Chris Storer, Instructor of Philosophy, De Anza College and Executive Council Chair, California Part-time Faculty Association (CPFA) responds.

My personal feeling, and the general principle behind the CPFA Mission as I understand it, is that community colleges are institutions for teaching and learning. This institutional mission is based on the relationship between a student and full-service professional faculty. Any degeneration of the professional expectations of any faculty member is destructive of the professional ethics of the faculty member and the rights of students to fair and equitable treatment within the system.

Thus, the "ratio of pro-rata pay" should not even be open for discussion. There should be one classification of faculty, as implied by the definition of faculty under minimum qualifications in Assembly Bill 1725, and one schedule of compensation with distinction based solely on load, educational background, and experience. This is the way it is in K-12, our other purely teaching/learning institutions, and this is the way it must be in community colleges.

This argument is basic, simple, and unquestionable. We should all be able to present it in any and every context where it might be relevant. There is no REAL issue here. The appearance of an issue has been created by either of two mistaken perceptions:

1) The first mistake is to equate community colleges with four year institutions where one may reasonably distinguish between two different professional occupations. Whether the two, research professorships vs. teaching professorships, justify different wages is not an issue we need to debate. The distinction is irrelevant to community colleges.

2) The second mistake is the more dangerous and pervasive one. It is the idea that education, like manufacturing, involves work which can be broken up into piece work, hired out on hourly wages, assembly lined in packaged modules that do not require a full-service professional educator. It is this mistake that deprofessionalizes all faculty, threatening the very foundation of the community college ideal of democratizing higher education, and threatening also the tenure system which protects educational quality. Both of these threats would turn the entire area of public higher education into the job training of technical workers, denying the fundamental and constitutionally protected humanity of our students.

Ciao,

Chris

Chris Storer; storer@fhda.edu

Instructor of Philosophy, De Anza College

Executive Council Chair

California Part-time Faculty Association (CPFA)