BY CAPRICE LAWLESS

We in the Colorado Conference asked ourselves a few questions as the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine began to lift. Could we create a midsummer event requiring just a few hundred miles of driving that would bring together AAUP members from half a dozen cities? Could we link up, via satellite, to the AAUP president so members who live in tiny mountain villages could meet her? Could we make the AAUP Redbook the star of our event to promote its study and usage, especially among our newest members? Could we get AAUP’s brainy Hans-Joerg Tiede to explain the book to us remotely from his office? Could we get infusions of Vitamin AAUP from former Committee A member and fierce faculty defender Don Eron? Could he teach us how to use the Redbook to defend adjunct faculty? Could we use our brief time together to hatch a failproof plan for our forthcoming shared governance symposium? Could we introduce attendees to the idea of writing and disseminating press releases? Could we who live in Colorado’s foothills catch up with our far-flung colleagues on the other side of the Continental Divide about their work on behalf of faculty?

Could we do all of this for 25 people, on a budget of $2,500, including overnight lodging for many of them, meeting room rental, two breakfasts for 25, two lunches for 25, an evening beer-and-pizza party for 25, the printing of 60 workbooks for the meetings, and make it all happen on a July weekend in the picturesque, resort destination of Summit County, Colorado?

Colorado ends in the word “do,” so of course our Conference accomplished this by pulling together an event modeled on the fantastic AAUP Summer Institute. Our shortened, miniature iteration of the national event is a one-and-a-half-day gathering we call the Mini Innie. Ours brought together faculty members from the Colorado Mountain College, the Community College of Denver, Front Range Community College, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado State University, and the University of Denver. The ideas presented and discussed were the full-size AAUP ones, but packaged for delivery in small, to-go containers comprising several carpool rides in the mountains, one two-hour Zoom, two short workshops, two presentations, four generous meeting-room buffets, an overnight stay in a tiny hotel for a dozen or so members, one library meeting room, and one al fresco pizza-and-beer dinner overlooking a mountain valley.

“I liked it a lot,” said Dave Ruffley, vice president of the Colo. Mtn. College chapter. “It was so good to finally put names to faces, especially Don Eron and Steve Mumme, since they had helped us earlier with a faculty issue. I appreciated all the work that went into the presentations. I picked up a lot of good ideas from those,” he added. (Ruffley had driven his motorcycle to Breckenridge all the way from Estes Park, 120 miles to the northeast.)

“It’s always important to meet with faculty from different kinds of institutions,” said Claude d’Estrée, a member of the University of Denver AAUP chapter. “I am energized by the meeting,” he said, recalling that he was both uplifted by the AAUP principles discussed, and simultaneously depressed to hear from community college faculty how bad things have become. “They are fighting for their lives,” he said. “We have a nationwide problem here. It invigorates me to think of what I can do to help colleagues in other settings,” said Claude.

“Supporting the Mini Innie is an example of the role a state conference can play in helping build membership,” said Steve Mumme, co-president of the Colorado Conference and a presenter at the event. “Anything we can do to bring people together in person to talk about our profession—especially following so many months of isolation—is crucial,” he said. Steve drove to Breckenridge from his home in Ft. Collins, a 280-mile roundtrip, to be a part of the event.

“It was stimulating to exchange stories with colleagues from the other colleges and universities,” said Susanna Spaulding, Colorado Mountain College chapter member who lives in historic Leadville, a mining town near the Continental Divide in the mountains southwest of Breckenridge. “I appreciated the way the Mini Innie was organized and all the takeaways, especially the workbooks. It was the kind of event that gave us lots of ideas and also the tools to help us turn those ideas into action,” she added.

Because it was so power-packed and energizing, we will likely stage another Mini Innie in the future. Because we know funds are tight everywhere, we want share with Academe Blog readers the eight steps to follow if you want to stage a Mini Innie for your state conference or chapter.

Step 1: Choose a date and time
By midsummer, most faculty have regained just enough time and energy to think about other things and a willingness to move around a bit. Also, somewhat like bears, we tend to downshift to a sedentary mode for the duration of the academic year. For these reasons, picking a time after the July 4^th holiday when crowds are smaller, but before the August syllabus-writing crush sets in was our plan. We picked a mid-week date, one that required driving against traffic, not with it. Most mountain driving here requires considering the traffic problems of crossing the Continental Divide, 14,278 feet above sea level. Since our event drew attendees from both sides of it, this meant that we had to start on a Friday morning and end on a Saturday afternoon. That way we were never engaged with the weekend fishers, campers, mountain bikers, motorboaters, paddle-board riders, or motorcycling clubs who routinely clog I-70 Friday nights and Sunday afternoons through Denver, the Eisenhower tunnel, and down into the lush, scenic, playground valleys of Summit County. With these factors in mind, we scheduled our event July 9 and 10.

Step 2. Secure a meeting venue
Colleges and universities charge faculty to use spaces on campus, and that gets pricey. For this reason, we often hold events in cost-free, unlikely places in Colorado like the downstairs poker room at the Denver Press Club, the City Hall in Georgetown, and public libraries in Louisville and Castle Rock. Public libraries have up-to-date, comfortable meeting rooms with the latest technology. Most of these in Colorado offer free parking and the use of a kitchen adjacent to the meeting room. Matthew Eric Lit, an AAUP member who lives in the Summit County library district, was able to reserve the big meeting room in the Breckenridge public library for us to use, at no cost, for both days.

Step 3: Find lodging
As we realized many would be driving long distances over mountain passes to our high-altitude event, the Conference determined we could spring for one night’s lodging for about a dozen people, if we could get the rooms at a low price. We especially wanted to draw adjunct faculty to the event. The low wages adjuncts are paid would prevent them from attending if we did not cover lodging and all meals. We chose the tiny, family-owned-and-operated Dillon Inn near Lake Dillon for its low cost ($106/night) and its proximity to our meeting venue in nearby Breckenridge. The other reason we chose it was because its spacious swimming pool veranda overlooking Buffalo Mountain and the Blue River Valley made the perfect place for our dinner event Friday evening.

Step 4: Secure presenters, build a schedule, and e-mail invitations
Make a list of goals for the event (ours are described in the first paragraph of this article.) We sent out invitations for our July 9 & 10 Mini Innie starting June 2. We e-mailed out a follow-up reminder two weeks later, and a third nudge (that time with a map attached) the last week of June. All went according to plan, as described below:

We met all day on Friday in the library, starting at 8:30 a.m. with what we call “coffee, eatcetera” (bagels, muffins, and fruit). Then, via Zoom on an enormous screen, we “met” with AAUP president Irene Mulvey and director of research Hans-Joerg Tiede. Joerg outlined the most prominent AAUP principles, taking questions from attendees as we went along. After lunch, everyone got a Vitamin AAUP transfusion courtesy of Don Eron, former Committee A member and current Colorado Conference Executive Committee member. His workshop and workbook on how to defend adjunct faculty by using key principles articulated in the AAUP Redbook was a big hit.

Friday night we had our al fresco pizza and beer party on the veranda of the hotel. Those who were staying overnight did not have to worry, then, about having a few more beers because all they had to do was walk back to their rooms. Those who live nearby in Dillon or Breckenridge did not have to travel far to get back home for the evening.

Carpools Saturday morning took attendees from the Dillon Inn back to the Breckenridge library. We had three morning workshops: Colorado Conference Co-President Steve Mumme led a group discussion that helped the Conference plan for our Shared Governance Symposium slated for October. Mid-morning, I explained why, when, and how chapter leaders should publish press releases. Directly after that, Colorado Mountain College Chapter President Erin Beaver gave an overview of the AAUP advocacy efforts underway within that college, across its 11 campuses.

Step 5: Create and print workbooks and bookmarks
Faculty, as a species, inhabit a curious environment filled with pieces of paper and laptops filled with links to even more pieces of paper. For this reason, we made sure the Mini Innie handouts were workbooks with color covers. The workbooks were accompanied by a Redbook-sized, full-color, laminated memorial bookmark. We made sure the durable bookmarks and workbooks carried the same theme (color, typeface, design). We want Mini Innie takeaways to be useful items, not mere links to more pieces of paper that can be readily lost amid the sea of student papers, faculty communications, syllabi drafts, and other colorless documents we keep. Attendees took notes in their workbooks as they followed along, inserting names, ideas, and other media presenters mentioned during their workshops.

The workbooks are useful because we know how activists, as they meet with peers, often find it useful to have workbooks with them, as there are too many elements to remember from a conversation. Furthermore, looking at screens for every little thing, especially when meeting with a peer, can be distracting and tiring. By having a colorful, sturdy workbook to chat about with a colleague over a cup of coffee, the idea can more readily take shape, especially as margins are filled in, pages dogeared, and sections folded over to help us remember something.

We included “About the author” details and photos of the

presenters on the workbook back covers to help attendees reinforce the all-important member-to-member connection. The AAUP is all about ideas, and big ones. What we too often forget is that the AAUP is also about people, and how small and seemingly inconsequential connections to one another can powerfully reinforce those big ideas.

The Colorado Conference works with a local, family-owned-and-operated company who handles our printing at a reasonable rate. They made our 60 workbooks for $3 each, and the bookmarks for a fraction of that (see photos). We printed a few more of everything because we knew attendees would ask for extra copies to take back to their departments, which was the case.

Step 6: Plan meals and eatcetera
Marki LeCompte, president of the Univ. of Colo. Boulder Chapter, offers this advice of interest to all would-be event planners: “Once you get everyone up there, keep them together the whole time,” she said. Not only does this keep the conversations going, but it can also keep costs low.

Our conference has its own, forty-cup coffee maker to keep the caffeine flowing throughout any event, at fifteen cents per cup. We used that both mornings. We also have an assortment of red tablecloths we picked up on sale after the holidays one year. We set up a few conference tables at the back of the library meeting room, covered them with our red tablecloths, and topped these with pots of miniature roses. Amidst the roses we stuck bamboo skewers with AAUP stickers pasted to them. (After the event, we gave chapter leaders the potted roses to take home and to plant in their gardens.) The paper plates and napkins we use at our events are also red, or red-and-white, purchased on sale after holidays. We keep stashes of paper goods like these in our garages to use for our events. That is another way to save chapter dues for more important things, like printing.

Just prior to our event, Anne Emmons, a member of the Front Range Community College chapter who has years of experience staging art shows and gallery openings, made several runs to Costco and Whole Foods on our behalf, saving the receipts so we could reimburse her later. Because of her efforts we had a generous buffet each morning of all sorts of bagels, cream cheese, croissants, Costco muffins, her homemade banana-chocolate chip muffins, bananas, mandarin oranges, sugar and several types of sweeteners. For lunch both days she set out trays of diverse breads, cheeses, ham, turkey, mozzarella balls, hummus, chopped vegetables, salad-making ingredients, dressings, pickles and giardiniera. She brought coolers stocked with ice so that we could have cans of cold soda and bottles of lemonade, iced tea, and iced coffee right there in our meeting room that kept us hydrated and carb loaded.

After the Friday workshops and just prior to our evening party, we picked up various cold beers at a package store. On Matthew Eric Lit’s tip, we phoned in an order to Windy City Pizza for four large, gourmet pizzas, each one with different toppings. On the hotel veranda Anne spread out the blue-and-white tablecloths we had brought with us, and she once again put out sodas, salad-making items and vegetables for nibbling. We had made only a small dent in the brews when Matt arrived with our pizzas.

Step 7: Expect a few snafus
The world is imperfectly perfect, and so, inevitably, a few things went awry. One attendee dropped out because of a canyon mudslide. A high fever in a twelve-year-old daughter kept another at home. Another backed out at the last minute, but never told us why. A few faculty members who live in Summit County we had expected to join us for dinner could not do so, for various reasons. The library kitchen had no knives to cut our bagels and veggies, but we made do with some cheap steak knives we picked up at the local grocer. Library electronics right before our big Zoom with the AAUP president were cranky and obstinate, but staffers eventually coerced them into performance. On Friday night we discovered we had had accidentally left the paper plates earmarked for the pizza party back at the library, but our hotel manager gave us some he had on hand. A car ride was delayed slightly when a herd of Rocky Mountain Bighorn sheep crossed the highway and lingered on the shoulder. We happily leaned into that incident, though, and photographed them.

Step 8: Send thank-you notes
It goes without saying that we left spotless the veranda that night, as well as the next day, our hotel rooms, the meeting room and kitchen at the library. We did leave behind, though, a trail of thank-you notes to those who helped make our event a success. Matt, who had snagged the library meeting room for us, received a note. Anne, the tireless member who thought ahead about all that beautiful food and packaged it for transport was sent a note (and a reimbursement check). We sent a note to the library officials who helped us arrange the room and walked us through how to use the meeting room electronics. We sent a note to the manager of the hotel who hosted us, even though ordinary commerce dictates payment is thank you enough. Even so, the AAUP is not about the ordinary, but rather, the extraordinary. Such measures build goodwill and help the AAUP make friends wherever we go.           

Colorado is 380 miles wide, lots of it is a mile or two high, and our colleges and universities are spread out all over it. Consequently, our members have more ups and downs, outs and abouts than do most other AAUP conferences. This can make organizing a logistical challenge. Short and lively events like the Mini Innie keep us energized and together despite such obstacles. Maybe a Mini Innie can do the same for you.

Caprice Lawless is co-president of the Colorado Conference. She is an adjunct faculty member at Front Range Community College.