Summer Series: Summertime, and the living’s not easy (for adjunct faculty)

BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Hauling rocks. Nailing fence posts. Painting walls. Babysitting. Folding sweaters. Making photocopies. Cleaning horse stalls. Laying sod. Pouring coffee. Packaging candies. Watering plants. Driving UPS vans. Delivering pizzas. Delivering flowers. This is just a short list of what many of America’s 768,000 college teachers will be doing this summer to try to…

Has your organi-zing lost its zing?

BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Bread-bakers depend on the dough’s rest, during which time the yeast rises. The peasant farmer uses winter to carve wood or nail things together. Pickle-makers know it as the cure; those passing hours as the cucumber mysteriously turns pickle. Whatever. Hallmark-Channel-ey platitudes don’t play on the edgy, 24/7 adjunct reality show no…

Expressions of gratitude for AAUP for recent censures

NOTE: These two letters were read to the audience directly prior to the votes to censure Community College of Aurora and Spalding University at the AAUP Annual Meeting, June 17, 2017, in Washington, D.C. Statement from Nate Bork Community College of Aurora, Aurora, Colo. Prior to AAUP’s presence in Colorado, all higher education faculty in…

Undevelopment

BY CAPRICE LAWLESS This weekend the Modern Language Association (MLA) is holding its annual conference in Philadelphia. If ever there were a time and place more apropos for teachers of rhetoric to gather, and for rhetoric’s “teachable moment,” it is post-election 2016, in the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed. What is remarkable…

Thunder in the Rockies

BY CAPRICE LAWLESS The work of our AAUP chapters in Colorado’s community college system has been in the headlines recently and will continue to be so. It shows how the small, sparky things we do (staffing hallway membership tables, distributing our crossword puzzles, bookmarks, fliers, cookbooks, etc.) can lead to lightning bolts of change. Briefly,…

Publish a lively chapter calendar

BY CAPRICE LAWLESS If your chapters are like ours (spread out across a large geographic region)  and your membership like ours (working multiple jobs on multiple campuses) publish a calendar on your website to help keep everyone on the same page. (See link below.) A calendar like no other, ours is easy to update and…