BY CAPRICE LAWLESS

Along with workers of all stripes mobilizing for better pay, better working conditions, and human dignity, the low-wage faculty majority of the wealthy Colorado Community College System has been organizing for change. So they have at their fingertips deeply hidden data they need for their advocacy, the American Association of University Professors Colorado Conference has researched the issues and collected thirty-four pages of them in The Adjunct’s Guide to Working in the CCCS. It is available at no cost, to download online through the AAUP Colorado Conference website:

https://coloradoaaup.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Adjuncts-Guide-to-the-CCCS-FNL-copy.pdf

The publication answers twenty-four frequently asked (but stubbornly unanswered ) questions that administrators have used to maintain the murky, gaslit atmosphere that keeps in the dark 4,500+ part-time teachers in the state’s largest and most financially secure institution of higher education. The CCCS has for years been cutting full-time positions, leaving the faculty unstable and ever worried about how to pay for rent and groceries, while ostensibly modeling for 124,000 CCCS students the value of higher education. The text illustrates how those shoveling snow and planting petunias outside the classroom windows have far higher wages, paid healthcare benefits, and adequate retirement, while 80 percent of those teaching the 124,000 CCCS students do not.

By using the Freedom of Information Act, by researching CCCS audits, national higher-education databases, and Congressional documents, the stubbornly (and purposefully) elusive facts emerged that adjunct faculty need. Along the way, we also discovered how more than $160 million in federal dollars are flowing into CCCS colleges from a trio of federal stimulus bills, namely the CARES Act, the ARPA, and the CRRSSA.* The AAUP, of course, hopes that the already wealthy CCCS will use some of those funds, finally, to address long-standing wage and benefits inequity that has kept its faculty majority wages $10K below the living wage.

Recently appointed CCCS Chancellor Joe Garcia has signaled changes to workplace culture that will, in turn, make the CCCS sustainable, equitable, inclusive, and stable. The Guide will help Garcia by giving CCCS adjunct faculty the facts and perspectives they are missing to help him manifest that vision.

For further information, contact the author listed above.

*Cornavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the Coronavirus Response, and Relief Supplemental Appropriations (CRRSA) Act