From one union member’s e-mail this morning, after reading about the figures reported to the AAUP:
How are the faculty salary raises calculated? As far as I know, none of us got any raise in ’07-08, but the chart shows an average of 2.1%. What do these numbers actually represent?
Good question. I’ll ask USF administrators that, and we’ll see what they say.
From AFT’s contingent-faculty issues blog, commenting on the Inside Higher Ed story on state appropriations, Craig Smith notes that some of the story’s language implied that the last few years have been indulgent:
… the real rub is that things don’t seem to get better when money is better, but they get worse when times are tight. Institutions seem completely settled into this mode of exploiting cheap labor and are unwilling to re-prioritize to invest in faculty and students, while states refuse to make the necessary funding a priority or show the leadership necessary to get institutions to address the situation. And to be fair–there are a host of larger public policy issues (read: healthcare) that federal policymakers don’t appear to have the political will to address which ends up driving huge costs down on to states and institutions.
As reported in the St Pete Times education blog, the federal Department of Labor ordered FAMU to pay back wages to 350 employees. I don’t know if any of the employees are represented by the United Faculty of Florida, but FAMU faculty did suffer along with staff with late and missing paychecks in prior years. Here’s hoping that new FAMU President James Ammons can help FAMU put the mess behind them.
Update: According to UFF staff in Tallahassee, none of the employees affected by this week’s order are in the bargaining units represented by UFF.
A story appeared this morning in the Tampa Tribune about the fallout of allegations from a USF football player’s estranged spouse. I was called by a few reporters on this, and in some ways, it’s easy to refuse to comment because of privacy laws. But there are some things I know about academic integrity, and here’s the key one: maintaining academic integrity is much easier when faculty know their students well.
One reason for this is because a critical foundation for academic integrity is education about expectations: When surveyed a few years ago, USF students said that they generally knew the expectations the university and faculty had for them, and their answers indicated that faculty were a key foundation for those expectations. Rapport between a faculty member and students is an important part of the credibility of those expectations.
Then there’s the enforcement side: faculty who know students are going to be able to tell who belongs in a final or what passage was unlikely to have been written by an individual student. If classes are so large that faculty cannot know students as individuals, we’re going to see a reliance on more bureaucratic measures for enforcement. That’s already happened with checking for plagiarism, and it’s more likely to happen with exams. In a year or two, I would not be surprised if it’s not just online testing that requires that Florida university students show up at a testing center and show an ID, but for large classes in general.
Faculty will always have to be vigilant, but there are conditions that help build an environment of academic integrity and others that make it much harder.