by Chris Cumo

ROME BUILT AN empire of roads, baths and aqueducts. Some 1,500 years after the empire disintegrated, Florida is building a vast network of community colleges. Its 28, many with multiple campuses, teemed with 753,255 students, according to the Florida Community College System Web page, in the 1998-1999 academic year, giving the system one of the largest enrollments among state systems of community colleges in the United States. Suppose the average student took 10 credits that year--well below a full-time load--at $100 per credit. These figures would have grossed the system $753,255,000. If Florida's community colleges could issue stock, they might challenge Microsoft, Intel, and other corporate heavyweights.

Despite assurances from Ronald Reagan that money trickles down from the affluent to the indigent, adjuncts share little of the wealth that overflows the coffers of Florida's community colleges. No statewide average of pay per course has been tabulated, but anecdotal evidence suggests it is not lavish. Abel Bartley, now an associate professor of history at The University of Akron, made $1,800 a course at Tallahassee Community College. In six years as an adjunct at Palm Beach Community College, Mike Shreffler has earned a maximum of $1,440 a course. Bill Panapacker, an assistant professor of English at Hope College in Michigan, taught one summer at Dade County Community College for $1,400 per course. None of the three received medical insurance where they taught. If any group of adjuncts should be militantly pro-union it should be those in Florida. Yet there are few stirrings of a union movement in the Sunshine State.

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