UFF-USF

Last spring, the UFF-USF chapter leadership discussed Youtube with the administration, concerned about the possibility of surreptitious recordings of classes, and both sides agreed that faculty could place reasonable restrictions on class recordings in a syllabus.

The concern from a union perspective was with the possibility of an anonymous video prompting an inappropriate investigation from the public nature of Youtube. The dangers of ad-hoc investigations of teaching have become clear in the last few years, most recently at Brandeis, where the faculty senate and the provost are at odds over the provost’s investigation of a faculty member’s conduct, including placing a member of the administration in the class to monitor the faculty’s conduct. This case has attracted the attention of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the ACLU of Massachusetts, among others.

The case, very briefly: Donald Hindley was accused by a small number of students of using the term “wetback” in class in a derogatory fashion. Hindley claimed he was explaining the social context of the term, the provost assigned a monitor for the class without a hearing, and singled him out by requiring him to attend what the provost described as “anti-discrimination training.”*

The Massachusetts chapter of the ACLU explained the substantive and procedural issues clearly:

The ACLU of Massachusetts supports the right of all students to equal educational opportunity. Severe, pervasive, or targeted harassment of a student based on race, national origin, or ethnicity can interfere with the ability of students to obtain an education and would violate our state and federal civil rights laws. However, incidental comments by a professor in class, even if offensive to some, do not constitute illegal harassment under the law, and imposing punishment on a faculty member for occasional comments significantly jeopardizes freedom of thought and academic freedom which are so integral to a university and the quality of education that students will receive there.

Students plainly have the right to complain about a professor, to raise their complaints with a professor, organize with other students to discuss with the professor their objections, and debate what has gone on. However, faculty members also have the right to a fair process when they have been accused of wrongdoing, and Brandeis appears to have denied that process to Professor Hindley.

We are also troubled by this incident because it comes after several other recent incidents at Brandeis in which the University administration’s initial impulse has been to shut down unpopular expression rather than affirm the principles of freedom of speech and academic freedom which are integral to a university community.

While the situation at Brandeis is different from the concerns about Youtube the UFF-USF chapter raised in consultation, the dangers of ad-hoc investigations are clear in this case and parallel: Brandeis’s provost made ad-hoc decisions that skirted serious concerns about procedural and substantive due process. The rush to judgment at Brandeis has been roundly criticized by the university’s faculty senate and civil-rights organizations.

* – Several years ago, the UFF-USF chapter filed a grievance when the administration wanted to require diversity training of all faculty without bargaining the change in assignments. Then-chapter president Mitch Silverman explained to the faculty senate that he attended one of the diversity seminars, he thought it was well done and recommended it to everyone, but that the university could not require it.  The grievance was settled when the administration withdrew the requirement.

According to an article this morning in the St Pete Times, USF offered a raise of 70% to football coach Jim Leavitt, bringing his 2008 salary to $1.5 million, up from $537,680 in 2005. At a time of extraordinary budget pressures, the treatment of a football coach is an extraordinary contrast with how the Florida university system is preparing to treat faculty and staff.

Today’s Inside Higher Ed has a story on a newly-released survey of employers conducted by Peter Hart for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The money quote from the executive summary:

Employers’ emphasis on integrative, applied learning is reflected in their recommendations to colleges and universities about how to assess student learning in college. Again, multiple-choice testing ranks lowest among the options presented, just below an institutional score that shows how a college compares to other colleges in advancing critical thinking skills. Faculty evaluated internships and community-learning experiences emerge on top. Employers also endorse individual student essay tests, electronic portfolios of student work, and comprehensive senior projects as valuable tools both for students to enhance their knowledge and develop important real-world skills, as well as for employers to evaluate graduates’ readiness for the workplace.

So let’s have no more nonsense about businesses’ insisting on standardized testing as accountability for higher education.

Good boss, bad boss: Which are you? is a lively NY Times article that links to a number of list and quiz websites with crazy-workplace stories and other tidbits. My favorite from the My Bad Boss contest (from Working America):

Someone in your family has died unexpectedly. You are devastated, but feel touched when your normally cheap boss sends flowers to the funeral. The next month, you find out your boss has taken the money for flowers out of your paycheck!

Apparently this item was taken from a real story submitted by the victim of this maneuver.

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.

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.

A few years ago at a statewide UFF governance meeting (the UFF senate), I saw a senator from another campus wearing a threadworn t-shirt with the caption, “United Mindworkers of Florida.” It was a play on the phrase “united mineworkers,” but it makes the point that what we do as faculty is work. In a month when U.S. News and World Reort called faculty jobs “cushy” and ABC news anchor Charlie Gibson implied that the faculty at a small Benedictine liberal-arts college in New Hampshire must make $100,000, it’s evident that someone needs to remind the general public (or at least sloppy journalists) that successful faculty members often work 50-60 hour weeks.

Reading the grim budget news from the state of Florida makes that role of the United Faculty of Florida even more important. Legislators will want the state budget to be strategic. Unless we remind them that the faculty are the strategic resource in the state university system, they might think of flashy programs, initiatives with catchy acronyms, and the like. Part of the role of the United Faculty of Florida is public advocacy. Three years ago, we fought back a bill that threatened academic freedom. This year, we will need to focus on the state budget, reminding the legislature that investing money in universities and university faculty is one of the most efficient use of resources the state can make.

Sometimes the value of higher education is lost in the discussion over tuition. A recent study by the College Board, Education Pays, confirms what all such studies have been saying for several years: Higher education more than pays for itself in direct economic benefits: lifetime income of college graduates who pay taxes, employees with pensions funds in retirement and health insurance with employment who do not require expensive social services, and increased relocation of businesses to states that have an educated population.

The lobbyists our dues pay for will help convey that message, but paid lobbyists are more effective when we work as constituents. Call your legislators’ offices today, before the legislative session starts. Make an appointment to talk with your representative or senator to explain what you do, why focusing the state’s resources on higher-education faculty is a great use of state funds, and why that is even more important in hard budget years. Make sure that our legislature understands how hard we work and how much that makes a difference in the lives of USF students and the state.

While the legislature agreed on a second property-tax-cut deal, the signals (see the article) are that the Florida Education Association will oppose the proposal. Though it will not directly affect education, the rhetoric around property taxes assumes that we can have a free lunch in Florida. If we want a state economy that relies on more than tourism and agriculture and that provides equal opportunities for all, we have to spend money. The state cannot go into a deficit, and in the past decade the state has put a greater burden for education funding onto local property taxes. So the money has to come from somewhere. While I’d love to see the distribution of funding shift back towards the state, I fear that slashing local tax revenues will put a greater burden on the state at a time of significant economic weaknesses.

And there is already the need at the state level to invest more in education… or, as the St. Pete Times editorial put it today, we have tough choices for higher education (and all education).

Governments need to be frugal, and I am not going to defend irresponsible spending. Personally, I agree with those who think higher education is a cheap date. But other services cost money, and the reason why spending has risen at the local level in recent years is partly because spending in Florida was depressed for so long. We don’t know what the effects of the proposed tax cuts will be, and I am skeptical that it is wise policy. To pretend that eviscerating the tax base is good governance is not fiscal responsibility.

Update:  According to analysts at the Florida Education Association, the proposal that will be on the ballot in late January will take almost $3 billion from K-12 school funding over 5 years.

If the governor approves a 5% undergraduate-tuition hike as part of the state’s budget reconciliation process, that will help the state’s higher-education picture in some small measure. For a variety of reasons, this cannot be the primary base of funding support at USF:

1. Currently, tuition is a fraction of the total costs of undergraduate education. A 10% tuition hike gives USF less than a 3% increase in related revenues. (The differential tuition bill signed by the governor in the spring will matter more, simply because of the significant differential approved.)
2. USF’s enrollment profile has been shifting away from undergraduate enrollment and towards graduate enrollment. Raising undergraduate tuition matters the least for institutions with a high proportion of graduate students.

The reality is that higher education funding must be diversified. Higher tuition is part of the picture (with considerable attention to financial aid and addressing student debt), but tuition cannot be the entire picture.

If you are a new faculty member or professional employee at USF, please accept my and the chapter’s welcome. The United Faculty of Florida is your union, and we’re glad you’re here. We hope you find USF a congenial place to work, and we hope to see you at a chapter meeting sometime this fall.

If you have not worked or studied at a unionized university, you should know a few things about the United Faculty of Florida:

• The United Faculty of Florida represents us and our colleagues at all Florida public universities, 8 of the community colleges, and one private college because most faculty at Florida’s public universities chose union representation in an election in 1976, and faculty have chosen UFF at several points since.
• The United Faculty of Florida bargains on our behalf for a single Collective Bargaining Agreement that protects the rights of everyone in the unit. The collective bargaining agreement includes provisions on academic freedom, intellectual property, promotion and tenure procedures, annual reviews, salaries, sabbaticals, and many others. To the right, you can click to read the current Collective Bargaining Agreement and “reopeners” that have covered salaries between 2004 and the present.
• The United Faculty of Florida has the legal obligation to enforce the collective bargaining agreement. When the university has violated the contract, the chapter can represent individuals in grievances. This avoids the expense of lawsuits and can often resolve issues informally.
• The faculty union also operates in a democratic manner. The USF chapter has biweekly meetings during the year, when all members present at the meeting participate in decision-making. The USF chapter also holds annual elections for officers and for representatives to the statewide governing body, the United Faculty of Florida Senate.
• The United Faculty of Florida also represents faculty interests in public, educating the public and policymakers about how higher education works. We successfully fought a 2005 state legislative bill that would have damaged academic freedom, and the statewide union is committed to improving higher education funding and insulating universities from untoward political pressures.

JOINING: You do not automatically join the union. You need to fill out a form and send it in (campus mail address: 30238 USF Holly Drive) to join and start dues deductions. There are some specific benefits of membership (including two professional liability insurance policies), but the most important reason to join is to work together to protected our shared values and interests.