Speaking to power: Adjunct group addresses the SBCCOE Feb. 10, 2016
Post date: Mar 6, 2016 2:52:41 PM
Community members (one pictured above) served as proxies representing thousands of adjunct faculty too afraid to be heard or seen outside their classrooms. They wore signs that read, "PROXY: Representing 4,000+ impoverished community college adjunct faculty silenced by fear of CCCS retaliation."
Some from the AAUP group (above) posed outside after the presentation at the Aurora Community College. The SBCCOE meets 10 times a year in daylong meetings at various CCCS colleges. Adjunct faculty in the CCCS are 75% of the faculty and half of all CCCS employees. However, any comments adjuncts wish to make must be made during the five-minute "public comment" period during the meeting. It is a measure of how inconsequential the CCCS regards its working faculty majority when one of them, or one representing many of them, is allowed less than one hour per year to say anything at all to the CCCS governing board. It is difficult to plan to attend the monthly meeting because its agenda is not published until a few days prior to it. Unlike all the CCCS executives and administrators whose attendance at the board meeting and travel to it is paid for, any adjunct who wishes to address the board must forfeit the payment of any class he/she might miss to attend the meeting and must pay for his/her own travel expenses. Furthermore, the way the CCCS has interpreted the Colorado Sunshine Law impairs the spirit of shared governance, as most of the 8-hour meeting is held in an executive session closed to the public. It is in this way that the faculty majority and the public have little knowledge of CCCS decision-making and how it determines to spend nearly $700 million/year in revenues. SBCCOE board members, unlike the Regents of the University of Colorado, for example, are not elected, but chosen by political insiders and their appointments then rubber-stamped by the Colorado governor.