Contract Currents

Faculty Voices

COPE-ing

It's been just a few weeks since Flex Week, and yet what a whirlwind of activity there's been at CCFT and across campus. Students returned this fall to yet another increase in their fees, fewer open seats in required classes, and new restrictions on attempting those classes. All of us have had to confront the reality of an understaffed campus. Perhaps you've felt it in your division office, where your now-solo IDA struggles to provide the same excellent service for you and your students. Perhaps you felt it when preparing your handouts and readers for the semester, and changes in Duplications prompted new procedures and deadlines. Perhaps you felt it those first two weeks as you turned down student after student trying to wrangle a seat in your already overstuffed class-rooms. Probably you feel it every day in many different ways. I know I do.

But Cabrillans won't suffer in silence. CCFT, CCEU, the Student and Faculty Senates, and others at the college are working together in what is really an amazing collaboration to get out the word on Props. 30, 32, and 38. Considering these and the rest of this fall's propositions, it’s really an exciting election for California voters, especially new ones.

As we face down the next few weeks before the election, there are many opportunities to do our part in the classroom, in phone banks, at voter registration tables, and in conversations with our friends and communities outside education. The last month has already been an education for me—a quick study in state and campus politics and policy—in my new role as editor. Jeff Hancock's work on the newsletter these past several years set a stellar example, and it's a difficult standard to live up to as we go digital with the news. Thankfully, his work is well archived. I hope to do my Digital Media instructors proud with the online news. If it weren’t for Cabrillo’s investment in my professional develop-ment during a sabbatical two years ago, I couldn't be doing this.

Which brings me back to Prop. 30. We’d all prefer not to think of what might happen if it doesn’t pass, so let’s not let it happen. Not on our watch. In the next few weeks, as voters start sending in their absentee ballots, let’s step up that whirlwind to level: fierce!