Fighting Back: Taking Power in Colorado
These activists went straight to the legislature—and got results!
By Dana Waller
When a handful of faculty activists founded the Colorado conference of the AAUP in 2003, we decided that legislative action would be one of our priorities. Last spring, the conference executive committee voted to find a state legislator who would be willing to sponsor a bill to require institutions of higher education in Colorado to provide health benefits for adjunct faculty members. Sen. Ron Tupa, a previous recipient of the conference’s Friend of Higher Education Award, was excited about the idea. But when he started asking questions, he found it was not going to be easy.
No one seemed to know anything about adjuncts: How many were there? How many classes did they teach? How many taught at more than one institution? How many needed health insurance? How much were they paid? There were so many questions that could not be answered that Sen. Tupa ultimately changed the bill into a study. In May 2006, the governor signed it into law; by the 2007 legislative session, we will have the answers, for the first time, to all of these questions about adjunct faculty in Colorado, and we will reintroduce the bill, with real numbers, for adjunct health benefits.
After being contacted by another state representative a few months later, members of the conference met several times with a group of legislators to discuss higher education in the state. One of them, Sen. Sue Windels, was so struck by the desperate plight in which so many faculty found themselves that she determined to do something about it. The result was what she refers to as her “little shop of horrors” bills. One requires the Colorado Commission on Higher Education (CCHE), like all other executive-level departments in Colorado, to publish and solicit comments on all proposed rule changes. CCHE rule changes apply to all institutions of higher education in Colorado. Another puts political balance back into college and university governing boards by mandating that no more than a simple majority be from one political party. A third requires members of the CCHE to have experience in higher education. And a fourth would have required an outside agency to determine the actual cost of education at all institutions in order to establish a formula for distributing financial support to colleges and universities from our new Colorado Opportunity Fund (or, as our governor likes to call it, our “higher ed vouchers” fund). The governor vetoed three of the bills but signed the one requiring political balance on governing boards—a surprising success, because all of our boards are currently packed with Republicans who believe in a corporate model for higher education.
In addition to working with state legislators to create bills, the conference mobilized this year to oppose harmful legislation. Colorado governor Bill Owens called for a bill to put restrictions on tenure, and Rep. Keith King complied by sponsoring a post-tenure review proposal. Members of the Colorado conference testified against the bill when it came before the House Education Committee, but, to the surprise of all, it passed. Afterward, King incorporated many of the opposing comments into the bill.
The bill was deemed “sufficiently changed” by House Speaker Andrew Romanoff to be reassigned to the House Education Committee for a new hearing. (Romanoff is a past recipient of our conference’s Friend of Higher Education Award.) That gave us two days to convince one key committee member to vote against the bill. Because we had no four-year colleges or chapters in the targeted representative’s district, we contacted a representative of the Senate Faculty Association Council, and she contacted faculty senates at the three community colleges in her district and asked them to call the representative. We also activated our new AAUP chapter at Colorado State University-Pueblo, an institution that receives many transfer students from the two-year colleges in the representative’s district, asking chapter members to call the representative and express their concerns.
At the second hearing of the bill, AAUP members again showed up to testify against the bill, and when it came time to vote, the representative we had targeted announced that he had heard from quite a few constituents and had changed his mind as a result. The bill died in committee.
Although it is only three years old, the Colorado conference has developed a network of activists who have created an effective voice in our state legislature.¨
Dana Waller teaches political science at Front Range Community College.Her e-mail address is danarwaller@msn.com.
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