California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger suggests that community college districts should hire more part-time faculty to help the state close its $24.3 billion shortfall.  Already, community colleges have been cut $800 million, which districts say will result in an estimated 250,000 students being iced out next year.  Now, the students who remain will find themselves plunk in the middle of a California's growing staffing crisis. It's suddenly starting to look a whole lot worse.

According to a story in the June 8 Sacramento Bee, the governor has asked the legislature to suspend portions of state education code that require 50 percent of a community college district's educational expenditures to be used for teacher salaries and which set a systemwide goal that 75 percent of instructional hours be taught by full-time faculty.

"This is almost silly," says Marty Hittelman, California Federation of Teachers president, a former math community college professor. "Under these kinds of economic conditions, districts don't have to keep to those 75:25 requirements anyway.

The bigger issue, says Hittelman, is that "if the Legislature enacts the governor's current budget proposals, our students and the society we live in are not likely to recover for decades."

The CFT has been strongly advocating for tax increases. In a June 2 statement, Hittelman urged members to contact their legislators and tell them: "Instead of forcing children and the sick and elderly into terrible suffering, we can ask people who make $250,000 or more a year to pay slightly more in taxes, and we can ask corporations that evade reasonable taxes to pay their fair share."

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that community colleges on the East Coast are also eschewing full-time faculty. At a June 6 Burlington County College job fair, for example, vice president for academic affairs Kathleen Carter said the college was looking to hire 200 adjuncts. The college has 60 full-time faculty with 10 current vacancies, she reported, but it's more cost effective to hire the adjuncts, because full-timers take time to hire and cost around $100,000. Part-timers, on the other hand, get paid $1,800 to teach a three-credit course.

The adjuncts also get a little teacher training, which will come in handy for Chris Pfister, a marketing-software professional who got laid off in December. She says she always dreamed of teaching. Now she has the time to give it a try.