BY CAPRICE LAWLESS

Bread-bakers depend on the dough’s rest, during which time the yeast rises. The peasant farmer uses winter to carve wood or nail things together. Pickle-makers know it as the cure; those passing hours as the cucumber mysteriously turns pickle. Whatever. Hallmark-Channel-ey platitudes don’t play on the edgy, 24/7 adjunct reality show no one is taping. Adjunct faculty need bread now. We chew nails and are already in a pickle.

So, what do we make of the unnerving and unwanted rest, the inevitable slow time? When organizing takes its requisite siesta, we feel flat. We don’t know what to do when it all goes zing-less. Did we do something wrong? What shall we make of the lull, make from it, make out of it? Our AAUP Chapters of the Colorado Community College System have had our share of full-on slumps (after our first and second bills failed in the legislature) and a few slump-ettes (each time our pleas for help are dismissed by our governing board and administrators).

We’ve developed a few work-arounds. In the spirit of solidarity, we share these antidotes to the negative self-talk that will cross your mind. Use them in case you feel an advancing slump:

1. If attendance was low, no one is interested in the issue.

Low attendance is not always an indicator of interest, especially in adjunct faculty ranks, who are working several jobs. After each event, publicize the information shared, share plots lines with those who could not attend, and promote the next opportunity for getting together. Author and activist Joe Berry has repeatedly reminded us that a Committee of Two can be the most potent of gatherings.

2. If the local paper doesn’t cover your work, you aren’t doing it right.

Similar to our own profession, the profession of journalism is also running on fumes at present. Never take lack of coverage as an indicator of your success. Also, media ownership in many markets is aligned with the same power brokers attempting to destroy public higher education. Consider this and keep moving.

3. If you made all those copies for the meeting, you’ll have to throw away those leftovers now.

Never throw away materials you’ve printed!. We keep on hand a stack of red paper folders we buy at the grocery store for 50 cents apiece. We slap on the front of each an AAUP bumper sticker. That’s where we stash leftover fliers, event notices, newspaper clippings, bookmarks, etc., along with official AAUP membership brochure. We give these to prospective AAUP members, lawmakers, and reporters.

4. If you can’t publish the end-all, be-all, fully referenced research document to distribute to faculty, it’s not worth doing.

Some of our best work has been published on bookmarks and on half-page notes we leave around campus. Did Shakespeare have adjunct faculty in mind when he mentioned that brevity is the soul of wit? Use this time to sketch out your next thrilling bookmark: What will it say? What will it look like? What would be the best time to “publish” it by leaving it in SmartBoard trays all across campus?

5. A truly important faculty event includes linen tablecloths and stemmed water glasses.

Some of the best ideas occur among friends while sitting around grimy tables in ratty bars or noisy coffee shops. When meeting with your impoverished peers, always keep this in mind. Never let the humble surroundings deceive the clarity of your purpose, the profound contributions to society your peers make each semester, or the value of ideas that sometimes accompany plastic swizzle sticks.

6. It’s boring and inconsequential to read governing board meeting notes, state funding documents, or to try to find out which higher education committees, industry advisors, and chambers of commerce impact adjunct faculty in your college.

Between campaigns is the golden opportunity to conduct wonk work like this. Now you have the time to go all Columbo and Walt Longmire on the issues. Research all you can about your institution. Make power maps. Which lawmakers are on the higher education committees? What are their backgrounds? Which think tanks in your state collect background information you can use? Which industry members are on your college advisory board, and what are their agendas? Who looks after the Freedom of Information Act in your state? Introduce yourself to that person and begin a correspondence. You might need to file (as we do) a few Open Record Act requests with your Secretary of State to gather information about salary and benefits paid to your administrators. Many public-institution administrators would prefer that information be kept secret, and they protest too much in so doing.  Compile what you find, and publish it in charts on your website, or in lists such as our Adjunct Index. You can use tiny facts to populate a crossword puzzle to share with colleagues. You could scatter them throughout recipes in a cookbook, or publish them on a series of bookmarks you will distribute on campus, etc. Just because you publish your findings in unconventional ways is no indicator of their ultimate value. Furthermore, you can make great use of your research later in press releases and interviews. The adjunct faculty member who can spoon out pesky, sparky facts will be appreciated by the reporter gagging on the predictable drivel your college president just passed along. Use the downtime to gumshoe. It pays off later. Researching the particulars of your own institution is pioneering work. You might be the only one looking at all the facts through the lens of an adjunct faculty organizer.

7. Organizers need to confine their work to on-the-job issues.

Many adjunct faculty work lonely, isolating, and spirit-crushing hours. Of course, tomorrow they do need to join the AAUP and work toward needed change, but today they may just need a sandwich. Take a look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to start. Think concretely about what adjunct faculty need and take action. Are adjunct faculty hungry? Find food resources. Are they needing shelter? Reach out to city and state agencies. Gather names, phone numbers, websites, even forms to complete to help your peers. Are they needing health care? Find out how the Affordable Care Act was interpreted in your state, and what resources are available for those earning low wages. Do they need flu shots but were shut out by administrators from the campus-wide free-flu-shot campaign? Call your state Dept. of Health and speak to the Epidemiology Division. We were able to snag hundreds of free flu-shot vouchers to distribute to adjunct faculty in this way.

8. Advertising that the faculty majority earn poverty-level wages makes the profession look bad.

Many adjunct faculty now qualify as indigent because we earn so little. We have not failed the system. The system has failed us. There is nothing to be ashamed of whatsoever. Now, more than ever, those in the profession have got to fight to save it. Many academic labor researchers refer to adjunct faculty as migrant workers. Therefore, don’t be predictable and blasé by copying and pasting just a few links about poverty statistics on your chapter website. Get down to the brass tacks. If needed, put on a blazer and drive down to your county Health and Human Services offices to meet with the officials. Are your peers cold because they can’t pay their utility bills? Find out about utility subsidies and gather the forms. Share these with colleagues when you meet in person. Provide links to them on your chapter website. Be the eyes and ears on behalf of your time-constrained peers. Find out the details for them. Host a few Adjunct Survival Workshops if you think it will help. In this historical moment, being a faculty organizer might also entail some old-fashioned social work. Do it. It’s interesting and everything you learn will be like gold for your adjunct peers. Don’t overlook the power of these small acts within the long-term goal. “No matter how insignificant the thing you have to do, do it as well as you can, give it as much of your care and attention as you would give to the thing you regard as the most important. For it will be by those small things that you shall be judged,” as Gandhi put it.

9. The college administration is staffing and supplying food banks for students only, so food scarcity must not be an issue with the faculty majority.

When you get a moment, watch the movie “Gaslight” and let it make an impression on your mind of how gaslighting works. Also, the bread and butter (or would that be croissant and caviar?) of administrators is to “other” or to distance themselves psychologically from the objects of their oppression. This is why our college administration can never mention the word “adjunct” on it’s website, invite adjunct faculty to use the campus food bank, never feature adjunct faculty in college materials, and, indeed, never even refer to us as faculty, but only as “instructors.” Similarly, our community college system administrators are not going to reveal that they pay 80% of their faculty $10K below the living wage for Colorado. All the more reason to de-stigmatize food bank use, to gather subsidized housing and health care information for adjunct faculty, and to volunteer to take them to food banks.

10. Nothing has changed from all our work and so we must have run out of things to say to our peers, to the public, to lawmakers.

Everything that is wrong is an opportunity to set things right. We see now, on any given day across any media, rivers of teachers marching in protest toward yet another Capitol in another state. In fact, the number of things to be said about what is wrong in K12 and higher education is growing. Consider video you see today of teachers marching as only the receding of the tide before the tsunami of wrongs, so long in building, finally comes crashing onto the shores of education decision-makers everywhere. Each incidence of gaslighting, othering, and ignoring is an opportunity for us to promote the facts however we can. Also, never forget that the primary target for most organizing are the other faculty in our buildings. Those brown bags of lunches sitting in the faculty refrigerator might soon be paperclipped with your latest list of facts, observations, a bookmark of pesky facts, or an invitation to your next AAUP event. Everything is changing, in spite of the temporary perception that nothing is changing.

See if any of these ideas help you recapture your organi-zing. It can take a little time. Be good to yourself. If you are as lucky as we are in the Colorado Conference of the AAUP, you can call other conference members to get a booster shot of encouragement. At that next event, after you endure such a rich and re-affirming slump-ette, you’ll be stronger for the rest, spitting nails, and, through your actions, climbing out of the pickle you are in today.