Our AAUP chapters of the CCCS, now with members at six of the 13 colleges within the Colorado Community College System (CCCS) are celebrating our fifth year of organizing CCCS faculty. We have been advocating for equitable wages, health-care benefits and due process rights through five years of potlucks, pub crawls, Scrabble games, coffee klatches, flu-shot voucher campaigns, unemployment benefits workshops, a Campus Equity Week Tailgate Party, the first-ever AAUP Summer Institute Minnie Innie, the Adjunct Film Series, several Adjunct Survival Workshops, the annual Damn It! Summit, the Adjunct Faculty Un-Service at the Denver Press Club, and field trips to meet adjunct faculty in Dillon, Durango, La Junta, Lamar, Pueblo, and Trinidad.

We have had two bills so far in the Colorado legislature: House Bill 14-1154, sponsored by Rep. Randy Fischer, and Senate Bill 15-094, sponsored by Sen. John Kefalas (CCCS admins spent $132K on lobbyists to ensure defeat of both bills).

Our work has received national press coverage in The Guardian, Inside Higher Ed, The Hechinger Report, the Academe, the Academe Blog. Local coverage highlights include a Rocky Mountain PBS investigative feature, a cover story in Westword, CPR and KGNU radio interviews, a front-page story in the Boulder Daily Camera, stories in the Denver Post, and the Aurora Sentinel.

We research the state’s largest and most financially secure institution of higher education: the CCCS. We have published that research in two books exposing CCCS finances. The Adjunct Cookbook, now in its 6th printing, features food-bank-friendly recipes for dinner, along with ingredients for radical change in the CCCS. The Adjunct Coloring Book, a similarly themed book of startling facts, statistics, puzzles, charts, and images, is now in its 5th printing.

We also published (and use frequently)  Suzanne Hudson’s White Paper, Proposal for a United Faculty within Colorado’s Community College System. A second blockbuster report on the CCCS (that we are referring to affectionately as our Beige Paper since we already have a White Paper) was written by Stephen Mumme et al,  this winter and will be published by the Center for the Study of Academic Labor this summer. Every other year we publish The Adjunct Index, a little list of big facts administration wishes we did not know. We distribute on our campuses The Adjunct Index and other AAUP missives using guerrilla marketing, as administration prohibits us from using for AAUP purposes faculty mailboxes, or posting anything on campus walls and bulletin boards.

Our work resulted in modest “tiered-pay” increases of approximately $4.80/week each year for CCCS adjunct faculty, and thus has raised awareness among Colorado lawmakers of the terrible plight of CCCS adjunct faculty and the parsimonious administration under which they labor. Now it is widely known at the Capitol that 80% of CCCS faculty are paid poverty-level wages, have no sick leave, no health-care benefits, no due process rights and no voice in college governance, even while CCCS revenues have soared, enrollment has risen 30,000 from 2008, and as scores of CCCS administrators have received 30-50% pay increases in recent years. 

In 2016 AAUP’s powerful Committee A launched the first-ever investigation of a CCCS college, drawing local and national press attention to the dumbing-down of curriculum at the Community College of Aurora as well as to the plight of CCA adjunct faculty member Nate Bork. Bork spoke out about the problem and was fired mid-semester by CCA. (He is now working on his Ph.D. in Political Science at Colo. State Univ.). Committee A has since put the Community College of Aurora on its Censure List.

Collegiate teaching is not supposed to the poorly paid, frustrating, lonely job it has become in the CCCS. We urge adjunct faculty to join the AAUP. Any interested faculty are welcome attend any of our upcoming events to get to know us:
• May 31, 2018: Damn It! Summit, Denver Press Club
• June 15-17, 2018: AAUP Annual Conference on the State of Higher Education, Washington, D.C.
• July 19-22, 2018: AAUP Summer Institute, Durham, New Hampshire
• July 26, 2018: Adjunct Faculty Golf Tournament & Picnic, Adventure Golf, Westminster, Colorado
• August 3-5, 2018: COCAL XIII, San Jose, California
• September 27, 2018: Adjunct Faculty Un-Service, Denver Press Club
• October 2018: AAUP Colo. Conf. Annual Meeting, Location TBA
• January 31, 2019: Snow Job Summit, Denver Press Club