By Cynthia Mahabir, Laney College | Originally published in FACCCTS, Fall 2024 The Problem There’s a fundamental weakness in our California Community College system that impairs student success. Fortunately, there’s also a prospective solution. At […]
The California Community Colleges (CCC) system plays a pivotal role as an engine for economic and social mobility in California and as a driver for the fifth largest economy in the world. In the past two decades, the CCC system has undergone significant “reform,” narrowing students’ educational opportunities and shrinking the student body by over one million students. During this period, the CCC system’s student outcomes have declined, stagnated, or only slightly improved despite decades of “reform” efforts. This paper illustrates that transitioning from a two-tiered to a nontiered—unified faculty—model will better serve students, colleges, and the state of California. The concept of a unified faculty emphasizes the elimination of the two employment tiers—part-and full-time faculty—to create a nontiered structure. This model is based on faculty and collegewide unity as opposed to the current structure that has produced a divided faculty, inequitable service to students, and stagnant or diminishing student outcomes. Presently, the K-12 system and Vancouver model are structured around a unified, nontiered faculty model. It is time for the California Community Colleges to address the hypocrisy at the heart of its institutions: decades of disinvestment from the faculty and thus, students. Investing in a nontiered, unified faculty model will remedy the CCC system that is currently struggling to bring back the millions of students who have been pushed out of their colleges.
The newly formed Campaign for Faculty Equality (CFE) seeks to correct the broken faculty system in California’s community colleges, particularly the incredibly unequal two-tier faculty structure, a decades-long problem consigned to the shadows of academia. […]
The two-tier workplace, with an upper tier of tenured faculty and a lower tier of non-tenured faculty, has been the norm in U.S. higher education for half a century, long enough to have enabled several generations to become acculturated to it. Just as it seems natural and normal for water to run downhill, no one is surprised when adjuncts are not paid the same as tenured instructors.
Nearly seventy years ago the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate can never be equal and struck down racial segregation in our nation’s K-12 public schools (Brown v. Board of Education). Yet in the past fifty years, higher education has instituted a separate but unequal system of faculty employment based on tenure-status. . . .
By Jack Longmate When hearing about proposals to fund new tenure-track jobs, adjuncts might think to themselves: “If I could only get a tenure-track job, I could say ‘Good riddance’ to this dead-end adjunct gig […]
Three decades ago part-time college professors were paid at a much lower rate than their full-time, tenure-track counterparts, had artificial caps imposed on their workload limits, received few benefits. . .
By Keith Hoeller How many contingent professors have lost their jobs or had their teaching loads reduced since the COVID-19 pandemic started more than a year ago? This question has the same answer as nearly […]
This excerpt has been posted on the CPFA website with the express permission of its author. CPFA’s Must-Read Book Spotlight. Buy the book on Amazon. Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System by […]
Dear Contingent Faculty, Every so often, on this list and at conferences, people comment that the contingent faculty movement needs a new narrative. Given the lack of progress over the years, it is hard to […]
CPFA is working to achieve a basic democratic principle: Equality. CPFA seeks to eliminate the inequality faced by part-time faculty when compared to their full-time colleagues by establishing a One-Tier System in the California Community Colleges (CCC), in which faculty with the same qualifications, experience, and responsibilities are supported and compensated proportionately according to their workload.
By Alexis Moore, Jack Longmate and Keith Hoeller When most people think of part-time (or adjunct) professors, they conjure up the image of someone with a full-time job and benefits in the private sector who chooses to […]
California Part-time Faculty Association Endorses the following Vision The One-Tier Model of Faculty Employment Context: The College for All Act of 2021, has been heralded as “the most substantial federal investment in higher education in […]
By P. D. Lesko This article was previously published on December 2, 2020 at AdjunctNation.com For many years, I have made myself unpopular among higher education union leaders for pointing out blatantly unequal union representation […]
By Keith Hoeller Why are teachers the only professionals routinely denied unemployment when they are not working? Though our nation’s unemployment system was established in 1935 by the Social Security Act, not until 1970 did […]