UFF-USF

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.

Listmania time: The new list of Kiplinger’s 100 Best Values in Public Colleges identifies USF as the 79th best value for in-state students and 94th for out-of-state students. In specific disciplines, the Journal of Criminal Justice Education ranked the criminology department 10th in the country.

It’s great to be considered a fabulous value; USF faculty and graduate students work hard. I hope we can keep that up in the next few years. The challenge for the legislature and Board of Governors is to make sure the budget crisis doesn’t turn USF from a great value into a cheap education.

The Florida Education Association has joined Florida Is Our Home, a grassroots coalition opposing the referendum on the January 29 primary ballot.

According to analysis by FEA government relations specialists, the referendum would cut our property taxes by a very small amount, but the public effect would be dramatic, with serious cuts in municipal and local services, several billion dollars in cuts to local schools over the next 5 years, and a spillover effect on the state budget that would inevitably affect the university system, including USF.

Below is a copy of the flyer that FEA sent out recently. The recommendation from FEA is to VOTE NO ON JANUARY 29.

Early voting starts Monday, January 14.

No-on-1-pamphlet

Now that we know the latest figures, according to the data USF submitted to the American Association of University Professors, we can measure our discontent with salaries: 2.1%. That’s how much salaries rose from last year, the mean raise for faculty who continued at USF this year. USF faculty raises this year are much less than they were two years ago (4.9%) and were less than raises this year for Hillsborough Community College (3%) and K-12 teachers in Hillsborough County (8%). I suspect that if we looked at raises since 2001, USF’s faculty raises would be much less than at HCC, where the starting salary for someone with just a masters degree rose 54% in a six-year period.

Lower raises for faculty at USF have consequences for the institution: lower morale and higher turnover. When the USF Board of Trustees approved a new strategic plan, the goals were lofty: meeting admissions criteria to the elite Association of American Universities. The vast majority of that work has to be done by faculty and by the majority of faculty. There is no way to meet the needs of the faculty and the university without higher pay. Without meeting the needs of faculty, the goals of the Board of Trustees will go unmet.

We have already seen the erosion of the educational environment this year with substantially increased class sizes for several dozen classes. The federal budget for research grants is not going to increase, which means that hit rates will drop in many programs. Most faculty will work their tails off, as they usually do, but without a significant pool of money for faculty raises, many will also leave, leaving more work for the rest of us.

Four years ago, then-Faculty Senate President Liz Bird argued that low salaries were threatening USF’s future. For a few years, salaries rose faster than inflation. But now that raises lag inflation, we need to remind our community, our legislators, and our Board of Trustees that low faculty salaries still threaten USF’s education and research environment.

When we came to USF, most of us had to choose between the state’s standard pension plan and sticking the equivalent USF contributions into one or more mutual funds (e.g., TIAA-CREF). (Not everyone had a choice: many of those in USF Health have to join the mutual-fund system and cannot join the Florida Retirement System, or pension plan.) Many tenure-track faculty members and instructors have chosen the mutual-fund route because we weren’t sure how long we’d be at USF or because mutual funds seemed a better financial option than a state pension. When you’re 30 or so, the possibilities for job switches loom big, and retirement is far in the distance. Normally, the two plans are entirely separate, but the legislature is allowing university employees to make a one-time switch during 2008 from the mutual-fund accounts into the state’s standard pension plan by buying credit for years of service. (There is another option—moving from mutual funds where you control the mix of assets to a mutual fund where the state of Florida controls the mix of assets—but I assume most people will only be considering the shift into the pension plan.)

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Colleagues:

In the past few days we have learned that the state Local Investment Fund that school districts and local governments use like a money-market account (to invest their money until they are ready to spend money on salaries and expenses) has been frozen. the problem was that the fund had bought worthless sub-prime paper associated with the failing real estate loan market. This led to a run on the fund when localities learned of the news. They rapidly withdrew money from the fund (7-8 billion in a matter of days)– until the state placed a freeze on withdrawals. For some of the smaller school boards and localities the freeze means they cannot meet payroll this week.

It gets worse. The political appointees (left from the Bush era) who manage state funds want to use the state pension fund (your retirement money) to secure the bad debt in the Local Investment Fund. In other words, the state pension fund (Florida Retirement System) is targeted by the Bush appointees as a means to secure up to two billion dollars worth of bad debt. Although the retirement fund has nothing to do with the irresponsible Bush-era decisions undermining the Local Investment Fund, it is now slated by the Bush appointees as a means to bankroll a rescue of the Local Investment Fund and save the politicians who got us into this. Faculty retirement benefits are jeopardized by this scam. (Note: Questions were raised about Jeb Bush’s involvement in this when he was reported to be hired as a consultant — after he left office — by a firm whose debt was underwritten by the State. http://www.forbes.com/business/2007/11/30/florida-bush-lehman-biz-beltway-cx_mb_1130florida.html )

The three member board that runs the fund will meet on Tuesday, December 4th, to plan the next steps. So far only Alex Sink, the state comptroller, is publicly criticizing the raid on the retirement funds of faculty and other state employees. She deserves your support and encouragement in her courageous fight against this unparalleled proposal (email: cfo@fldfs.com). The other two members, Governor Charlie Crist (email charlie.crist@myflorida.com) and Attorney General Bill McCollum (ag.mccollum@myfloridalegal.com), are still not saying how they will vote on your future.

I have asked the Florida Education Association to use all political and legal services resources available to support Alex Sink, to expose this scam, to mobilize educators, and to hold the state government accountable for the future of faculty and other state employees who for a lifetime invested their earnings and savings in this retirement fund — with the expectation that Florida would honor its commitment to their retirement, without subtraction for unrelated and unethical purposes. We will keep you posted as we learn more.

Tom Auxter
President
United Faculty of Florida

UFF President Tom Auxter sent the following to members earlier this week:

Colleagues:
We have an historic opportunity to change the tax structure in Florida. Faculty are specifically invited by the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission to submit comments on the effects of under funding. Commissioners want to know how under funding has affected the quality and the delivery of what students receive in higher education.

The Commission has the power (from the Legislature) to write language proposing a change in the tax structure that will appear on the November 2008 ballot. The results of our efforts (contacting Commissioners now) could change our economic picture for two decades (until the next Commission begins work). This is our chance to make the case for more adequate and stable funding. We are urging the Commission to adopt a proposal that allows Florida to harvest the benefits that come with investing in a developed and well-functioning higher education system.

Contact the Florida Taxation and Budget Commission now, from your computer off campus, with comments on the problems faculty and students face with inadequate funding. Give examples from your campus. See Talking Points below.

Tom Auxter
President, United Faculty of Florida

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I’ve given variants of the following to higher-education reporters in the area:

The USF chapter of the United Faculty of Florida looks forward to working with Ralph Wilcox to improve faculty pay and the quality of education and research at USF. The fundamental issues we have to address don’t change with the name of the person sitting in an office, and from his administrative positions Dr. Wilcox is familiar with the long-term challenges that USF faces. I wish Dr. Khator well in her new post at the University of Houston, and I wish Dr. Wilcox well as USF’s provost beginning in January.

This spring, the Florida legislature required that businesses of a certain size (including USF) accommodate short leave requests of employees who have been the victims of domestic violence.  Here is the information from USF:

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