs for part-time faculty meeting certain thresholds. It has established the Faculty Obligation Number to enforce the 75/25 goal.

Each measure addresses a symptom of the two-tier structure. Each accepts the two-tier structure as given. In fifty years of remedial legislation, the Legislature has never examined whether the underlying structure was the product of deliberate legislative choice — or of judicial interpretation and circumstance.

The 75/25 goal and the FON deserve particular attention. The 75/25 goal attempts to limit the proportion of instruction delivered by part-time faculty. The FON is the enforcement mechanism. Neither has achieved its purpose — the goal has never been met statewide in nearly four decades.

The two-semester time limitation — rendered inoperative by the court — would have achieved what the 75/25 goal attempts, directly and without enforcement apparatus. The Legislature could have added one sentence to the recodified temporary classification statute (§ 87482.5) clarifying that the limitation applies. Instead, over fifty years, it built the 75/25 goal, the FON, parity pay funding, office hour funding, rehire rights, health care reimbursement — an apparatus that has not solved the problem — when a one-sentence statutory amendment, made early, would have addressed the underlying structural problem that all of this later legislation attempted to mitigate.

The contrast between the simplicity of the correction and the complexity of the workarounds is itself evidence that the Legislature has not examined the statute. It accepted the court’s reading and worked around it, rather than correcting a judicial interpretation that the original text does not support. The fiscal incentive explains the inertia: converting temporary positions to permanent ones across the system’s 73 community college districts would require replacing cheap, flexible staffing with full-time positions carrying salary, benefits, and tenure obligations. Had the correction been made fifty years ago, these costs would have been absorbed incrementally as a normal part of operations. Today, after half a century of accumulated reliance on inexpensive temporary staffing, the investment required is unknown but likely substantial — a barrier the Legislature has not been willing to confront.

The accumulated damage has now reached the point of generating independent legal consequences. In Roberts v. Long Beach Community College District (L.A. County Superior Court, filed 2022), a wage-and-hour class action on behalf of over 1,450 part-time faculty produced a proposed $18 million settlement — the court granted preliminary approval on July 1, 2026; final court approval remains pending as of this writing.²⁰ Roberts did not arise from the original misreading. It arises from fifty years of employment practice built on top of it. The structural mismatch between the classification and the employment reality — workers performing permanent work under a temporary label — is now actionable under modern labor law independent of any statutory correction. The Legislature’s failure to examine the foundation has not merely perpetuated inequity. It has created liability.

VIII. Conclusion

No legislator voted to create a system in which full-time positions could be replaced with part-time employees who have no path to tenure and no right to pro-rata pay. No legislator voted to classify a permanent workforce as “temporary.”

The statute was coherent. The court collapsed two separate questions — independence and duration — into one and held the time limitation inapplicable without analysis connecting that conclusion to the text. A separate recodification error removed the pro-rata mandate, though this is secondary given that the mandate excluded temporary employees by its own terms.

The Legislature has spent fifty years applying remedies to symptoms — parity funding, office hours, rehire rights, health care, the 75/25 goal — without examining the framework that produces them.

It may be argued that subsequent Legislatures, by leaving Peralta undisturbed, implicitly ratified the court’s reading. The 1988 language change gives that argument its strongest form: AB 1725 rewrote the override clause in broader terms nine years after Peralta had already held the time limitation inapplicable — a sequence that can be read as adoption. The doctrinal answer is in Part V: both formulations of the override clause displace only conflicting law, and the time limitation conflicts with nothing. But the ratification argument also fails on its own terms. Ratification requires awareness, and the evidence points the other way. AB 1725 treated the consequences of Peralta — the overuse of part-time faculty, the absence of parity — without examining the decision itself. The Legislature built the 75/25 goal and the FON to achieve indirectly what the time limitation would have achieved directly, which is not the behavior of a body that understood it had a simpler tool available. A Legislature that repeatedly legislates to mitigate an outcome it never examined has not knowingly embraced that outcome. Acquiescence is not enactment. Building on a foundation is not the same as laying it. No Legislature has enacted a statute providing that faculty at 60% or less may remain temporary indefinitely — and the apparatus built to work around that result is evidence that no Legislature intended it.

A one-sentence clarification to § 87482.5 — restoring the applicability of the two-semester time limitation — was the correction available at every point between 1979 and 1988. That is what the statute intended. That is what the bill’s author stated. That is what the Court of Appeal held. Made then, the correction would have been simple and its costs absorbed incrementally. The Legislature did not make it. Instead, it built the 75/25 goal, the FON, parity pay funding, office hours, rehire rights, and health care reimbursement on top of the Peralta reading. What a timely correction would have cost then, and what restoring the original framework would require now, are not the same question. Any restoration would also require enacting a pro-rata mandate in Title 3 — the recodification error that removed it was a separate failure, and correcting the classification statute alone would leave faculty converting to probationary status without the compensation rights the original framework provided. The Legislature faces that larger question today because it declined the smaller one for fifty years. The principle, though, remains what it was in 1967: the statute provided a time-limited temporary classification, and the Legislature needs only to restore what was always there.

Endnotes

1. California State Auditor, Report 2022-113, California Community Colleges: Increasing Full-Time Faculty and Diversity Remains a Challenge (February 2023), at 4 (full-time faculty calculation at 65% in 2003, declining to 55% by 2015, recovering to nearly 60% by 2021 — part-time instruction above 40% continuously since at least 1999, the first year for which the Chancellor’s Office provided data); California State Auditor, Report 2000-107, California Community Colleges: Part-Time Faculty Are Compensated Less Than Full-Time Faculty for Teaching Activities (June 2000) (part-time credit instruction grew from 40% to 47% in the five years prior to 2000).
2. See generally Cal. Ed. Code §§ 13334–13337 (1959 Ed. Code).
3. Former Ed. Code § 13337 (1959 Ed. Code).
4. California Teachers Assn. v. San Diego Community College Dist. (1981) 28 Cal.3d 692, 697.
5. Stats. 1967, ch. 1655 (SB 669).
6. Peralta Federation of Teachers v. Peralta Community College Dist. (1979) 24 Cal.3d 369, 378–380 (reciting the legislative history of SB 316).
7. Stats. 1976, ch. 1010, effective April 30, 1977.
8. Ferris v. Los Rios Community College Dist. (1983) 146 Cal.App.3d 1, 8.
9. Balen v. Peralta Junior College Dist. (1974) 11 Cal.3d 821, 828–829.
10. Peralta Federation of Teachers v. Peralta Community College Dist. (1977) 69 Cal.App.3d 281.
11. Peralta Federation of Teachers v. Peralta Community College Dist. (1979) 24 Cal.3d 369.
12. Id. at 380–381.
13. Press Release, Office of Governor Ronald Reagan, describing SB 316 – Chapter 705 (Grunsky & Petris). Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Digital Library Collections, Collection: Reagan, Ronald: Gubernatorial Papers, 1966-74: Press Unit, Folder Title: Releases – Bills Signed and Vetoed 1967 [03/20/1967-07/13/1967], Box P22.
14. Haase v. San Diego Community College Dist. (1980) 113 Cal.App.3d 913, 918–919.
15. California Teachers Assn. v. San Diego Community College Dist. (1981) 28 Cal.3d 692, 697–698.
16. Ferris v. Los Rios Community College Dist. (1983) 146 Cal.App.3d 1, 8.
17. Id. at 8–9.
18. Stats. 1988, ch. 973 (AB 1725).
19. See, e.g., In re Greg F. (2012) 55 Cal.4th 393 (a “notwithstanding” clause declares legislative intent to override conflicting law); Arias v. Superior Court (2009) 46 Cal.4th 969 (construing “notwithstanding any other provision of law” as displacing conflicting provisions).
20. Roberts v. Long Beach Community College Dist., No. 22STCV11381 (L.A. County Super. Ct., filed Apr. 4, 2022). Judge Stuart Rice ruled for plaintiffs on February 19, 2025. The district board approved an $18 million settlement in January 2026; the court granted preliminary approval on July 1, 2026; final court approval was pending as of this writing.