BY CAPRICE LAWLESS

What does it look like to have been asking for a raise above poverty wages for seven years? When an AAUP group, on behalf of several thousand faculty, has been engaged in that pursuit, it is crucial to document that work. Our “Milestones: AAUP Chapters of the CCCS” (below) briefly lists the steps of this quest. It is a useful tool to share with press members, lawmakers and decision-makers who need proof that we have checked every box available to disenfranchised, yet crucial, faculty. It is a compelling snapshot of the historic, low ebb for the faculty majority in the Colorado Community College System (CCCS), in our decidedly anti-worker, anti-living-wage, anti-education state. Over the past few years, Colorado has become a de facto “right-to-work” state controlled by business interests. State support for education is forty-ninth in the country, with all the despair that has meant for student learning—costly, consultant-generated and lopsided “analyses” directed by CCCS admins be damned. For these and related social justice reasons our state is about to be flooded, most predict, by a blue tsunami a few months from now. Through the dissemination of this document (and the organizing and networking it represents) the AAUP Colorado Conference is poised for big—and fast—change in our direction.

 Milestones: AAUP Chapters of the CCCS, 2013–2020

2013: We ask Front Range Community College (FRCC) Pres. Andy Dorsey for a needed pay raise for adjunct faculty. He tells us his hands are tied, and that we need to work with the state legislature. We form an AAUP Chapter at FRCC.

2014: January–March: We work with Rep. Randy Fischer and Sen. John Kefalas, who co-sponsor HB 14-1154, an equal-work-for-equal-pay bill (equal-pay-per-class with full-time faculty). The CCCS pays its lobbyists $68K to defeat the bill. AAUP national President Rudy Fichtenbaum testifies in support of the bill in the hearing before the State Affairs Committee. He and AAUP national Collective Bargaining Vice President Howard Bunsis prepare a financial analysis of CCCS expenses showing how modest reprioritization of expenses could fund the equal-pay measure. FRCC Pres. Andy Dorsey and Community College of Denver Pres. Everette Freeman testify against the bill. Several state representatives tell scores of adjunct faculty assembled to testify in the three-hour hearing that we “need to understand that teaching in the community college is not a real job.” The bill passes through that committee. In the Appropriations Committee hearing a few weeks later, many lawmakers explain that they had been coached by CCCS lobbyists and CCCS college presidents to kill the bill. The bill dies in that hearing.

2014: November: The CCCS publishes the recommendations from its own Adjunct Instructor Task Force, which include a necessary, immediate, 28 percent pay increase to all 3,500 adjunct faculty.

2014: December: The governing board of the CCCS (the State Board for Community Colleges and Occupational Education) rescinds its recommendation of an immediate pay increase to all adjunct faculty due to “lack of political support.”

2015: The CCCS announces it has given full-time faculty a 20.3 percent pay raise, predicated on an earlier CCCS HR twenty-page analysis of full-time faculty wages. Adjunct faculty receive a pay raise of approximately $4.80/week. We recruit more members at more CCCS colleges.

2015: As a response or House Bill 14-1154, the CCCS creates the Tiered-Pay Schedule, granting adjunct faculty with graduate degrees and several years of experience and who have completed requisite professional development through their college, stratified, nominal pay increases per-semester-hour (across the semester these amount to increases of $5/week to $10/week). Wages for CCCS adjunct faculty in the six metro-area community colleges remain $10K below the living wage, even when those adjunct faculty teach the same number of classes per year as do their full-time colleagues.

2015: January: Sen. John Kefalas and Rep. Joe Salazar co-sponsor SB 15-094, a second, watered-down equal-pay-for-equal work bill. The CCCS pays its lobbyists $61K to defeat the bill. The bill lived only a few weeks and was defeated in its first committee hearing.

2015: We publish The Adjunct Cookbook as a fundraiser and to raise awareness of the adverse working conditions of CCCS adjunct faculty. The book is direct action, raising questions about the wealthy CCCS and its refusal to pay its faculty majority a living wage. It is also a collection of our research highlights of the CCCS and the adjunct labor movement, albeit presented in the disarming form of a cookbook. It receives coverage in Inside Higher Education. The book is now in its fifth printing.

2016: Since 2014, the CCCS has hired 1,100 more adjunct faculty and twenty-seven more vice-presidents.

2016: Suzanne Hudson, AAUP Colo. Conf. Executive Committee, publishes the first White Paper on the CCCS underclass of adjunct faculty: Proposal to Reform Colorado Community College System’s Employment Practices.

2016: Our AAUP Chapters of the CCCS present a formal response to the CCCS 2014 Adjunct Instructor Task Force to the State Board for Community College and Occupational Education. We receive no response from members of our governing board.

2016: We research and write a detailed “Request for a Legislative Audit” and send it to the General Assembly committee. We were unable to find a lawmaker willing to sponsor the Request.

2017: We publish The Adjunct Coloring Book, a hybrid form of research and direct action, full of statistics about CCCS finances, salaries, and inspiring quotes from higher education advocates and labor activists. It receives coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The book is in its third printing.

2017: June: The AAUP formally censures the Community College of Aurora for violating academic freedom over the firing of part-time philosophy instructor Nate Bork.

2017: October: The CCCS hires data-modeling analysts at EMSI to produce a twenty-three-page report that shows the CCCS generates more than $6 billion /year for the state of Colorado.

2017: December: We hold Unemployment Benefits Workshops in three counties (Boulder, Denver, Douglas) to help CCCS adjunct faculty apply for benefits during the long winter break. Fifty apply; only three receive any benefits.

2018: We make a short film, “Secrets, Scams, and Scandals: The Dirty Little Secrets of Colorado’s Community Colleges.” The film depicts salary discrepancies in the CCCS, and describes some of the problems that occur when 80% of the impoverished faculty is working two or three jobs to make ends meet. The film is shared widely at conferences and among AAUP chapters and is still available via You Tube.

2018: The research paper, “Instructor Impermanence and the Need for Community College Adjunct Faculty Reform in Colorado,” by Stephen Mumme, is published in the Journal of Academic Labor and Artistry.

2019-2020: A group of AAUP members and one CCD full-time faculty member begin meeting on a regular basis with CCCS Vice Chancellor for Academic and Student Affairs Landon Pirius and Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer Diane Duffy (meetings sometimes include CCCS Chancellor Joe Garcia). We make a formal proposal requesting phased-in pay increases across the three tiers to all CCCS faculty in the six metro-area community colleges (CC Aurora, Arapahoe CC, CC Denver, Front Range CC, Pikes Peak CC, and Red Rocks CC), increased shared governance, and an increase in the number of full-time faculty to be drawn from the adjunct ranks in the six metro-area community colleges.

April 2020: We recommend the CCCS offer an accelerated, paid, online-teaching certification course to adjunct- and full-time faculty who could then continue teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also recommend the CCCS not fight unemployment claims made by laid-off adjunct- and full-time faculty. The CCCS offers the two-week training courses and Chancellor Joe Garcia writes a letter guaranteeing the CCCS will not fight unemployment claims due to the pandemic.

2020: With the passage of HB 20-1153, Colorado WINS gains collective bargaining rights. In July 2020, members from the AAUP Colorado Conference meet with Colorado WINS executives.

Note: Press coverage of above work: The Denver Post, The Boulder Daily Camera, the Coloradoan, Grand Junction Sentinel, The Guardian, Inside Higher Education, Chronicle of Higher Education, Academe, Academe Blog, Westword, Rocky Mountain PBS, KGNU Radio, Jezebel, California Part-Time Faculty Journal, COCAL Update, Alternet, The Professor Is In.

Caprice Lawless is first-vice-president of the AAUP, chair of the committee on contingency and the profession, and adjunct faculty at Front Range Community College, Westminster Campus. She leads the AAUP Colorado Conference’s community college project.