Santa Fe Community College faculty pushes board for higher wages

Feb. 28—Chris McGlone, an assistant professor of biology at Santa Fe Community College, listed off a series of numbers before the college's governing board.

The first: $1,750 per month. The cost of rent, excluding utilities, that he paid for a shabby apartment. Even that sum, he noted, was low in Santa Fe's housing market.

The second: Two-thirds. The proportion of McGlone's salary eaten up by his rent each month.

The third: $100 per week. The amount of money McGlone said he has left over for groceries, gas and other necessities, after rent, utilities, car and insurance payments.

"Those are the real-world numbers associated with trying to live on what Santa Fe Community College pays us," McGlone told the board.

McGlone was among several members of the college's full-time faculty who came to Thursday's board meeting to demand higher pay, amid ongoing collective bargaining between the college and the union.

SFCC president Becky Rowley said the college is dedicated to increasing employee pay where possible, though all pay increases must go through the collective bargaining process.

"I do appreciate their comments and them coming forward," Rowley said in an interview. "We know it's a problem, and we are committed to working on it. I look forward to working with them on trying to do as much as we can."

On average, full-time faculty at Santa Fe Community College make about $63,000 per year, with starting salaries hovering around $49,000 per year, Lenny Gannes, president of the full-time faculty union and chair of the college's Biological and Physical Sciences Department, said in an interview.

For many faculty members, Gannes argued, that's not enough to live in Santa Fe. Some — like McGlone — have moved to Albuquerque to reduce housing costs. Others work multiple jobs. And still others have left the college for higher-paying jobs elsewhere.

"A starting faculty member — at that $49,000 — is barely making enough to pay for rent and gas," Gannes said.

Crucially, that starting salary is less than first-year teachers make in New Mexico's K-12 public schools.

In 2022, the Legislature increased base teacher pay to $50,000, $60,000 or $70,000 annually depending on experience. Lawmakers followed it up the next year with 6% raises, on average, for K-12 educators.

Salaries for college faculty haven't kept up, Gannes said, even though many faculty members have degrees beyond the bachelor's degree typically required for teacher licensure — and the student loan debt to prove it.

At SFCC, 56% of full-time faculty have master's degrees in their field while nearly a third have doctorates.

But it's not that K-12 teachers don't deserve higher wages, Gannes said; it's that college faculty do, too.

"I do not begrudge that K-12 got that salary increase; they desperately needed it," he said. "But the problem is that the Legislature has sort of been ignoring that ... we're not getting the salary that professors at the big, four-year institutions are getting, and faculty at community colleges are really in dire straits."

Increasing faculty pay was the subject of a short-lived push during this year's legislative session, with Rep. Joy Garratt, D-Albuquerque, sponsoring a bill to provide full-time faculty with nine-month contracts a minimum salary of $60,000 a year at four-year institutions and at least $55,000 at two-year ones.

The bill would also have increased per-class pay for adjunct faculty, many of whom — like college staff — face the same cost-of-living struggles.

But the proposal died in its first committee meeting after facing opposition from college representatives, who said the pay hike was not funded in the state's or their institutions' budgets. A proposal to study the issue didn't make it across the legislative finish line this year either.

Overall, legislators included a 3% raise for college faculty in this year's statewide budget bill — about 5% less than what SFCC had hoped for, Rowley said. During the board meeting, she called it "a little bit of a disappointing number."

The major problem with low pay, Gannes said, is that it makes it much harder for the college to retain quality teaching staff.

When the full-time faculty union first got started about eight years ago, Gannes said the college had about 90 full-time faculty members. Now, he said, there are fewer than 60.

"As there are fewer and fewer faculty, all that work gets taken on by fewer and fewer people," Gannes said. "The amount of work hasn't decreased; there are just fewer people that are doing it, so it becomes a real load for the faculty that are left to deal with that."

The college is well aware of the issue, Rowley said, and it's working to find a vendor to conduct a salary study, one step toward determining more appropriate pay for SFCC's full-time professors.

"We really appreciate you taking the time, coming here, sharing with us your experiences," board chair Jody Pugh told faculty Thursday. "We do know it's hard. We do support you. We, too, are looking for options."