The group, which consisted of around 30 people at the height of the protest, carried signs and informed passersby about the plight of part-time instructors. Those adjunct professors make up around 70 percent of the community college’s workforce, according to a press release issued by the protest organizers.
According to the release, adjunct or part-time professors teach 63 percent of classes at CNM. They receive an average of $1,000 less for each class than full-time instructors, and adjuncts are only compensated for four hours a week per class, regardless of the total time they spend creating curriculum, grading assignments and helping students outside the classroom.
Myrriah Gomez, one of the protest organizers, is a part-time instructor of Chicano studies at UNM and part-time English instructor at CNM. She has a Ph.D. in English, and although she is considered part-time, she taught six classes in the fall 2014 semester, she said.
“Contingent faculty across the country are speaking out against the terrible working conditions we have, in terms of low pay, no benefits, no full-time status or long-term contracts — no job security, basically,” Gomez said. “This is really an issue of labor exploitation. It’s a continuation of the privatization of education.”
Gomez said that despite her degree and experience, and the number of classes she teaches, she makes less than the average high school student would at a part-time job.
Part-time instructors at CNM are hired using one-semester contracts, and the school can choose not to renew the contract for any reason, meaning that the instructors have little to no job security, according to the press release. Even if they are hired, if too few students register for their classes, they can be cancelled at the last minute. This semester, CNM cancelled nearly 500 classes this way due to lack of enrollment, according to a report by KOAT.
“This has become a real plague and problem in this country in higher education,” said protester Bob Anderson, who has taught political science at CNM for 10 years as well as numerous classes at UNM. “People are getting paid hamburger flipping kind of wages. People at Walmart make more money than some adjunct professors make.”
Anderson said there are too many people with higher degrees looking for work and not enough jobs in the state. Many universities take advantage of this situation, knowing that if instructors are not happy with the contracts they offer, there is an army of qualified people who will take their place, he said.
“A lot of faculty wind up working two or three other jobs. I run into people who are teaching here and working at 7/11 to make ends meet,” Anderson said. “The country cannot get quality education out of this system. I’ve got a Ph.D. and most of the faculty (protesting) here do too. When you figure out the amount of hours that we have to work, we don’t make minimum wage sometimes. It’s unfair.”
Jay Mehida, a UNM philosophy and political science major, said he came out to support the instructors because teachers deserve respect and a living wage.
“I think education is the most noble profession in the world. It’s the pillar of our society, and so if we don’t support that, then everything else falls apart,” he said.
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Despite all the support they have received, Gomez said she knows there is a lot of work to be done before teachers at all levels get the pay, benefits and respect they deserve.
“I think that efforts and action during one day is not going to be the solution. This is just the beginning, and it’s going to take a lot of people, and probably countless hours, to raise awareness,” Gomez said. “I think the president (of CNM) needs to acknowledge that this is a problem, I think the full-time faculty need to acknowledge it and stand in solidarity with the part-time faculty, because if not, nothing is going to change.”
Jonathan Baca is the news editor at the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @JonGabrielB.
