BY CAPRICE LAWLESS

Our AAUP Chapters of the Colorado Community College System (CCCS) recently published a timeline listing milestones in our first seven years of organizing. While we have yet to achieve our goal of equal pay for equal work and truly shared governance, our influence in the statewide, thirteen-college Colorado Community College System has grown. We have retained a core membership committed to needed changes. Advocacy chapters like ours have a tough go of it without the pressure a union might provide. In a state like ours, where the laws restricting unionization are all but prohibitive, advocacy is the only practical avenue. Has it been worth it? Absolutely. We are discovering that so-called failures might better be construed as initial advances over the familiar, invisible ramparts.

Making Tiered Pay a first start

As a direct response to our first piece of equal-pay-for-equal-work legislation, HB 14-1154, the CCCS instituted the first-ever “Tiered Pay” schedule for adjunct faculty. Adjunct faculty who teach for several semesters, and who successfully finish workshops and seminars provided by the college may advance through the three tiers and thus see their wages increase. This is similar to the way full-time faculty are rewarded for years of experience and completing professional development opportunities outside the college system. Most CCCS adjunct faculty are unaware of the AAUP’s role in the establishment of the Tiered Pay system, as the administration conveniently did not mention our efforts when it announced the Tiered Pay system. Although the increased wages between the tiers remains nominal, the design is the first-ever professional acknowledgement of adjunct faculty who commit to teaching some of Colorado’s most disadvantaged students. It is the first step toward fully rewarding, through wages and not just tiresome and bloviated “thank-you-for-all-you-do” notes that have long defined CCCS workplace culture.

Securing sick leave

Most significantly, at the flagship Front Range Community College (FRCC), adjunct faculty now have sick leave for the first time ever. Although adjunct faculty at some of the other colleges in the CCCS may have been able to collect sick-leave pay, at FRCC adjunct faculty suffered twice when sick; we taught when we were sick, and, if too sick to come to work, suffered a loss in pay for missing class. Legendary is the story of an adjunct who taught for two weeks on a broken leg before she saw a doctor. A blog post describing what it was like to teach while suffering from shingles was also influential. Full-time faculty on FRCC’s Westminster campus, some of whom have spouses who are adjuncts, helped push this through in the final stages.  If we had not made the cruel policy an issue through our blog posts, letters to the editor, and testimony before legislative bodies, the FRCC sick-leave policy would likely remain unchanged today.

Fighting for unemployment benefits

For the first time ever, for Fall 2020 CCCS adjunct faculty who have lost classes are eligible to receive partial unemployment benefits. It was the same case for the Summer 2020 semester. Our AAUP chapters led both campaigns. CCCS administration has blessed our pursuit of these benefits for the first time for three reasons. The first is the COVID-19 pandemic, and the light it has shined on the contribution of adjunct faculty.

The second reason is the result of several organizing strategies, chief among them an elaborate (and failed) campaign to help scores of adjunct faculty apply for unemployment benefits for Winter Break in 2017. For that energetic campaign, we interviewed CDLE officials, worked through the various forms, and published a multi-page, detailed workbook to help adjunct faculty through the unemployment process. We held the workshops in three cities, using the Denver Press Club poker room for one, the Louisville Public Library for a second, and the Castle Rock Public Library for a third. We did so to cast a wide net, offering help to adjunct faculty teaching at six of the CCCS colleges in metro Denver and metro Colorado Springs. To help applicants power through the process we passed out coffee, muffins, Vitamin AAUP and membership forms, of course. Even so, of the more than 50 who applied, only three adjunct faculty received the meager unemployment benefit of a few hundred dollars per week. Crestfallen doesn’t begin to describe how we all felt. The ugliness we encountered from CCCS HR and CDLE officials during the appeals processes for those whose benefits were denied put a pall over our holidays that year. Gandhi urges activists to “make the invisible visible.” Our unemployment push in 2017 certainly opened a few eyes. For fifty employees, at least, the AAUP was visible for the first time, and sadly, also visible, was their employer’s ability to disregard their real need for help during the coldest and longest months of Colorado’s winter.

The third reason is that we amplify all we do—even our failures—through press releases. Our college system has determined the AAUP is political activity, and so prevents us from using faculty mailboxes to distribute AAUP communications. This forces us to rely on leaving notices affixed to Vitamin AAUP packets in classrooms to catch the eye of faculty, even though that can be catch-as-catch-can. More importantly, it forces us to use traditional and now social media to spread the word. Even when our unemployment push failed, we wrote press releases and blog posts about it. Likewise, for our most recent success with unemployment benefits, we have spread the word through the local press, Academe blog posts.

Using media relations, local editorials, Academe articles and posts

Whatever we do, even if it is as small as a parking lot tailgate event, we issue a press release. As teachers, perhaps it is natural for us to be conducting a year-round, never-ending seminar on how academic labor’s exploitative policies affect faculty at the local community college. We work hard to keep education reporters at the local newspapers and radio stations aware of what policies are new, and how they are affecting adjunct faculty. Consequently, we have met most of them in person during interviews that come our way because of our press releases.

Our editorials also move the conversation forward. It might feel like failing from the outside, but we are learning that words matter, that what we write, send, post, think, speak, and spread matters and makes a difference. While not all AAUP members are inclined to write editorials, the receipt of them by newspaper staff, especially, helps spread the word in newsrooms of our ongoing efforts to address equity issues. AAUP Front Range chapter Co-President Mark DuCharme’s letter in December 2019 appeared in the Boulder Daily Camera.  The following month, a Guest Opinion piece by AAUP Conf. President Steve Mumme and me appeared in the same paper. Because of those previous efforts, occasionally we get a top-of-the-fold story that raises awareness for the public about labor injustice at the local community college. An Academe blog post I wrote in April 2019 threw a little shade on our un-shared governance and especially the soul-crushing nature of most of our faculty orientations. We notice a far more respectful attitude toward us on our campus, perhaps because we have made so visible our work on behalf of all faculty.

We also write articles for the AAUP Academe to keep our peers around the country informed about the aberrant strain of democracy we work under in our community college. Melinda Myrick, Co-President of the AAUP Front Range chapter addressed in December 2018 the myth of “safe spaces” in our college. A 2018 piece I wrote describes how Democracy Light is manifest on our campus, and how we get around it by using some of the same techniques Col. Bob Hogan used in the 1960s hit show, Hogan’s Heroes. Some of our ideas come out of the pocket edition of Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution and The Troublemaker’s Handbook, and from listening to every YouTube video we can find (and share) that features Howard Zinn or Saul Alinsky.

Turning a rough start into a clear path

The CCCS appointed a new chancellor, former Colo. Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia, in 2019. In a typical failing-forward series of events, our first meeting with him a few months into his administration did not go well. We asked point-blank for a much-needed raise in pay, and he point-blank insisted that we were not a priority, but that, instead, his priorities were enrollment, marketing, and securing pay raises for administrators. The new Vice-president of Academic and Student Affairs, Landon Pirius, attended the meeting and passed around some business cards. FRCC chapter Co-President Melinda Myrick gave VP Pirius a call. She and Community College of Denver chapter President Shane Petersen began regular meetings with Pirius and Executive Vice President Diane Duffy to start a dialogue about our issues of abysmal wages, lack of shared governance, and the shortage of full-time positions. After a few meetings, and after a few more AAUP members joined the discussions, it was clear we needed a focus for the meetings. The meetings were in danger of becoming open-ended, friendly, but perhaps fruitless confabs. We developed a straightforward, numbered proposal to provide the focus and to gauge progress. Briefly, our three-point proposal provides phased-in pay raises to all three Tiers over the next three years to establish equal-pay-for-equal-work among part- and full-time faculty, to make the faculty majority a majority of representation on faculty senates, and to add two new full-time faculty positions in each department, drawing from the adjunct faculty ranks. The carefully crafted language of our proposal illustrates how these three steps will improve student retention by stabilizing faculty.

Through these meetings with Pirius, Executive VP Diane Duffy, and sometimes Chancellor Garcia, we have established a rapport with the administration that we did not have previously. Toward the end of the summer, when the federal government determined not to extend the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance past July 31, not to issue stimulus checks of  $1,200 payment to all citizens, and when  many adjunct faculty lost Fall semester classes due to declining enrollment, we realized we would need partial unemployment benefits for those who had lost classes. Because of our improved rapport with CCCS Chancellor Joe Garcia, we were able to secure partial unemployment benefits for Fall 2020, similar to the way he had okayed partial unemployment benefits for the Summer 2020 semester. As was the case in May, in September we issued another press release directing any faculty who had lost classes to apply for partial unemployment benefits. Even more helpful, the AAUP Colo. Conference held a statewide Zoom with guest presenter Colo. Dept. of Labor and Employment Chief of Staff Daniel Chase. He walked us through the application process, explained the CDLE benefits calculation, and showed us how several other state and federal programs that might benefit faculty who lost classes.

Promoting paid online-teaching certification

In Spring 2020, we added to our original proposal three more items: unemployment for faculty who lose classes due to the pandemic, the need for an accelerated program to teach and to certify faculty for online learning, and to pay adjunct faculty who take the certification course. All three of the items were approved and put into place. Most of us have taken the online certification. That was good because, as was the case with Fall 2020, classes for Spring 2021 will be held remotely as well.

Growing AAUP membership

We continue to “fail forward,” to use Don Eron’s description of the indirect triumphs of the Instructor Tenure Project at the University of Colorado in nearby Boulder. Our AAUP chapters have benefitted mightily from the mentorship of our Colorado Conference leadership, especially Executive Committee Members Don Eron and Suzanne Hudson. Because of their in-the-trenches experience with the Instructor Tenure Project at CU, they know how it feels to fail, try, and fail again, until you finally prevail. Especially in an unprecedented, global pandemic, uncertainty is the norm. Feelings of failure, or possible failure, surround us. We do not know how the national election will go a few weeks from now. There is no going back to the old normal predicated on exploitation of faculty in higher education and all the damage that has done to our shared mission to serve the public good. In his book, On Tyranny, author Timothy Snyder urges citizens everywhere to defend democratic institutions to halt fascism. Our AAUP chapters of the CCCS, through our advocacy and our record of failing forward, are defending higher education. We defend one another, and, in so doing, defend the opportunity our teaching presents for some of Colorado’s most disadvantaged students. We have lost a few members who have not only left the AAUP, but the profession itself. Surprisingly, however, we have added new members who appreciate what the AAUP can do for them personally and financially through our efforts. More importantly, they see how the AAUP makes higher education stronger whenever it advocates for strong faculty, strong faculty voices, inclusion, and equity.

Shattering a myth

The adjunct myth that speaking out will cost you your job has been vaporized by our AAUP activism. Especially of late, we have a far better rapport with our system administrators, perhaps because they have come to know us as people who share their same goals for student learning. Furthermore, chapter members have made friends through our pre-pandemic potlucks, Scrabble games, meetings at the state Capitol with lawmakers, picnics, coffee meetups, and even by sharing Facebook posts from peers around the country. Although we certainly have had our low ebbs, frustrations, and setbacks, the friendships we have made through our AAUP activism keeps us putting one tired foot in front of the other. By speaking out across various platforms and through various gestures—some whimsical, some profoundly serious—we are moving forward. None of it feels like failure. It feels like success.

Caprice Lawless is chair of the AAUP 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.