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March 2009, Volume 23, Issue 1 - Farewell Old Friend |
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By Lantz Simpson
The Hourly Advocate is being retired. This, our last edition of the Advocate, will be a fond look back at some of the best articles in the Ad-vocate’s archives. These articles also have an important historic component: they show how far part-time faculty have come in the last 25 years in terms of consciousness and empower-ment, as well as highlight the major contractual gains in salary, job security, and benefits achieved by our FA It is these gains that have led the FA leadership and Editorial Board to the decision that the Advocate has served its pur-pose. Today, after decades of concerted efforts, full time and part-time faculty at Santa Monica College enjoy a widespread sense of solidarity and mutual respect. As an indication and recog-nition of that achievement, the FA’s future newsletters are being unified into one. One for all.
Jim Prickett invented the Hourly Advocate. He said he had always wanted to edit a newslet-ter for part-time faculty and call it the Hourly Advocate. He got his chance when the Advocate was born out of an ad hoc Academic Senate committee on hourly faculty in 1986. Gordon Dossett chaired the committee under Charlie Donaldson’s senate presidency. Under Fran Chandler’s FA leadership, a permanent hourly committee was started and the FA soon took over the publication of the Advocate.
―Wisdom of the Hourly‖ was another one of Jim’s ideas, although I admit I scoured my Eng-lish 1 textbook A World of Ideas and pulled out some of the better nuggets. These little twisted quotations were always good for a knowing chuckle.
And why the Hourly Advocate? Why not the Part-time Faculty Advocate?
Back in the 1980’s, all part-time faculty at SMC were paid on an hourly pay schedule. Pro rata pay for any part-time faculty was still a goal—and really more of a dream. In those days hourly faculty was the nearly universal term at SMC for part-time faculty. The contract used the term ―hourly‖ almost exclusively to define and describe part-time faculty. And in 1986, the average hourly wage (being paid for classroom teaching hours only) was $28. Adjust that for inflation, those of you now paid pro rata, and see how that would affect your salary today.
So we say farewell to a grand project and honor its successes with this remembrance of its best work.
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