COCAL VIII: Epiphany in San Diego

by Martin Goldstein

The Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) is a loose federation of faculty activists working on contingent issues in all levels of higher education. Its members come from all over the US, as well as Canada and Mexico. Previous COCAL conferences, generally held every other year, have been in Boston, New York, San Jose, Montreal, Chicago, and Vancouver, with  the next scheduled for Mexico City in 2010. This year it was held on the spacious campus of San Diego State University, August 8-10, 2008.

A COCAL Conference is generally a get-together of academic activists (this was my fourth one), and routinely they are filled with gripes, complaints, and outright horror stories.  But this one was different. Of all I’ve been to, this one was without doubt the most positive; no matter where you turned, people were strong, optimistic, confident.  Everybody’s conference is different, of course, with 250 people and scores of workshops and breakouts, so I can only report on what I experienced.

I went there with a purpose, looking for signs of an emerging consensus on the next crucial steps for contingent labor. For me, that step is taking out the contingent part, or at least, minimizing it as much as possible.   Regularization (a concept introduced to me at a prior COCAL) requires not just equal pay and benefits, but equal job security for the load you teach.  For full-timers, it’s called tenure; for us it’s due process rehire rights.

That job security, those due process rights, are a major part of what gives teachers academic freedom, and if we don’t have those rights, we don’t have academic freedom.  This has become a mantra of the AAUP recently, and it’s quite simply the truth.  At Santa Monica College  we have achieved an excellent form of job security for our part-timers,  our Associate Faculty status. It’s not perfect, but it’s very good, and it exists, so it can be done. But who else was doing it, or even thinking about it? Is it enough of a consensus issue, at least among the CC’s, to be part of widely supported legislation, like the change in the 60% law to 67%? That was our first real win. What’s next?

I went there looking for answers, and found them.   From  the  opening  night speakers  on,  the British Columbia model of regularization was on the table.  I went to a breakout the next day on “Strategies for Achieving Job Security,” where Bob Samuels of UC-AFT explained their process of achieving what he termed “tenure lite,” a situation of continuous reappointments, where, after a certain number of years, everyone is rehired in perpetuity.  A professor from Southern Illinois talked about de facto tenure in their British Columbia-like process of regularization.  There was even a later panel on “Tenure for Contingents,” though this proved to be more a proposal than a reality. But clearly, job security was not just on the table, but out there front and center. 

Other breakouts covered a range of issue from local chapter organizing, to health and retirement problems, lobbying and legislation, academic governance, unemployment insurance, and globalization and corporatization of the university.  CPFA, CCA, AFT National, NEA National, and AAUP National all held association meetings,  old acquaintances were renewed, friendships and professional connections rekindled, and generally a good time and a good vibe was had by all.

We all left energized, filled with a refined sense of purpose.  It’s not a futile struggle anymore.  We’re finally getting someplace.  And even more importantly, we finally know where we’re going. It’s called regularization, and we’re setting a course to get there, piece by piece.