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Organizing a Legislative Forum
By Jack Longmate
Since states fund public higher education, state legislators are essential to reform efforts. An excellent way to familiarize legislators with faculty needs is through a legislative forum, where legislators are invited to discuss higher education issues.
Most legislators enjoy the chance to meet with their constituents, say a few words, and learn more about the academic institutions within their districts. Their presence can draw some media notice, along with the attention of the campus community and the general public. Their presence can also be the beginning of a relationship that could pay off when decisions are made about priorities and spending. At Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington, legislative forums, inspired by Campus Equity Week, have become annual events, with a stronger following each year.
A forum can be organized in any number of ways. Begin by establishing a date, time, and location (for example, a room or auditorium on campus) for the forum, and then invite legislators from the districts surrounding your institution to attend.In our experience, most come. We also invite the student body president to welcome the audience and introduce the speakers, who include a contingent faculty member, a tenured faculty member, the college president, and the legislators. Each speaker has about five minutes to speak, after which he or she fields questions that can be submitted anonymously on index cards or asked directly by audience members.In its most basic form, the event requires little or no expense. Given the natural interest that public figures like legislators may draw, an audience is virtually guaranteed, but even if the audience is meager, the meeting of faculty with legislators is, in and of itself, valuable. If funding is available, publicity, refreshments, and videotape production of the event are possible. Our local public-access television channel broadcasts our forums four times after they occur.
Such events are especially important for contingent faculty, whose story must be disseminated to policy makers and the general public. The following are potential topics relating to contingent faculty, which can be tailored to your institution:
- nonproportional pay for part-time faculty, in violation of the principle of equal pay for equal work
- workload caps that restrict assignments and therefore pay, creating hardship
- lack of incremental pay increases for greater experience and seniority (such as those typically received by workers in the public and private sector and by tenured faculty)
- lack of health care and retirement benefits
- lack of job security (contingent faculty are not assured of employment beyond the current term)
- lack of academic freedom(to protect their job, contingent faculty must be mindful of what they say)
- denial of access to unemployment insurance (a key right for contingent faculty not employed between terms)
Running the forums becomes easier over time; now, on our campus, they seem to run themselves, and legislators look forward to returning the next year. To see the organizational materials for Olympic College’s legislative forum, send an e-mail to jlongmate@oc.ctc.edu.
Jack Longmate is an adjunct faculty member in English at Olympic College in Washington and vice president of his National Education Association–affiliated local. His e-mail address is jlongmate@oc.ctc.edu.
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