BY CAPRICE LAWLESS
Our work advocating for faculty may seem to be eclipsed, at present, by national events, but the stellar AAUP members in our Colorado Community College System (CCCS) Chapters, befriended now by scores of authors, activists, lawmakers and organizers around the country, tirelessly persist, in this, the Age of Persistence.
It looks as though our request for a legislative audit has been successfully railroaded by those under the dome who are opposed to social justice. Those of you outside Colorado may be interested to know that in November, Colorado voters determined that an aged statute legalizing slavery in Colorado, in certain circumstances, was worth saving and so it stands. We have many downtown who ARE dedicated to social justice, but they are in the minority, at least for now.
When you understand that so many in Colorado eye slavery as a useful employment model, it makes it easy for the high rollers in our system to cast those of us seeking a living wage as less than grateful, I suppose.
Meanwhile, in our rapidly corporatizing 13-college system of community colleges, communicating with peers grows more difficult by the day. Our once friendly and spacious mail room, its walls lined with big faculty mailboxes, has been replaced by a wall of slots into which we are allowed to leave a folder or two, under the watchful eye of a staffer, but never much more and AAUP items are strictly verboten. All the shabby and endearing bulletin boards crammed with evidence of community and life have been removed. They were replaced with new, smaller bulletin boards, postings for which must be approved by the vice president. Anything posted in a classroom is subject to similar review, and thus, our classrooms are as inviting as clinic examination rooms.
Speaking of sterility, students and faculty might yearn for something meaty to read in such an environment, but if you want to read a newspaper on the Front Range Community College Campus, for example, you are out of luck. There are neither copies of the local Denver Post, nor the New York Times anywhere on campus. The assumption (and it is wrong) that all of our impoverished students and their faculty majority have the latest in mobile technology, and so do not need anything in print. That assumption is wrong. Nevertheless, the campus forbids newspaper vending machines, where a student or a faculty member might be able to purchase news. The campus bookstore only sells textbooks, sweatshirts, snacks, etc. There are no local newspapers, magazines, fiction or non-fiction books for sale anywhere on our campus, and the library is only open until 8:00 p.m. at night, and not until 1:00 p.m on weekends. Reading anything outside that assigned in a classroom seems to be discouraged; our sterile hallways and classrooms underscore that theme. At one of our campuses, members report that they will try to hand AAUP brochures to faculty in the hallway when no one is looking. When information as important as the AAUP principles can be passed along only via subterfuge akin to a drug deal, something is seriously wrong with the way Colorado lawmakers allow the CCCS and its presidents to interpret the First Amendment.
How wrong? The individual presidents at the 13 colleges (all of whom have received hefty wage increases in the past few years as high as $35K), seem to have determined that the AAUP (mostly because it advocates for higher adjunct faculty wages) is a so-called “outside group.” As such, we are not allowed to set up a table to pass along literature about the AAUP without first paying a hefty “table” fee of $50 and then showing proof of a liability policy, should someone trip over a chair or sprain an ankle. Those policies (designed for vendors of T-shirts, etc.) run about $200/per event, thus effectively killing AAUP membership recruitment in our college system. It’s also unfair.
How unfair? The nation’s leading organization that advocates for faculty rights and wages is thus silenced, while the organization advocating for higher executive wages, the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), is well-funded by the CCCS membership dues and is widely promoted in our college system. Likewise, administrators and staff who want to belong to the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) are encouraged to do so, and the CCCS has a strong presence in the CUPA-HR. Hourly personnel, likewise, are automatically a part of the Colorado state employee union that advocates for them, Colorado WINS. However, since in the CCCS exploitation of faculty is not considered unjust, but considered a cunning business model, membership in the AAUP and the attendant knowledge of its principles of fairness, due process, academic freedom and shared governance, are thus silenced.
Evidently we are supposed to fill that silence with the joy of another $4.80/week pay raise, similar to the one adjunct faculty received last year. While full-time faculty recently received a 20% pay raise plus a COLA increase, and while presidents, vice-presidents, deans and directors have all seen tens of thousands in pay increases recently, the CCCS tossed to its adjunct faculty (the faculty majority) a $4.80/week pay increase again this year. Such measly pay raises to adjunct faculty speak volumes, especially given that the CCCS is one of the wealthiest and most financially secure community college systems in the nation. (CCCS President Nancy McCallin’s salary is up $105K from 2013. She now earns three times more than Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper.) Also, the CCCS saw multi-million-dollar revenue increases in the past two years in student tuition and fees, fee-for-services, auxiliary enterprises, state appropriations, federal PELL grants, contracts and grants, state capital contributions, capital grants and gifts, and other operating revenues, according to its most recent Financial and Compliance Audit.
Even so, instead of using any of those increases to assign a meaningful raise to its faculty majority, the CCCS encourages campus leaders to “show appreciation” for adjunct faculty. Accordingly, each spring during Adjunct Appreciation Week, work study students are obliged to go to the Dollar Store, purchase a mountain of 10 for $1 “Thank-You” cards, write a brief sentence on the inside thanking each adjunct faculty member for his/her work, and then to put those cards into the faculty mailboxes. Also, on an appointed day that week, staffers leave behind in the decidedly bleak, windowless and bulletin-board-less adjunct workrooms trays of bagels, kiddie drinks with bite-off lids, a few boxes of generic cookies, and the like. We are to consider this genuine appreciation, especially given the little, handwritten signs the staffers prop against the boxes of bagels that read: “Adjunct Instructors – THANK YOU for all you DO!!!” Seeing the microscopic increase in our paychecks is a tough-enough reminder that teaching, as a career, is almost over in the community college. As for the left-behind-for-you treats, they have the same cachet for us as do the bowls of water coffee shop owners leave out for their customers’ dogs.
It is in this Orwellian environment that we filed a Colorado Open Records Act Request in early January, as we do periodically, to get a bit of the type of information that is never made available to the public in our increasingly non-transparent public institution. Briefly, here’s a breakdown on the categories of employment by headcount (not by FTE).
Of the 12,590 CCCS employees:
- 6,831 are administrators, professional-technical, classified, hourly or student employees
- 4,613 are adjunct faculty
- 1,146 are full-time faculty
- 80% of all faculty are adjunct faculty
- Only 9% of its total employees are full-time faculty
- More than half its employees are not faculty
Notably, salaries at the ever-expanding top continue to rise (that is where the increased revenues can be seen most readily). See the chart at the bottom of this report that we received from CCCS headquarters in response to our CORA Request. Compare it to a similar chart we received in response to a CORA request in 2012 The number of highly paid administrators goes beyond the list, of course. The list does not include all the department chairs, deans, program and department directors, etc.
Now that non-faculty outnumber all faculty in our college system, it is no wonder that the most recent vision statement was created without even one faculty member present. Given the abysmal state of affairs for the profession of teaching in the CCCS, it is yet the latest example of poetic injustice.
It’d be nice, for a change, to see one of these pieces empirically substantiate its exaggerated and offensive comparisons of adjuncting to “exploitation” and slavery. Sadly, innumeracy + political agendas strike again.
How is it a comparison? She is listing a legal fact that gives insight into the context CO adjuncts are living within. Nowhere is there a comparison or political agenda outside the author’s interpretation of her own experience, which is very different from yours, I imagine; unless you consider a living wage to be an agenda, in which case, that’s pretty scary. As far as number of administrators outnumbering faculty and lack of FT faculty positions, that’s clearly cited.
1. The author describes adjuncting as exploitative in both the title and the article.
2. “When you understand that so many in Colorado eye slavery as a useful employment model, it makes it easy for the high rollers in our system to cast those of us seeking a living wage as less than grateful, I suppose.”
1. That’s a definition.
According to OED:
a. The action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work:
*the exploitation of migrant workers*
b. The action of making use of and benefiting from resources:
the Bronze Age saw exploitation of gold deposits
• The fact of making use of a situation to gain unfair advantage for oneself:
this administration’s exploitation of the fear of crime
2. That’s not a direct comparison. It’s background.
And, of course, writing from across the country, from a tenured position in a private research institution, you, Professor Magness, are so highly qualified to render judgments on the conditions of adjunct faculty in Colorado’s community colleges! Experience is empirical; you don’t have any.
Miranda –
1. There’s an extensive scholarly literature on the meaning and conditions of exploitation. I’d suggest the following as a starting point. Once you’ve examined it, you can proceed to the question of whether what you claim about adjuncting meets those conditions.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exploitation/
Of course in doing so, you will also have to address prior investigations of the application of the term “exploitation” to adjuncting. And that has been an unfortunate sticking point for persons who like to casually toss the term around.
2. The suggestion that adjunct conditions are derivative of a “background” in human slavery is both absurd in its chronology and offensive in its trivialization of the suffering of actual slaves.
Hank – In addition to betraying your own lack of familiarity with my experience in adjunct conditions, your attempt to shift the discussion away from the appropriateness of the term “exploitation” and toward myself is a textbook indulgence in ad hominem.
Well, given your demonstrated expertise in ad hominem crap I’ll plead guilty.
It seems odd to raise tangential questions, when something as serious as wage theft is being discussed. In this society, people have only their incomes to solve problems that they can’t solve by themselves. In the many situations in which a privileged group takes the money earned by others, merely so that the privileged can have more unearned luxury, they should be widely recognized for what they are: common thieves, no better than any other thief. Any other quibble is nonsense.
The Sanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy…an excellent resource for students, but hardly peer-reviewed literature. The bibliography is good, but not super extensive; one could even say it is selective.Nevertheless, here’s a quote from it: “workers in a capitalist society are exploited insofar as they are forced to sell their labor power to capitalists for less than the full value of the commodities they produce with their labor.”
How is this not suggestive of the adjunct condition?
Nothing in the entry seems to contradict any of Caprice’s language.