BY CAPRICE LAWLESS

Most community college faculty are paid poverty-level wages and so can’t afford the laptops they need to teach, especially when they teach remotely. Even so, neither state lawmakers nor college administrators budget for them. Perhaps, I thought, a national initiative might provide them the technology they need to serve the nation’s most economically disadvantaged students. Accordingly, I petitioned Senator Bernie Sanders to create such a program. Below is the letter I sent to him.

Dear Senator Sanders,

As Chair of the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions, you understand the needs of teachers and students. I am a member of the American Association of University Professors, recently retired as 2nd national vice president of the AAUP. Across the country, my colleagues teaching in the community colleges earn poverty-level wages while they teach the most economically disadvantaged students. While students often readily qualify for free laptops or deep discounts on them through campus programs and through technology-sector programs, their teachers are forced to purchase used laptops that are hopelessly out of date. When those inevitably expire, they are forced to use their own credit cards to buy new laptops to keep our jobs. The school content management systems and grading programs are constantly being upgraded, and so, of all those making higher education run, it is the long-suffering, lowly paid adjunct faculty who have to go into debt yet again (atop their student loans) just to purchase the technology their students and their employers require. This is scandalously unfair, considering adjunct faculty are the faculty majority in the community colleges, outnumber their full-time colleagues three-to-one, teach the lion’s share of the courses offered, yet live in poverty. Adjunct faculty living in their cars is not uncommon, Senator.

Can the Education Committee partner with a computer manufacturer or a consortium of them to supply, free of charge, laptops to our nation’s adjunct faculty (approximately 60% of all faculty in all public institutions), or at least to those teaching in the community colleges? Higher education has sunk to a new low with the way they exploit the labor of their faculty majority (adjuncts).

Of course, adjunct faculty all need a much-deserved raise (as well you likely know already). Meantime, some help with technology tools would be appreciated and would help students indirectly insofar as helping their teachers do their jobs At least if adjuncts knew the US Senate sees their predicament, and designed a way to help them get the job tools they need (technology), if could help them understand someone higher up sees them and cares about them. When tech firms donate technology, they can write that off on their taxes as a business expense. Most adjunct faculty can’t write off the cost of purchasing a laptop, as few of them own their places of residence.

Thank you for your time on this, Senator.

Caprice Lawless, Member, AAUP Colorado Conference

Guest blogger Caprice Lawless recently retired from teaching English at Front Range Community College and from leadership positions in the AAUP. She is the recipient of AAUP’s Georgina Smith Award, Al Sumberg Award, and a National Council Resolution honoring her work on behalf of higher education faculty.