UFF-USF

From UFF President Tom Auxter:

UFF United Faculty of Florida
306 East Park Ave.
Tallahassee, FL  32301

                                                                                                                       
June 2, 2010

Dear Colleague:

Now that the budget is signed, how did higher education fare in this year’s Legislature?  The good news is that we saw an increase of 3.5% in recurring revenue, in spite of a three billion dollar shortfall that forced severe cuts for many state agencies. This compares quite favorably with what happened elsewhere. In other states higher education was not spared cuts, and faculty layoffs are now expected in order to balance the budget.

Legislators are responding positively to our “invest in higher education” campaign. This is our second year of running a campaign that spares or minimizes the damage to higher education in a recession — bucking national trends.  Most legislators now accept the premise that investing in higher education is the fastest and strongest way out of a recession.

But we also faced serious threats to our profession in this legislative session, which could easily undermine progress we otherwise can make by investing in higher education. If faculty had not been successfully united in opposition to a series of bad bills this year, progress in the future could be meaningless. 

When the session began, we found ourselves in the middle of intense attacks on public employees in general and on public educators in particular. As one veteran higher education advocate put it, “They are coming at us from all directions.” It is amazing we were finally able to fend off these attacks, but we can fully expect they will continue in next year’s session.

In this year’s session legislators introduced a bill to cut all public employee salaries by 3%. There were 30 bills filed to cut public employee pensions.  (One of them cuts pensions by as much as half.) Another bill would eliminate the health insurance subsidy ($1800 annually) for retired public employees.

In addition, we saw intense attacks on tenure and the retention of experienced K-12 teachers (SB 6) — with reverberations across the nation. The attacks were primarily about changing both the criteria for evaluation of performance and the conditions for retention. Legislators were looking for a way to phase out more highly paid teachers with credentials and replace them with cheaper, inexperienced teachers they thought would be ready to teach with an eye on test scores.

In place of credentials and experience, politicians in the legislative leadership decided that improving student scores on standardized tests would now be the way to reward teachers for merit.  Advanced degrees in specializations like math and science would be discouraged because teachers could no longer pay back heavy education debts with additional salary compensation provided when they finished degrees. In other words, we would dummy down the content of the curriculum with no reward for anything except coaching students on how to improve test scores. Although K-12 teachers were the ones targeted in SB 6, it is clear that faculty would be on the chopping block next.

All of this is the brain-child of Jeb Bush and Senator John Thrasher (now chair of the state Republican Party). They teamed up once before (in 2001) in a failed attempt to abolish the collective bargaining contracts that protect faculty rights to due process, academic freedom, and retention based on credentials and experience.

Against the odds, faculty prevailed — in the midst of sustained attacks by legislators in leadership positions:

1. We defeated the 3% salary cut at the last minute in legislative conference.

2. We defeated all 30 bills limiting pensions and health insurance subsidies. 

3. We even defeated SB 6 — with the help of a veto by Governor Charlie Crist.

How is this possible? It happened because faculty joined forces with public employees and with teachers to make it happen. We contacted legislators in their district offices and made sure they heard our voices. Faculty actively became advocates for higher education — joining efforts by our affiliate, the Florida Education Association, and gaining recognition for our concerns.

We defeated bills that would have seriously damaged our profession. For our entire profession, it has been a life and death struggle.

The struggle is not over. The same politicians that launched a devious plan this year to rob public education of its status as a profession will be back again next year — with more plans and perhaps with a Governor who will back them.

Join us in the fight to defend the values at the heart of our profession. We need the full support of all faculty to stop the attacks. 

Sign the form* to join United Faculty of Florida. The 1% membership already paid for itself three times over when we stopped the 3% salary reduction this year.  Join your colleagues in the struggle for our professional future.

Our strength is in our membership. Every member counts.

Sincerely,

Tom Auxter

President, United Faculty of Florida

*The membership form can be found at http://faculty.ourusf.org/join-uff/ — Join us today.

Yesterday, Senior Vice Provost sent an e-mail to all faculty in Academic Affairs-Tampa as follows:

Complaints have been received that some faculty are scheduling make-up classes during the summer term for days missed due to an official holiday. This year’s summer terms have two holidays, Memorial Day and Fourth of July, that occur on week days.

University and Collective Bargaining Agreement regulations specify that faculty members cannot be required to schedule classes to make up for those falling on a holiday; further, faculty members cannot require students to attend make-up classes for those falling on a holiday. The implication for those who are teaching in the summer is that courses must be planned with the knowledge that class days falling on a holiday cannot be rescheduled.

Chairs – please be sure to distribute this information to adjunct and graduate instructors who are teaching this summer.

Dr. Smith is correct in reading the contract language. The following language is from Article 17.5 of the collective bargaining agreement between UFF and the USF Board of Trustees:

An employee shall be entitled to observe all official holidays designated as holidays by the University, which shall at a minimum include those holidays designated in Fla. Stat. Section 110.117. No classes shall be scheduled on designated holidays. Classes not held because of a holiday shall not be rescheduled [emphasis added].

Faculty have a number of options to handle Monday classes in this summer’s term (or for any class cancelled because of holidays), including the following:

• Holding optional makeup classes.
• Providing assignments that are instructionally useful but do not require scheduled class time (such as intense work on individual projects, fieldwork scheduled by the student, etc.).
• Providing material on Blackboard that students can access outside scheduled class time.

The choices of how to adjust to holidays–or any cancellation of classes (think hurricanes and flu)–should remain with the instructor for the class according to her or his best professional judgment.

April 20, 2010. Fate of faculty pensions could be decided in a Conference Committee meeting to take place on Wednesday, April 21, Let legislators know you don’t want FRS altered!

Dear Colleague:
It is possible the Legislature could decide on the fate of faculty pensions tomorrow in a meeting of the Conference Committee, which makes the final decisions. Contact your legislators now.
See below for contact information and an update from our affiliate, the Florida Education Association.
Tom Auxter
President, United Faculty of Florida

Conference Committees began meeting yesterday, April 19, 2010 and are scheduled to continue meeting into the coming weekend.  We are still hearing only rumor and innuendo regarding how Conferees will handle FRS retirement issues.  FEA continues to closely monitor retirement issues pending in the remaining two weeks of the 2010 Session of the Florida Legislature.

This morning the Government Operations Conference Committee held a meeting where Conferees indicated that they were informed that the health insurance subsidy bill, H.B.5701 (Rep. Rivera, R-112, Miami), and the FRS bill, SB 2022 (Senator J.D. Alexander, R-17, Lake Wales), will be bumped to the overall Conference Chairs.  The Conference Committee meeting schedule released yesterday shows that outstanding conference issues will be bumped to overall Conference Chairs on Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 1:00 p.m.  And by the way, the overall Conference Chairs happen to be Sen. Alexander and Rep. Rivera.

You help is still needed throughout these Conference Committee meetings.  Keep the pressure on your legislators about these issues by calling or emailing to let them know that they must defend and protect the public employee participants in the Florida Retirement System.

Contact your Senators and Representatives and urge them to oppose any changes to FRS retirement benefits.  Urge your Legislators to tell Conference Committee members not to balance the budget on the backs of public employees and retirees.

Urge your Legislators to tell Conference Committee members that they are opposed to any changes to FRS retirement benefits.

Senators:   To find your Senators, go to www.flsenate.gov and look for “Find Your Legislators” at the bottom of the menu on the left side of the web site.

Representatives:   To find your Representatives, go to www.myfloridahouse.gov and click on the heading that reads “Find Your Representative” right below the blue bar and the red bar at the top of the page.

March 5: Below are an e-mail circulated by HR Friday and a Word version of the application attached to the e-mail:

• HR e-mail March 5, 2010
• Retirement Incentive Application (March 5 distribution, Word version)

February 17: Below are the documents for the Early Retirement Incentive program, downloaded for the USF St. Pete HR website:

• ERI description and guidelines
• Early Retirement application (PDF version)
  
• Early Retirement Settlement Agreement
• FAQs: ERI FAQ 1 and ERI FAQ 2

Interested employees in the faculty pay plan should contact Donna Pepper for more information (813-974-9357, dpepper@admin.usf.edu).

The ballots are in the mail to chapter members for the chapter elections. You can read the UFF-USF chapter candidate statements (PDF) here. Note: due to a printer’s error, the ballot itself was not printed on blue paper but on white paper. Please complete both sides and return! (Put in the smaller envelope, seal without marking, and then put the unmarked small envelope into the addressed #10 envelope. Seal, print and sign your name on the front, and mail in.)

The state of Florida has just released the audited financial statement of USF for 2008-09, and it has confirmed what the unaudited statements released several months ago indicated: USF is in decent financial shape, and it’s especially decent given the drop in state appropriations.

Audited financial report for USF 2008-09, released February 2010

UFF finished its ratification vote this week, and the overwhelming majority of ballots cast were in favor of ratification. The Board of Trustees meets Thursday, January 21, for its ratification vote.

This morning’s Tampa Tribune quotes me in a story about a website allegation regarding football coach Jim Leavitt, and while it’s generally correct about what I said, it has a few things garbled.

Here is the relevant passage  from the article:

Sherman Dorn, head of the union that represents USF’s faculty, is pleased the school is conducting an investigation into the alleged incident and doing so with a committee based outside the athletic department.

He said transparency and thoroughness are important in this type of investigation.

“If there is as a serious allegation, then there should be a serious investigation,” Dorn said. “It should be done in the same way the university conducts a serious investigation of misconduct by a faculty member. The thing to keep in mind is this is a report by a Web site that has statements [supported] by one or two observers. It’s certainly appropriate for the university to investigate. There may be something to it, or maybe not.’

The correct statements in that passage (or the reasonably close ones) come from the following parts of the phone conversation I had last night with the reporter:

• I said that the allegations came from individual reports, and I had no idea what the truth of them may be.
• I said that when there was a serious allegation concerning any university employee, it was appropriate for the university to conduct an investigation.
• I said that until the investigation was concluded, the university should not say anything about the matter other than that there was an allegation it was investigating.

I don’t remember saying anything explicitly about transparency, and I did not say anything about who was conducting the investigation, because I had no knowledge of who was going to conduct the investigation. Having said that, I do in fact agree that the people conducting it should be outside the athletics department.  That’s true for any investigation of allegations. For most of the investigation procedures I am aware of (whether regarding research misconduct, discrimination, or violation of human participant guidelines), there is first a determination of whether there are sufficient grounds to conduct a full investigation (to avoid spending lots of time on frivolous allegations). If the preliminary investigation suggests there is something to the allegation, there is a more complete examination of the issue. I don’t know whether that two-step process will be followed in this case, because “football coach grabs and hits player” is not a common allegation, so there hasn’t (yet) been a chance to write a procedure for this.

It would not have been correct for the university to fire a coach based solely on an allegation, in the same way that the university should not fire staff or faculty based solely on allegations of misconduct.

Linked below are three documents: a memo from Associate Provost Tapas Das with regard to a potential closure or serious disruption of USF from events such as H1N1 or hurricanes; a list of suggestions from the provost’s office on things to think about tied to potential closures, and a paragraph to insert in all syllabi.

There is a provision in the UFF-USF Collective Bargaining Agreement about emergency closure: all in-unit employees are paid during emergency closures. I assume that the bargaining history is related to storms rather than potential pandemics, but the effect is the same. At least in terms of the attached documents, accommodations for closures are left to the professional judgment of faculty and other instructors of record.

Tapas Das letter

Paragraph for syllabi

Things for faculty to think about regarding closure

One issue coming directly from a recent membership study commissioned by the UFF-USF Chapter is the set of concerns from participants about the structure of formulaic merit pay and administrative salary discretion. This time of economic hardship is probably the best year in which to talk about long-term structures in the contract, as there will probably not be a huge amount of money in play. During the fall, I will be setting up meetings on every campus and in multiple places on the Tampa campus to talk just about merit pay and other salary issues.

This will be a member-driven process: colleagues who are not dues-paying UFF members can vote on contract ratification, but the members set chapter policy. I want to be clear about my personal interests and intended role, before the discussions focused on merit pay begin: like my colleagues, I have my own opinions and ideas about merit pay, but the collective interests of the chapter membership will determine what the chapter’s approach on merit pay will be over the next few years. In 2007 I campaigned on the pledge to follow the faculty and professional employees of USF as we changed, and from a few places (not just the membership study), I am getting the message that merit pay and discretionary pay has to change. To be consistent with what I promised, my job is to start and protect a conversation about merit pay.

From what I know already, the issues involved in merit pay are a classic wicked problem, or a complex issue that isn’t going to be amenable to a direct “here’s the cause, and here’s the solution” process. I’ve had a number of conversations about merit pay over the years with both administrators and faculty, and the tendency of many comments is to fall into a pattern: “Here’s the problem with merit pay at USF, and instead of doing it this way we should do it just like it was done at my last institution.” The reference to “my last institution” is a heuristic short-cut: well-intended but an elision nonetheless, and I will view one of my jobs in these conversations to get behind such short-cuts.

As I wrote above, I have some preconceptions about the issues and potential solutions, but I know that they are preconceptions, and it is more important that the membership determine policy than that I agree with that policy. To guarantee that the decision is membership-driven, I will argue against any unilateral setting of long-term merit-pay bargaining guidance without a membership vote.