From the Archives #2: Control the Language and Control the World
By: David Sheftman, CCFT Historian
Over the years as a faculty member, I’ve revisited a journal article I read during graduate school. Its theme was the social construction of knowledge and the idea of discourse communities as a potent force for identity formation. The article was “Inventing the University” by David Bartholomae.
His basic idea is that students entering higher education were engaged with a social and intellectual process of transformation as they strived to construct themselves as belonging in the college environment. Students were learning from experienced insiders, their professors, how to “talk-the-talk” so the students could “walk-the-walk.”
Bartholomae was the first theorist to introduce me to the concept of a discourse community. He argued that students in all their courses had “to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community.”
In the second semester composition course I teach, ENGL C1001, I take a page out of Bartholomae’s book. I ask students to write a paper in which they invite me, an outsider, into the language, knowledge, identity, and culture of an insider community they are steeped in. From that paper, I get to know a lot about what my students value through their expertise as insider pros within their community, how their thoughts and actions are structured by a shared vocabulary and knowledge-base which all insider members find rewarding and productive.
As members of CCFT, we, too, are part of a discourse community whose language, knowledge, and values bond us one to each other, creating that sense of belonging to one union. In “From the Archives #2” let’s look across time at our Faculty Voice newsletters, meeting minutes, and email communications to reflect on how our discourse community shifted its language and thought to today’s Associate Faculty from yesteryear’s UPT (Unit Pay Temporary), Part-Timer, and Adjunct.
Why the change in language? There are many reasons and motivations, but philosopher and theologian Peter Kreeft stated it well: “Control language and you control thought; control thought and you control action; control action and you control the world.”
From our first collective bargaining agreement with the District into the 90s, UPT was not just how the District named us but how we named ourselves. In April 1994, one item from our union correspondence read:
“UPT Appreciation Week: There will be banners saluting part-time instructors, plus our newsletter and buttons and acknowledgement of non-teaching part-timers such as counselors, librarians, nurses. We have made many advances for part-timers such as sick leave that accrues as long as you’re teaching at Cabrillo.”
Let’s go back even further to the very early days of our union and our December 1989 CCFT newsletter, with this message from our then President Nancy Andreason:
“Sara O’Keefe, Chair of CCFT’s UPT Committee, sat in on negotiation sessions. The perspective of the UPT Committee was a particularly important element in team discussions. Unit pay faculty did not receive an increase in the money available for benefits nor a broadening of eligibility for benefits. We have not yet been able to see all unit pay faculty receive 60% of the compensation of their contract counterparts on the salary schedule.”
The last word in the acronym UPT is temporary. The first word is unit. Faculty are persons not units. They are not disposable as the word temporary asserts. One step toward controlling our world at Cabrillo was changing that language to take charge of how we name ourselves and insist others name us.
Fast forward to September of 2000 and another of our President’s messages in the Faculty Voice newsletter:
“Welcome back to the start of a new academic year. This is a big year at Cabrillo. Twenty new contract faculty. Many new adjuncts.”
In that same newsletter was this recruitment call:
“CCFT is looking for an Adjunct Faculty member to fill the position of Adjunct Faculty Chairperson for a minimum of one year. The Adjunct Chair serves as a union representative for the part-time faculty at Cabrillo. Adjunct faculty share many concerns with full-time faculty and staff, but by definition also have special and unique interests.”
Ten years later in 2010, an editorial in the Faculty Voice newsletter continues the use of adjunct:
“Article 16 of the collective bargaining agreement now includes language stating that the District will make an effort to provide continuing comparable assignments to adjunct unit members with reemployment preference.”
However, the same newsletter provides information under the heading “Part Time Faculty May Be Eligible for Unemployment Benefits Over Winter Break.”
To control the world through language requires consistency, and we’ve not always shown that consistency in the messaging we do.
Was Adjunct Faculty progress from the use of UPT? UPT is utterly dehumanizing, but Adjunct is a matter of degree not kind. The definition of adjunct is “added to another thing but hold[ing] a subordinate, auxiliary, or temporary position.” That doesn’t sound like progress, but progress was on the horizon.
In March of 2022, then Faculty Senate President Anna Zagorska in an email to all faculty shared this news:
“Senate unanimously voted to support CCFT’s request to replace the title of Adjunct Faculty with Associate Faculty to reflect their integral contributions to the college and align with our DEI goals (presentation made by John Govsky & Rachel Mitchell).”
In August 2022, article 16 of our three year CBA with the District (JULY 1, 2022 THROUGH JUNE 30, 2025) listed for the first time Article 16 as Associate Faculty. A link to the contract is here: FULL-CONTRACT 2022
In the October 2022 online version of the faculty newsletter, a list of events for Campus Equity Week included CCFT’s website offering slide show celebrations of Associate faculty.
An associate is a partner, a person recognized and valued for their integral employment contribution to the institution. That’s quite different from what adjunct means.
Where can we go from here? How can we further effectuate change through control over language and thought?
Learn about the One-Faculty initiative from this article sent to all faculty by Rachell Mitchell in a May 2026 email. One Faculty One Mission: A Unified Faculty Model for California Community Colleges. In her email, Rachell introduced the author, Dr. Klein, as the “former president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges (FACCC) and former Cabrillo anthropology instructor.” Rachel provided this abstract of Dr. Klein’s article:
“This article advances a unified, non-tiered faculty model as essential to fulfilling the mission of the California Community Colleges (CCC) system. Although the system is charged with realizing open access and educational equity, nearly 70% of faculty serve in part-time or contingent roles-often without proportional compensation, institutional stability, or meaningful participation in governance. Drawing on research demonstrating that faculty working conditions shape student learning conditions, the article argues that structural employment inequities undermine the system’s democratic promise. Situating the proposal within national “One Faculty” efforts and recent legislative attention to pay parity in California, it demonstrates that reform is both conceptually sound and administratively feasible. Examples from collective bargaining agreements and comparative institutional models demonstrate viable pathways toward equity within public higher education systems. The Unified Faculty Model offers a phased, resource-conscious roadmap for implementation, aligning employment practices with the system’s stated educational mission. Faculty equity and student success are inseparable; a unified faculty structure is therefore necessary to renew both educational quality and the California Community Colleges’ democratic mission.”
Non-tiered means faculty are faculty.
For more information and conversation about the One-Faculty movement, please contact our current Executive Board Associate Faculty leaders: Jasper Billings and John Govsky.
And keep fighting the good fight to control the language so that we can continue to drive the history of change to make Cabrillo the workplace we deserve and demand.