FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Caprice Lawless, President
Front
Range Community College Chapter
American
Association of University Professors
By publishing a cookbook like no other, instructors at Front
Range Community College (FRCC) are teaching peers, students, parents, and
others in the community about a situation that has reached a boiling point.
Interspersed amid dozens of what the authors call “food bank-friendly
concoctions,” the text is a primer in how the Colorado Community College System
(CCCS) is slicing, dicing and shredding collegiate-level teaching. Many pages
of research, audit charts, and budget breakdowns document what the authors say
is a recipe for catastrophe for 163,000 Colorado students enrolled in those colleges.
FRCC has campuses in Longmont, Westminster, Ft. Collins and Brighton.
Included are recipe categories such as “The Frappes of
Wrath” and “Nobucks Coffee Drinks.” Recipes
calling for beef scraps, bruised tomatoes, orange peelings and chicken bones
point to a workforce living on the edge. “Cracked Windshield” is a mint drink
based on cracked Lifesaver candies. “If Only” is a gin-and-tonic sans
gin. “Sliding-Toward-Despair Asian Sliders” are, perforce, small and
inexpensive to make.
The
recipes, say the authors in the introduction, reflect accurately the working
conditions of the college’s faculty majority. There is also much humor
sprinkled in amidst evidence of hardship and other ponderous but necessary
facts adjuncts need to know about why they are experiencing hardship.
The group
created the book when they discovered, after two years of organizing effort,
that many of the downtrodden and demoralized adjunct faculty are too weary even
to take a passing glance at hallway-table handouts and were similarly loath to
read further the research on the academic labor movement.
The cheery
cookbook, with the word "Adjunct" set in a fun style on the cover, is
not intimidating, if the initial (sold out) print run is any indication. The authors
believe that once teachers and students get the books home to read the recipes,
they discover many startling facts about their college. Most of those facts are
public information, albeit well-hidden information, about a bloated
administration consuming most of the $576 million in CCCS annual revenues.
Along
with its many photographs and insights from lawmakers, authors report, the
cookbook readers “will see the faces of good people who know about the
situation, will know who is already working hard to set things right, and will join
us in addressing the rapidly expanding fault line in higher education.” The
book also offers many local resources their AAUP chapter has found to help the
adjuncts get through the workweek [food bank locales and hours, local contacts
for food stamps, energy assistance, health-care, etc.).
“We hope
the book helps them realize they have not failed, but that the system
has failed them,” said Lawless. The group did not copyright the cookbook,
she said, because they want other adjunct groups around the country to use the
model to promote their work on their campuses. Copies are available for a
donation of $7.50 each (including shipping and handling), via the FRCC AAUP
website:
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