Mary Ellen Goodwin said she sometimes feels like a migratory bird who wants to settle down and find a home. To piece together a living, she flies back and forth on I-280 while holding part-time teaching jobs at De Anza and San Jose City Colleges.

This “freeway flyer” was dressed in a bird-like costume complete with feathers, a beak and birdseed on April 5. She, along with many other part- and full-time faculty students, administrators and Board of Trustees members gathered in the main quad and the patio stage to push their demands of equal pay for equal work.

“I hope that there will be a day that the term ‘freeway flyer’ refers to a CalTrans brochure, rather than a beleaguered colleague, ” said De Anza Vice President of Instruction Judy Minor.

Part-time Faculty Equity Week was a public education project of the Action 2000 Coalition. The project emphasizes that the state’s 30,000 part-time community college instructors receive only a fraction of the salary earned by full-time instructors for an equivalent teaching load. Part-time faculty collected signatures on petitions addressed to Governor Grey Davis, Chancellor Tom Nussbaum and to state legislators, asking for budget increases in support of part-time faculty equity.

Faculty union members said during the Action 2000 Coalition that part-timers earn about thirty-seven cents to a full-timer’s dollar, even though part-timers are required to have the same qualifications as full-time instructors.

“Equal pay for equal work is not just a slogan – it’s a minimum standard we must meet,” says Ron Reel, Vice President of the Community College Association of the California Teachers Association.

The inequity does not stop there. Part-timers are only paid for the time they teach. They receive no additional pay for class preparation, for office hours; faculty union leaders say this is due in part because of the “system.”

In an effort to save money, districts will hire numerous part-time instructors at a lower pay rate rather than hire a full-time instructor. According to a study released by the U.S. Education Department, the trend of hiring fewer full-time professors and more part-timers is continuing in higher education.

Minor says that she’s embarrassed and frustrated that “part-time instructors achieve a lot despite the system, rather than because of it.”

Most part-time faculty do not have basic health care coverage. “The health care system is poorly structured,” says part-time philosophy instructor Chris Storer. “It states that you have to teach 50 percent in one district to receive health benefits.”

Without pay for instruction outside of class, most part-time faculty do not hold office so they say students also come up short.

Adjunct English Instructor Abby Bogomolny said, “The real loser is the student because when the system employs so many part-time instructors, regardless of part-timers’ professionalism, there is a guarantee that the quality of education will be damaged. There is no substitution for the full-time, tenure-track instructors who can dedicate all of their time to schools.”

De Anza student Michael Gracon, who plans on becoming an elementary school teacher, says that although he can not distinguish between his part-time faculty and the full-timers, “[Part-time] teachers are not as happy as they should be. They bring that unhappiness with them.”

Hiring more full-time professors, part-timers say, would relieve the adverse affect on students.

The California Legislature passed AB 1725 in 1988, making it mandatory for community colleges to offer 75 percent of instruction by full-time instructors. “Very few campuses have met that … De Anza has never come close,” says full-time English instructor John Lovas.

According to the Chancellor’s office, the percentage of class time taught by full-time instructors in the fall of 1997 was 60.8 percent.

“Because you can’t value education without valuing your instructors, we at the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges value all instructors and we want to translate this value to a legislation action,” said Director of FACCC Jonathon Lightman.

Lightman’s most urgent concern is the necessity to push for allocation of the $80 million Human Resources proposal, sixty percent for equity and forty percent for full-time hiring. He also advocates the passage of AB 2434, which provides rehire preference based on seniority. “This bill carries a price tag. Education has a value,” Lightman says.

“If you think that money should be going to education … if you think that $300 million … should be going to community colleges, you need to communicate it.”