BY CAPRICE LAWLESS
The author with AAUP and AFT members fighting for a voice on the job for all workers in Colorado.
It is not only Colorado’s thousands of higher education faculty who stand to benefit through collective bargaining, but also Colorado’s hundreds of thousands of college students, their parents, and our state’s 5.7 million taxpayers. Why? Because when employers and employees make decisions together through collective bargaining, those negotiations require disclosure of financial documents. For decades, that crucial information has been essentially owned by the governing boards and presidents of Colorado’s higher education institutions. Years ago, public institutions like the Colorado Community College System, for example, stopped making readily available budgets the public might be able to comprehend. Instead, even the most diligent reporters who want to know anything about Colorado higher education funding would need to know how to grovel for numbers by filing Colorado Open Record Act Requests through the Secretary of State’s office at the Capitol, and also to be intimately familiar with esoteric language and search protocols of the Integrated Post Secondary Education Data System to find out what any of our colleges have in their coffers. That reporter would have to use those same tools to find out what any of the hundreds of the state’s six-figure-earning presidents are paid, how many full-time faculty still remain in our public colleges and universities and what they are paid, and just how large the army of Colorado’s impoverished, part-time, “adjunct” faculty has grown (the ones who qualify for food stamps and subsidized housing, many of whom work without health care benefits or even sick leave). With collective bargaining, those startling numbers and the equally startling statistics behind them will be facts that will be more readily shared, likely won’t stand the light of day, and so will require change.
That change is rapidly unfolding already, and administrators are naturally trying to close the door before too much light comes in as the Counties and Higher Education Collective Bargaining bill sponsored this session by Rep. Daneya Esgar and Sen. Stephen Fenberg moves toward introduction in the state legislature.
Today, a bright shaft of brilliant light came through from the AAUP and AFT analysis of Colorado’s higher-education financing as part of our support for this much-needed legislation.
Specifically, the question is: If collective bargaining leads to increases in salaries, will it spell double-digit tuition increases and the destruction college presidents allude to in recent gatherings and in this Op-Ed? Not likely. In fact, careful analysis reveals the stellar health of Colorado higher education institutions, most notably their nearly $4.4 billion in unrestricted reserves. Furthermore, there is no law on the books that prevents any of our colleges and universities from tapping into those funds for wage increases.
Colorado’s public institutions have large and increasing reserves to easily deal with these increases. We are not claiming that the existing reserves can be tapped into and then depleted over time to pay raises; we are claiming that each and every year, the Colorado public institutions have been generating excess cash flows, and this is why reserves are growing at each system for the last several years.
Even so, the gaslighting by Colorado’s higher ed officials continues apace this week, to underscore their opposition to the bill. Case in point: Earlier this week, at a public, Colorado Community College System end-of-the-year award ceremony, Chancellor Joe Garcia (whose CCCS salary is higher than that of the President of the United States) complained that the CCCS was so broke that Colorado PERA had to pay for the faculty ceremony. This, while the CCCS is sitting on more than $297 million in unrestricted reserves. Most faculty (even those being given awards) understand the CCCS is not broke, did not need to seek charity to pay for a faculty recognition event, and found yet another incident of gaslighting (at an event ostensibly focused on them) utterly tone deaf. This small incident illustrates the widespread, unrelenting gaslighting by Colorado’s higher education administrators. Spend enough time with faculty at any gathering from Ft. Collins to Pueblo, from Sterling to Grand Junction, and you will hear similar tales of tone-deaf administrators giddily celebrating groundbreaking multi-million-dollar building projects in the morning and, that afternoon, soberly announcing pay cuts or position cuts, against the untold story of the iceberg of unspent, unspoken cash, just below the surface of Colorado’s higher-education wealth.
There is no point in building up almost $5 billion in reserves. We are not advocating spending all of it, or even a significant portion of it. What we are claiming is that modest raises for bargaining-unit employees would be easily affordable for Colorado institutions, as these reserves are growing every year. These unrestricted reserves are not related in any way, shape, or form to the Foundations of the institutions or their campuses; none of the reserve amounts include a single dollar from the Foundations These unrestricted reserves are liquid; they generate excess cash flows each and every year as the cash they take in from tuition, the state, grants and contracts.
Meanwhile, our AAUP Colorado Conference this month is helping thousands of low-wage-earning college professors apply for the Colorado Low-Energy Assistance Program (LEAP) for help with their utility bills, because CCCS adjunct faculty are paid wages far below the living wage in a state where the cost of living is high. Inflation and the cost of living have risen the past few years in Colorado; during that time CCCS administrators have been deliberating how, when, and why they might be able, someday, to send to their 4,500 adjunct faculty a cup-of-coffee-per-week pay raise.
For these reasons, we support the Counties and Higher Education Collective Bargaining Bill. It will benefit higher education faculty, students, their parents, taxpayers, and lawmakers, all of whom deserve to know far more about Colorado’s higher education finances. That education process will be a natural byproduct of the collective bargaining process, as it makes financial information transparent and openly shared by the public. That will, in turn, lead to better decision-making to better serve the entire learning community of students, faculty, and administrators.
Caprice Lawless is copresident of the Colorado Conference of the AAUP. She teaches English at Front Range Community College.
