Although a future investment, system is inequitable
I agree in principle with the leaders of the state’s community-college system about how sufficient funding for the system is an investment that will improve the state’s future unemployment statistics [“Higher education can stimulate a quicker economic recovery,” Opinion, Feb. 20].
They comment that our system is one of the most efficient in the country. That’s no wonder because the work is done on the backs of numerous part-time workers, many of whom receive no benefits. Much of the clerical work is done by so-called “thousand hour” people who don’t get benefits.
More than half the teaching is done by part-time instructors who outnumber the full-time instructors by more than 2-to-1. The part-timers’ workload is limited to 66 percent by the unions who labor under the delusion that by so doing, most of the jobs will one day be converted to tenured positions. It hasn’t happened in 40 years. It has only gotten worse as the State Board of Education has seen part-time labor as a cheap way to do business.
As a result, most of the state’s thousands of part-time instructors have to teach at more than one college. That, incidentally, makes the community-college system one of the state’s least green employers as it forces multiple commutes each day and makes it impossible to use public transport — for several years I commuted 400 miles each week.
So while the leaders of the college system are preaching about lowering unemployment, they preside over an inequitable system that has been termed “part-time apartheid.”
— Walter Marquardt, ESL instructor at Highline and Seattle Central Community Colleges, Seattle