Dear members of the board,

My name is Dr. Deborah Garfinkle, I am an award-winning writer and translator, a former Fulbright Scholar who has served as part-time faculty in the English Department at the College of San Mateo for over eighteen years. I have also served on the faculty of De Anza College for almost twenty-two years. 

Now more than ever with public education under attack, our college and district have been a powerful force in advocating for and promoting the values of equality and equity in education, to ensure students’ right to quality education no matter their origin, race or social class. Today I’m here to ask the Board and the district to finally pay adjunct faculty by load instead of instructional hour. I urge you to do the just and moral thing to end the unfair system of compensation for adjunct faculty that does not reflect our community’s values. Each time part-time faculty, who make up the majority of faculty in the district, step into the classroom and are paid an hourly wage, we prop up a system that falsely implies that part-time work begins and ends with that 50 minute instructional hour and that our labor doesn’t equal that of our full-time colleagues’ and that we stop teaching once we cross the classroom’s threshold. 

This inequality persists because of the illusion that our faculty, with the same skills and qualifications, are as one instead of grossly divided by employment status. I always say we are all equal in the classroom. No student can tell  whether we are full or part-time – they haven’t a clue because nothing in the catalogue indicates that when you sign up for Professor X, you’re getting someone who can’t serve you fully because they’re not paid fairly. Like my student wanted me to be his Honor’s Program advisor but didn’t know I was part-time. I had turn him down because I couldn’t accept compensation that was, according to my full-time colleague, “just a token thank you, far from where it should be–but it’s something.” When the District embraces this illusion of equity, it robs passionate, highly-qualified educators with their right to equal pay for equal work that most of us have fought tooth and nail for, only not when it comes to our divided faculty. Without load, there is no way to set a coherent parity figure to compare the salary schedules. To do so is akin to comparing fresh-picked Granny Smiths to bargain bin leftovers. 

I could remind the Board in my meager three minutes of the 20-30 minutes I spend per student essay to provide meaningful feedback that will pass RSI muster, video overviews and lectures, revising my Canvas website, and all the other feedback I give to students beyond the 3 units and office time I’m paid for. I could point to the lack of transparency when it comes to how many hours I’m paid each month, or why I’m paid 1.7 hours less each semester for online teaching only because the Ed Code says I can be. At De Anza College, there’s no confusion or disparity; online and traditional courses are compensated by the same load figure (usually .125 of full-time). 

I could also argue the unfairness of not being given a paid holiday even though it’s a dirty secret that instructors, no matter how or what they teach, never have a day off, because weekends and days off are when we catch up on all the things we have to do for student success that we don’t have time to do while we’re in the classroom. I put in an equal commitment to student learning no matter the modality. That means I work every day from the weeks before the semester begins when I’m not yet under contract to the first moment I publish my course at 12 AM the day a semester begins all the way until the moment I finish grading my final essay. Year round, I work off the clock at revising and refining my Canvas course to make it a powerful tool for learning. When the Board and District willfully choose to ignore the depth and breadth of adjunct faculty labor because of this illusion of equity, they cynically betray the very values of equity and justice that drives our mission as a community. 

SMCCD is an outlier in the Bay Area in paying faculty by instructional hour. At De Anza College, I have been paid according to load since I began teaching there in 2003. West Valley College, San Jose/Evergreen, City College of San Francisco, College of Marin all have load based pay. Other less-wealthy non-basic aid districts in the Bay Area have been able to make the switch to load based pay, like San Jose/Evergreen where I used to teach. It not only can be done, it should have been done long ago. And I shouldn’t have to stand here arguing for what we all know is right. No one should work for free. 

In this climate targeting public ed, we cannot afford to pay lip service to equity. SMCCD needs to side with its better angels, the ones we  bring with us every time we open the door to our students’ hearts and minds.

Thank you.  

In solidarity with all those past and present who have joined in solidarity to uphold the rights of workers to organize.