a worn brown leather ankle boot without laces on a wooden floor

Colorado Community College Revenues Rise While Instructors Remain in Poverty

BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Note: The Colorado Conference published this press release yesterday. It is another example of how activists can be their own journalists. Research your organization and the larger context for the decision-making destroying the profession. Crunch the numbers and provide memorable images of what those numbers mean. Set the record straight with facts…

Screenshot of the cover of the adjunct's guide

Enlighten the Gaslit with a New Guidebook

BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Along with workers of all stripes mobilizing for better pay, better working conditions, and human dignity, the low-wage faculty majority of the wealthy Colorado Community College System has been organizing for change. So they have at their fingertips deeply hidden data they need for their advocacy, the American Association of University Professors…

The Power of the Press Release

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…

Secrets, Scams, and Scandals

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN To restore the profession of teaching in the Colorado Community College System (CCCS), the Colorado Conference of the AAUP has released the first of a series of videos showcasing the mounting, explosive, labor exploitation issue facing the 13-college CCCS.  The video, Secrets, Scams, and Scandals: The Dirty Little Secrets of the…

Organizing in the non-community community college

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 It seems even the formerly full-time First Amendment has itself been replaced by adjunct amendments, and is now as scattered and as difficult to organize as are we.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…

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…

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…