The chapter’s latest biweekly newsletter edited by Greg McColm is now available. Linked to it are two documents related to the e-mail issue:
The next collective bargaining session between the United Faculty of Florida and the USF Board of Trustees is Friday, April 6th, 2007, 2:30-5:30 pm, in EDU 413 and 416.
Through a combination of technical snafus and some idiotic decisionmaking by a few administrators, the University of South Florida selectively purged e-mails from faculty accounts in late February after the university released a statement about collective bargaining that included all of the draft editing, including language that directly attacked the integrity of the faculty’s chief negotiator. After some scrambling to find out what was happening, the United Faculty of Florida issued a press release the next day, which including the following:
The Collective Bargaining Agreement protects the academic freedom of faculty to participate in university governance, and the deletion of e-mails about university events and decision making violates that right. In a consultation with the United Faculty of Florida, the USF administration had previously agreed to intrude on individual faculty e-mail accounts only when there was a specific finding at the Vice Presidential level that an individual employee’s actions warranted investigation, and the wholesale deletion of e-mail from multiple faculty e-mail accounts violates that understanding.
More broadly, the administration’s attempt to purge embarrassing e-mails is inappropriate for any public agency that receives taxpayer funding and operates under the Florida Sunshine rules. Purging e-mails also threatens confidence in the university e-mail system: faculty and other university employees rely on the integrity of e-mails to do their work.
The university restored the forwarded e-mails, ending the immediate sense of crisis, but there are still significant issues to be dealt with. While it appears that the purging of faculty-sent and -forwarded e-mails on the topic happened only in one college, the university attempted to “recall” the original e-mails that had been sent everywhere. I hope no administrator had fantasies that faculty hadn’t read them or forwarded them off-campus!