By Jacqui Cain, Vice President for Contingent Faculty, and Enrie Marusya, Union Organizing Representative
Regular readers may recall the action that adjunct faculty took back in October 2021: dozens of adjuncts and their tenure-track peers attended a virtual meeting of the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges to present a petition reminding the State Board of their obligations to treat faculty equitably under RCW 28B. Many gave moving testimony about their experiences with loss of work during the pandemic. Since then, we have attended subsequent meetings with the goal of sparking a commitment. These actions included meetings of the entire board and also conversations with some board members.
We’ve made our goals clear to the State Board. They include adding benchmarks to the State’s Best Practices for Part Time Faculty (which you can find on the State Board’s website at https://www.sbctc.edu) of 85% pay parity per credit hour for adjuncts, and moving towards 70% full-to-part-time faculty ratios.
As of yet, the Board hasn’t taken any actions towards our issues. Instead, they are continuing their practice of “informal conversations” with no resulting commitments. We need to make sure they know how the lack of progress on these issues is hurting adjunct faculty. The Contingent Faculty Issues Committee (CFIC) is asking members to prepare for another action at the next State Board meeting on March 30th-31st. Public comment tends to be on Day 2, so stay tuned and mark your calendars!
