BY MARK DUCHARME AND MELINDA MYRICK

For educators in the Colorado Community College System (CCCS), the word “equity” is a familiar buzzword. Though it’s an admirable goal, and one we very much share, the problem is that it can seem like empty rhetoric— or worse, a cynical marketing ploy— in light of actual labor practices within the thirteen CCCS colleges. The decidedly unequal status of faculty and instructors in the CCCS undermines the system’s ability to deliver quality education, especially to the most at-risk student populations, belying the system’s claim of community college as a path toward student success. For the CCCS to provide meaningful student equity and learning outcomes, the gross inequities within the system must first be addressed. The precarity and poverty wages of the faculty majority must be eliminated through a reprioritization of both money and values.

According to the latest report by the AAUP, there are only 1,164 regular faculty employed across all CCCS colleges. Their average salary is around $65K, and in addition they enjoy benefits and relative job security. In contrast, the CCCS employs 4,519 adjunct faculty, referred to as “instructors.”  They are not salaried, but paid per class, earning an average of just $2,500 per course, though while this article was being written, some CCCS colleges announced 3 percent raises for instructors for the fall 2021 semester. (To put that number in context, four classes per semester is considered a full-time load at most institutions, though in the CCCS, a full-time load is five classes. The Modern Language Association “recommends minimum compensation [for adjunct faculty] of $11,400 for a standard three-credit-hour semester course.”)  Instructors in the CCCS hold the same degrees as their peers and teach the same courses, including Guaranteed-Transfer courses, for which students who pass receive credit at any public university in the state. Yet instructors are denied full-time status, regardless of how many classes they teach (which is limited by the CCCS), are denied a living wage and benefits, and have no job security. This amounts to unequal pay for equal work, and the price is paid by students as well as beleaguered, overworked instructors.

Though college and university presidents often blame the legislature for decreasing budgets, only a small percentage comes from the state. In fact, the CCCS takes in 20 million more a year than it chooses to spend. The problem is less about state funding and more about the way the money is spent. For example, according to AAUP research, in 2013, the CCCS only spent 27.7 percent on salary and benefits for all faculty, and this trend continues.  What presidents leave out of their calculus is administrative bloat, the financial shift away from classroom instruction and toward management. This movement has steadily increased since the 1980s, when colleges employed more faculty than administrators. Today, the reverse is true; administrators far outnumber full-time faculty, and they are highly compensated. For example, a 2021 Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) request revealed the combined salaries and benefits for CCCS executives now costs taxpayers nearly $40,000 a day, or about $8 million a year. At public institutions, this practice draws criticism, especially from faculty, who continue to see hiring rates drop. A recent AAUP report confirms the number of full-time faculty has decreased nationally at 61.5 percent of institutions as the number of upper-level administrators increased. Currently, the thirteen colleges of the CCCS employ sixty-four presidents, vice presidents, and their staff, even though some of the campuses are the size of local high schools (minus the football teams and the marching bands). Yet when CCCS instructors and AAUP representatives met with system chancellor Joe Garcia after a year of negotiating a proposal to improve adjunct faculty pay along with working conditions for all CCCS faculty to increase student retention and graduation rates, he stated, “a living wage is a number we can’t get to.”  (This was said at a meeting on February 25, 2020 at Front Range Community College. The authors were among the several people present at this meeting.)

While we all agree providing student support is important, especially as colleges enroll students from more diverse backgrounds, we can also agree that “no students were enrolling at one of our two-year institutions because they wanted to meet administrators.”  An important step in righting this wrong is reprioritizing the budget to address the pay gap. This would demonstrate the CCCS is invested in an authentic definition of equity by extending it to all members of the community. Otherwise, instructors and staff in student-facing positions will continue to live in precarity as an ever-increasing administrative class continues to grow.

The unchecked rise of the administrative class comes not only at the expense of an army of adjunct faculty, but the marginalized students the CCCS claims to champion. The duplicitous equity messaging flies in the face of what we know is the single most important factor in determining student success: teachers. Research has proven time and again that a stable faculty is the key to student success, especially for those who often lack stability themselves. This is especially true for community college instructors, who assume the responsibilities of counselors, advisers, and developmental educators far more than our counterparts at four-year institutions where research is prioritized over teaching. What most students don’t know is the very teachers tasked with delivering the promise of equity do not have it themselves. Without a living wage, health care, and job security, they are the gig workers of higher education—the freeway fliers who race from campus to campus using their cars as offices and lunchrooms—left with little time to advocate for the social, emotional, and academic success of students. Rather than fostering rich interactions between faculty and students, precarity undermines the help students need to successfully integrate into their campus communities. In turn, adjunct faculty have few incentives to fully invest in their campuses outside of class hours; in fact, overreliance on exploited labor has only encouraged instructors to leave. Nothing has highlighted this disparity more than the ongoing pandemic. Inside Higher Ed reports, “Faced with uncertain employment futures” and “institutions already making plans to abandon them,” many adjuncts have decided to beat their institutions to the punch and look elsewhere. In turn, this negatively affects the number of course offerings available to students, which ultimately influences the holy grail for administrators: graduation rates.

The CCCS is built on a lie. It paints itself as an engine of progress, empowering underserved, economically marginalized communities, but in fact its entire business model is based on the exploitation of teachers. You can’t ask people who work retail jobs in order to subsidize their teaching income to lift students out of retail work and offer them a rosy future. You can’t ask people going to food banks because they can’t afford to buy groceries to inspire students to reach for the stars. Chancellor Garcia and his top-level administrators know this, yet choose to do nothing, perhaps because their own six-figure salaries depend on keeping adjuncts underpaid and desperate. Yet adjuncts are not the only ones who are hurt. Students dealing with their own financial precarity need teachers to be there for them, yet how can adjuncts do that when they are juggling multiple classes at multiple institutions, multiple jobs, and limited resources? If the CCCS is serious about equity and serving the needs of its student population, it will invest in those who can have the most impact: the faculty majority of adjuncts who teach the lion’s share of classes. Anything short of that— anything short of offering adjuncts a living wage for the professional work they do— is a sick joke and a slap in the face to the people of Colorado.

Mark DuCharme is an English instructor at Front Range Community College. Melinda Myrick is an English instructor and online writing center consultant at FRCC. They are copresidents of the FRCC chapter of the AAUP. An earlier version of this article appeared in the Colorado Sun.