United Faculty of Florida, USF Chapter
invites all members of the USF community to an
Open Meeting on the Budget Crisis
Friday, February 1, 9:00-10:30 a.m.
SOC 160
Topics
The GAU chapter and the USF Board of Trustees began bargaining this afternoon, and several dozen graduate assistants crowded into the room to observe. GAU Co-President Jason Simms made an opening statement, as did Graduate Dean Delcie Durham and Gerard Solis of the USF General Counsel’s office. The GAU bargaining team distributed proposals on several articles, explained the rationale, and there was a discussion about the proposal to put more solidity into offers. The GAU team’s preference is to preserve as many 0.25 and 0.50 FTE appointments as possible rather than give USF discretion to carve out small portions of GA time. The bargaining session recessed while the two teams caucused. The faculty observer (Sherman Dorn) left before the session resumed.
The USF Oracle (the student newspaper) published an article on the opening of bargaining in the January 31 edition.
From Tom Auxter, statewide UFF President:
Dear Colleague:
I am writing to urge you to vote against Amendment One on January 29. To explain why United Faculty of Florida makes this recommendation, it is necessary to outline the deepening budget crisis in Florida higher education and how Amendment One will add to the damage.
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.
Q (received recently by e-mail): What are the criteria used to determine raises?
A: Raises are determined in two steps: annual evaluation and then salary provisions, both of which are subjects of bargaining between the United Faculty of Florida and the USF Board of Trustees.
If you are visiting the faculty union blog because of the e-mail I sent out through Blackboard, welcome. I apologize for not putting the following in the e-mail directly, but I think it better to put political comments and requests on our private domain than send them through university e-mail.
A staff member in the provost’s office has explained to me that USF calculates the figures for the AAUP report from specific pay periods a year apart. (See an earlier entry for a question from a member about the calculation.) For this year at least (I’m not sure about other years), the comparison pay periods included October 1 both years. In 2006, that pay period would have included the time before the raises we received.
If anyone is interested in replicating the analysis using base salaries rather than the pay-period basis, please let me know directly (sherman @ ourusf dot org), so that I can provide the relevant data. I suspect that the figure calculated from base pay from October 1 to October 1 would be positive but under 1 percent.
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.
The state office in Tallahassee is revising the statewide UFF page, and there is now a page for news and documents, which currently includes materials such as the nomination forms for UFF VP, the memo to chapter presidents on the Council of Presidents meeting at the end of January, and so forth.