BY STEVE MUMME AND CAPRICE LAWLESS

This op-ed appeared originally in the Boulder Daily Camera [openforum@dailycamera.com].

It’s indicative of the dire state in which Colorado’s Community College System adjunct instructors now labor that the American Association of University Professors’ Colorado branch launched a Christmas season GoFundMe campaign to help tide them through the annual semester break that separates the fall and spring college semesters.

Yes, really.

What most CCCS students don’t realize is that the very faculty delivering instruction at their local community college rarely earn a living wage from college teaching alone. More than 70% of CCCS instructors are adjuncts earning an average of $2,800 a course. Even teaching a grueling four-course load each semester earns them $11,200 before taxes from August through December, and this with no assurance they may be rehired in the following semester.

That this disgraceful situation endures, with adjunct wages diminishing by inflation every year, is in large measure attributable to a convenient hypocrisy embraced by CCCS administrators. That misleading trope, at best a half-truth, at worst a deliberate and self-serving misrepresentation of a long-standing state of affairs, is this: Community college adjuncts need not and should not rely on community college instruction for employment. They are fools to do so.

This CCCS myth of the part-time adjunct has long justified neglecting the need to pay adjunct faculty a decent wage and one that would sustain and support a steady corps of highly qualified teaching professionals to serve community college students. Confronted with faculty demands for better compensation, CCCS administrators have dodged responsibility by cloaking themselves in the righteous purple of defenders of lower tuition. This despite the fact that adjunct faculty wages comprise a fraction of the CCCS budget.

The hypocrisy in this is that the CCCS has tacitly encouraged and come to depend on the full-time commitments of thousands of adjunct faculty who outnumber full-time faculty three to one. These adjuncts deliver the regularly offered and required courses in the Guaranteed Transfer/Pathways programs leading to an associate of arts degree and the promise of admission to a Colorado four-year university. The Colorado Community College System, now headed by former Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia, conveniently fails to honestly report the number of adjunct faculty teaching the classes that are the backbone of the enterprise.

The simple truth is that CCCS administration sponges off its adjuncts while also blaming them for accepting poor compensation. Administrators do so rather than face up to the actualities of their exploitative practices.  High faculty turnover and low faculty morale is the norm, even though having a reliable pool of talented, well-educated, experienced faculty is vital to fulfilling the CCCS’s instructional mission. Doing so would be worth rearranging current expenses, if only CCCS had the integrity to admit it. By failing to do so, CCCS administration is simply avowing that CCCS students don’t deserve high quality experienced professionals in the classroom.

Unfortunately, the No Need to Pay Adjuncts Decently trope has been taken on the road by CCCS Chancellor Joe Garcia who, writing recently in the Daily Camera, Pueblo Chieftain and Sterling Journal-Advocate, invited anyone and everyone with a skill, with or without a bachelor’s degree, to apply for employment as a community college adjunct instructor. Penned to tout CCCS’s role in workforce training, his column’s subtext wasn’t lost on CCCS adjuncts: no need to pay a living wage — we don’t need (or want to pay for) skilled, experienced professionals. Just show up part-time for paltry compensation, then leave, having nobly sacrificed for the common good.

It’s time to call this CCCS administration trope what it is: professionalized abuse. Adjunct faculty aren’t buying it and neither, dear reader, should you. It’s high time for CCCS administrators to own their hypocrisy and pay their full-time adjuncts a living wage or better. Colorado’s Community College System students are sure to be better served.

Steve Mumme, a Fort Collins resident, is president of the American Association of University Professors Colorado Conference and professor laureate in the College of Liberal Arts at Colorado State University. Caprice Lawless, a Louisville resident, is first vice president of the national AAUP and leads the AAUP Colorado Conference’s community college project. She is adjunct faculty at Front Range Community College, Westminster Campus.