BY CAPRICE LAWLESS
For organizers, the benefit of watching Hogan’s Heroes reruns cannot be overstated. The 1960s sitcom details how inmates of a German World War II prisoner of war camp thwart enemy plans night and day, right under the noses of their Nazi warders. Twist that design just slightly, and you can reframe their fabulous style and stunning success to the situation adjunct faculty face on campus. We model Colonel Bob Hogan year-round, but during Campus Equity Week his influence is strongest. The national, grassroots CEW event is a news peg adjunct faculty organizers use to raise awareness of dangerous inequities in higher education. Democracy is all but dead in our wealthy Colorado Community College System (CCCS). Its highly paid administrators work to oppress and impoverish the faculty majority at every turn and are fully supported in so doing by our state legislature.
It was thus only natural that our AAUP Chapters of the CCCS defend democracy and channel Hogan’s Heroes as we planned and executed CEW last week at our campuses. We used inexpensive printing, stickers, tiny missives, small posters and some M&Ms in our 2021 CEW swag collection. These treasures we left in unlikely places at unexpected times. Many treasures still linger where we left them. They are truth tonics peers and students can take to counteract the damaging effects of admin drivel choking CCCS hallways and classrooms.
Our bright red stickers read: “Ask me about the Adjunct Discount.” We handed these to students and left them everywhere on campus to invite conversations about how the towering, top-heavy, wealthy CCCS is built on the adjunct discount; our teaching! We had bookmarks explaining the adjunct discount more fully. These we also deployed guerilla-marketing style; we left them anywhere on campus they might be seen.
Our poster this year showcases what a phased-in-over-five-years double-digit pay raise looks like, up close, per week, to impoverished adjuncts who are paid, on average, $2,500 to teach a college course by the wealthy CCCS. We are barred by campus vice presidents from posting anything on any wall without their express permission, which only helps us see each one of them as Hogan’s nemesis, Colonel Klink. So, we print our posters on tagboard. That way, we leave posters propped up against monitors, SmartBoards, restroom mirrors, what have you. 
The posters depict, for example, how a 35 percent pay raise sounds great until you do the math on it and see the photo in the poster of a shoe in the 35 percent category. With that pay raise, the typical CCCS adjunct could buy, on a given week, one leather shoe. With a 40 percent pay raise, the adjunct could buy the other shoe (the next photo on the poster) plus pay the tax on the purchase. This is sad stuff when you consider, as the poster points out, that it costs Colorado taxpayers $40K per day to keep the sixty-four presidents and vice-presidents of our thirteen-college system in designer suits and fancy cars.
Click to view the poster: CEW POSTER Oct 21 21 FNL
We left packages of Vitamin AAUP (M&Ms in tiny bags) like the bookmarks, in classroom SmartBoard trays and desks, in refrigerators and microwave ovens in faculty lunchrooms. The front of the label reads: “Vitamin AAUP: Builds faculty 3 ways. Powerful relief for stressed faculty.”
The reverse reads: “Fights for equitable wages in the Colo. Community College System * Advocates for academic freedom * Promotes governance shared by faculty & administration
The Rx reads: “Chew two tablets. Consider the declining health of our profession as you do so. For continued relief, join the AAUP and stand with colleagues to bring about needed change: https://www.aaup.org/membership/join.
Thanks to Ellen Kress, our regional AAUP organizer, we also had an online petition students, colleagues, and supporters could sign to help us get a meaningful raise from our governing board. The link to the petition is on the bookmarks we handed out on campuses. We also promoted it across social media. Right before Halloween we photographed a jack-o-lantern with a link to the petition and posted that via Facebook pages and groups.
We were able to stir up all this beautiful trouble for under $200. That money came from the sale of our Adjunct Cookbook, Adjunct Coloring Book, and small donations AAUP members make from time to time. We are so grateful for everyone who signed our petition. We make CEW work with what we have. Col. Hogan would be proud. So would John Dewey and Arthur Lovejoy. However, the CCCS Klinks and Schultzes are today likely reaching for the Schnapps and something to treat their CEW 2021 headache.
Caprice Lawless is copresident of the Colorado Conference of the AAUP. She teaches English at Front Range Community College.
I heartily applaud this strategy owing to its incrementalism. Far and away the most frequent cause of failure among faculty initiatives is the sudde3n attempt to accomplish everything. A small, motivated, and angry insurgent group, having suddenly discovered governance, attempts to topple the entire administration or to implement a vast reform, then quickly encounters the difficulty of large-scale revolutions, then, finally but also quickly, collapses, leaving the idealistic leaders not only defeated but dispirited. The approach suggested by the CCCS faculty evidences genius insofar as it erodes the opposition in tiny increments, indeed in atom-sized units of dissent. Such a movement has staying power because it doesn’t require too much power, yet it quickly changes the tone on campuses. Bravo!