POSTED BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Below is a letter sent last week by the AAUP Colorado Conference to James W. C. White, the interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His reported plan to reduce tenure and tenure-track positions has received local and national coverage. James W. C.…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Our AAUP Chapters of the Colorado Community College System (CCCS) recently published a timeline listing milestones in our first seven years of organizing. While we have yet to achieve our goal of equal pay for equal work and truly shared governance, our influence in the statewide, thirteen-college Colorado Community College System has…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS What does it look like to have been asking for a raise above poverty wages for seven years? When an AAUP group, on behalf of several thousand faculty, has been engaged in that pursuit, it is crucial to document that work. Our “Milestones: AAUP Chapters of the CCCS” (below) briefly lists the…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS As classes are cancelled and layoffs announced, help members apply for unemployment insurance benefits. It is helpful for several reasons: First, many of us will qualify for regular unemployment and an additional $600/week through the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance. Secondly, it appears many employers are not going to fight unemployment claims as…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Organizers do what they can, with what they have, where they are. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic our small community college chapters have been focusing on preserving the faculty majority of adjuncts who are nearly out of their minds with worry over income the next several months. While Colorado is essentially a right-to-work…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS The coronavirus pandemic has hit. The nation and the economy are in a free fall. Your college has closed and your college administration is announcing how there is nothing to see over here because the faculty—those miraculous, mythical, shapeshifting creatures—have morphed overnight from classroom teachers to “online educators” engaged in “online learning”…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS A big part of our success in chapter-building and awareness-raising in the Colorado Community College System is a list of facts we publish biennially in a document we call “The Adjunct Index,” modeled on the “Harper’s Index.” The index is an easy format to send to our press contacts, lawmakers, and to…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Dirty Laundry Week. Tuition Scam Week. Fraud on the Public Week. Tuition Lies Week. Perhaps if national Campus Equity Week had a more descriptive title, it might get the attention of journalists and lawmakers. As it is, October 21–25, 2019 will pass as another week for the nation’s 5,300 wealthy college administrators…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS By their decree, every word on every wall at our community college system is controlled by the administration. It seems even the formerly full-time First Amendment has itself been replaced by adjunct amendments, and is now as scattered and as difficult to organize as are we. Adjunct faculty comprise 80% of the…