Colleges Have Their Own Best Interest in Mind Not Your Child’s
What exactly does “colleges” mean?
Here we’re not talking about faculty or staff but those who make the decisions. They are trustees (board members) and presidents. And this is a problem. Why? Because they do not live lives similar to that of students, faculty, or staff. Most live in comparative luxury looking to better their lot by keeping themselves–decision makers–around. If cuts need to be made, they will be done at the low end, getting rid of adjunct and fulltime faculty, staff, and by increasing fees, tuition, and so on.
Here’s an example to elaborate.
Years ago, I was working at a community college and joined a group to get a union on campus, for without one teachers will get near nothing. Even with one they often don’t get enough, but a union helps. But sometimes they even help in major ways, life saving even. In my case, I was between insurances when I was told I had cancer. And only with the help of the union was I able to get health insurance. The union had ensured people in my situation that even with one foot in the grave they would get access to good insurance. Most employers do not have such strong insurance obtainment policies for employees. To this day, I am literally alive because of the AFT (American Federation of Teachers). After that the AFT continued to help me on several occasions to obtain fair treatment. To continue the example.
At the time I was attending board meetings, the economy took a dive and cuts had to be made. Who was affected most? Faculty, staff, students. Classes were cut, adjuncts (non-guaranteed, semester to semester contracts) were left unemployed, fulltime were asked to retire early, and tuition fees were hiked. That may not be so bad in itself, but on the other end, I sat in meetings during this time while the president gave herself consecutive, back to back annual $25,000 increases while board members were giving themselves $7000, $10,000, $14,000 annual increases and so on.
More recently, during the fiscal pay-calendar shift (where pay is usually the last of the month but shifts in July to the 10th so teachers are going more than five weeks without pay), teacher after teacher was discovering that their pay was not coming on the 10th of July but the 31st, basically going two months without pay.
Upon calling the AFT, I was told that Payroll intentionally did not specifically warn instructors with a memo about the change (it was buried in the new contract with some vague language, that which the chair of my department had to read several times before she could make sense of it) because the district wanted to cause hardships so that the teachers would complain thus enabling a greater opportunity for additional monies to be place in the state budget for community colleges. Of course here we’re talking about monies that would not necessarily be distributed to faculty or staff. It may be earmarked for them, but monies allocated by the state do not always get to their intended targets.
In effect, since the change was stated in the contract, no matter how vague, the AFT couldn’t do anything, at least according to the president of the AFT local I spoke to.
Another thing to consider in your child’s mistreatment and lack of regard expressed by the actions or inactions of the trustees is the fact that part-time faculty or adjuncts outnumber full time faculty by 60 to 40. The majority of teachers are adjuncts or temporary, semester by semester employees of a district so that money can be saved (i.e.: less money spent on pensions and benefits). This is solely done to save the district money.
Sounds good?
Guess again.
Because of this, along with the rule that an adjunct cannot teach more than 9 units in any given district, adjuncts (the majority of teachers) become freeway flyers, often going not only from college to college to college but district to district to make enough money to pay for the necessities. Along with this, most are not compensated for office time to meet with students. Some districts do compensate for an hour a week, but that’s rare. Most give nothing or one district pays for one hour a month. Not many student issues can be addressed in such a short period of time.
So the problem is that students don’t get the attention they deserve and teachers don’t get the motivation they need to keep teaching. It’s basically a lose / lose situation.
There are other injustices being incurred by your children too numerous to mention here, but the next time you hear colleges spouting a great mission statement be careful of the hype that most likely lies beneath it.
Nothing is as it seems? Yes, we can say that here, for certain.
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