What is Campus Equity Week?

Campus Equity Week is a national week of action to highlight issues of quality and equality in our system of higher education, including the unfair working conditions of adjunct and other contingent faculty, and the gap between the rising tuition students go into debt to pay and the low wages adjunct and contingent faculty receive. AFT affiliates’ CEW events are conceived and coordinated locally by faculty activists; as a national union, we seek to draw attention to the work being done on each campus. 

Stay Connected  

To get more information about Campus Equity Week or to register your CEW event, visit the official website: www.campusequityweek.org. Join the Campus Equity Week 2015 Facebook group and don’t forget to follow along on Twitter: #CEW2015, #campusequity, & #adjuncts.    

AFT and CEW  

As leaders in organizing and representing adjunct and other contingent faculty, the AFT and our affiliates have been active in Campus Equity Week since its inception. This year will be no different.  

Campus Equity Week connects with the AFT’s larger work to reclaim the promise of a high-quality, affordable higher education for all Americans. The inequities in the system—from the rising cost of college and the resultant burden of student loan debt, to the unfair treatment of academic workers, to the increasing stratification of the system as a whole—all derive from a systematic disinvestment in public higher education. We are shifting as a nation from the concept of higher education as a public good to one of higher education as a private benefit that is simply a pathway to a job and higher earnings. This increasingly vocational concept of higher education has led to the narrowing of curriculum, efforts to reduce learning to simple outcome measures, and ultimately the deprofessionalization of the faculty role. This is not what most Americans want or deserve to get from their college experience.  

So this Campus Equity Week, we encourage our affiliates to get involved in a way that highlights how a climate of austerity robs faculty of professional working conditions, and robs students of affordable access to a high-quality, rigorous education.   

If you are an AFT member and need more materials or assistance, please contact us at highered@aft.org.