By Andrew Walzer   

    For this year’s campus equity week, contingent faculty in California organized several regional events, including one in Northern California, one in the greater Los Angeles area, and one in the San Diego area.  What was novel is that we brought together contingent faculty from the three branches of higher education in California, including the community colleges, the Cal State system, and the University of California.  The goal was to build a coalition among these three groups so that we are more effective politically.  At the Los Angeles regional event at Cal State Dominguez Hills, part timers testified in front of a “panel of experts” including legislators, members of various boards of trustees (the CS and LA community college district) and Marcus Harvey of the AAUP.  (Our own Melissa Michaelson and Vicki Blaho were among those that testified).  Contingent faculty in all three systems face a common plight: low pay, lack of job security, and poor working conditions.  The legislators, including Cindy Montanez (39th district), Allen Lowenthal (54th district), and Mervyn Dymally (52nd district) were sympathetic to our issues, and pledged to fight to correct the injustices resulting from the use of contingent faculty in higher education.  So all in all this was a well attended and successful event.

    But let us not rest on our laurels; there is much work to be done.  For me, campus equity week provided an occasion to reflect on our political strategy.  It is one thing to have informational sessions which educate people on our issues; it is a whole other ball of wax to figure out how contingent faculty can be an effective force politically.  To do this, we need to think really carefully about what our goals are, and what we need to do to achieve them.  For me, our major goals narrow down to two things: pay equity and revision of the 60% law (which prohibits part timers from working more than 60% in a given district).  

To achieve these goals, we need to do a couple of things:

1)  We need to continue to build our coalition with full timers and with students.  We also need to think of what other organizations, including unions, are natural allies.

2)       We need to get statewide faculty groups to advocate more forcefully for us in the state legislature.  We’ve been at least partially successful in getting the attention of FACCC (the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges), in large part due, I think,  to leadership from Santa Monica College.  Now we need to work to get the major community college unions to work for us, including CTA (California Teachers Association), CFT (California Federation of Teachers) as well as the CCCI (California Community College Independents).

3)  We need to continue to work on defining specific goals on specific colleges that we can win.  One obvious target is the way that the statewide equity money has been distributed.  This has been a really corrupt process, including here at Santa Monica College.

4)  Lastly, in this time of budget crisis, we need to think about how we can advocate for our issues without getting drown out by all the other crises that are occurring.

Campus Equity Week