UFF-USF

Economists warn us that we are facing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and that we should expect hard times through 2010 or 2011. Florida has been hit harder than other states, and several state universities have announced major cuts: Florida International announced that it could lay off two hundred employees, while Gainesville warned that some of the most popular programs in the state faced the knife. USF administrators have proposed many rearrangements, some of them having little to do with the immediate financial crunch.

The fiscal year ends in two months, and after the governor takes a veto pen to the legislature’s budget, USF will be informed what its budget will be next year. Even now, the proposed budget is grim, and if the governor vetoes the 6% tuition hike included in the budget, the financial outlook will be grimmer. Even that budget may be inflated: at the latest United Faculty of Florida Senate meeting, UFF (statewide) president Tom Auxter warned that the real figures may not come out until November. Our legislative contacts report that Florida’s political leadership may be trying to make it through the elections without letting on how bad the fiscal situation is, and a special legislative session after the election might cut the state budget further. When Provost Ralph Wilcox says that USF has an obligation to meet its payroll, he is expressing a welcome realism.

On the other hand, the administration says that much of the reorganization is not just for budget-cutting. As observed previously (see Sherman Dorn’s commentary), many faculty think that administrators can take advantage of emergencies to institute otherwise impolitic changes – even changes having little to do with the emergency. And although our administration sold much of the reorganization as an opportunity for future accomplishment rather than a necessity for dealing with the immediate crisis, the administration has followed the hard sell strategy of insisting on committing to reorganization NOW.

It is during a crisis that clarity is most valuable, so we should separate out the two threads of the emergency and the opportunity. Let’s begin with the emergency.

Background on the Emergency and the Opportunity

Last fall, Provost Khator, in consultation with the Faculty Senate, charged a Budget Priorities Task Force to “review all academic centers, institutes, departments, and programs, and prepare recommendations that would allow us to make budget reductions strategically.” This task force only examined academic units within Academic Affairs on the Tampa campus, and was structured so that no reviewer was connected to a unit that reviewer helped evaluate. On February 29, the Budget Priorities Task Force submitted its report (see the 126-page PDF document), which listed brief ratings (on “centrality”, “quality”, “demand”, and “viability”) and evaluations of the colleges and departments. The document was released publicly, before chairs, directors, and deans had the opportunity to respond. Considering the number of units evaluated, the evaluations were inevitably terse and occasionally inconsistent with past reviews conducted by external panels drawn from a unit’s own discipline. That inconsistency and the lack of a pre-release review opportunity led to some departments’ being surprised and disappointed at both the process and the result of the task force. Many departments responded in March.

The evaluations did suggest some cost savings, and in particular tended to recommend that free-standing institutes find new funding sources. Several departmental mergers were proposed, particularly of units that seemed to be having difficulties. Perhaps the idea was that the synergy of merging two departments would improve performance, but certainly such mergers would reduce administrative costs.

Editorial comment: it is not clear that reducing resources – either by merger or by other means – would help any unit. If the university has a strong stake in a unit, then a wiser course may be to provide additional resources and perhaps additional nagging. On the other hand, if the university is trying a tactful way of abandoning a low-priority program at a time of budgetary stress, a merger can provide good cover.

In March, the second (opportunity) thread appeared when Arts & Science chairs received notice that administrators were contemplating breaking up the college, with natural sciences being merged with engineering. That move would be accompanied by other shuffling throughout the university. Decisions on these changes were to be made within a month, and in this compressed time scale the emergency and opportunity threads appeared to be conflated. At the April 14 meeting with engineering and natural science faculty, the provost and a few supporters of the college-level reorganization spoke of benefits to natural science of having its understaffed departments merged into a large college, although speakers were vague on how these benefits would materialize and in what form. Most faculty expressed concerns, most notably why an immediate commitment was necessary for changes unrelated to the budget problem.

Some faculty supporters of the merger hoped that it would resolve longstanding administrative problems, notably inequitable allocation of credit for external funding. But the suggestion that the university might simply address these administrative kinks was met by a pointed response by Engineering Dean John Wiencek that the opportunity called for more than “tweaking” policy.

Reactions and the Future of the Reorganization

After Arts and Sciences chairs complained about the discussion (or the insufficiency thereof), the administration has backed down from its initial plan to commit to the reorganization in April, and now plans to make the commitment by July 1 when the next fiscal year begins. And at its April meeting, the Faculty Senate resolved to “establish the Faculty Senate Task Force to Review the Administrative Structure of the University of South Florida,” and to meet on May 21.

But the most visible publicity this spring has focused on the proposal that Africana Studies, Women’s Studies, the Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean (ISLAC), and the Institute on Black Life (IBL) be merged. The proposed merger was seen as downgrading these units, and the resulting uproar, including last week’s student protest, was reported in the local newspapers, Inside Higher Ed, and the Chronicle for Higher Education. Some money would be saved – not much – so this could be a cost saving measure or perhaps (as some feared) a tactful way of abandoning low-priority programs.

Legally, the reorganization of USF is a management decision, but it has academic consequences, and as the reorganization proceeds, the Faculty Senate will be engaged over the next year. And reorganization affects the terms and conditions of employment, so the United Faculty of Florida watching the situation very carefully, especially the consequences for tenure-track faculty. A few dozen faculty have consulted with chapter officers over the past few months, and that will certainly continue. (The current officer list is posted on-line).

But will this reorganization work? As a package, it is supposed to cut the budget while seizing an opportunity to develop interdisciplinary research and not harm academics. The stakes are high: USF faces tens of millions of dollars in cuts, and these cuts must come from somewhere. In bad budget years, nerves fray and morale sinks as the administration faces only bad choices and worse choices. And this is a horrible budget year.

An effective reorganization requires not only much political capital but also broad support and widespread assistance. A top-down reorganization, devised and dictated by a small group of people, will cost a lot of political capital to sell and may have too little support and assistance from faculty and professional ranks to succeed. Every university that aspires to greatness must be a “loosely-coupled” system requiring the voluntary and committed action of faculty.

This is the hard-headed argument for faculty governance: because faculty work in the gut of the university, it is better to have broad support for an imperfect organization than apathy about theoretically better one. Several years ago, the Board of Trustees and the United Faculty of Florida agreed to language in the Collective Bargaining Agreement committing both parties “… to principles of shared governance, which require that in the development of academic policies and processes, the professional judgments of employees are of primary importance.” That lofty language carries a gritty reality. The goals of the university can best be met when faculty and administrators work together. This summer, the choices that the upper-level administration makes, and the process involved, will not only determine whether few or many have a stake in USF’s success, but whether USF succeeds.

As of the end of yesterday’s business, the Florida House of Representatives failed to take up Senate Joint Resolution 2308, the proposed constitutional amendment that would abolish the appointed State Board of Education, return the education commissioner’s job to an elected position, and eliminate all of the constitutional authority of the Board of Governors.

Once the legislature finishes its business tomorrow, we can thank the members of the House who killed the proposal and have a collective sigh of relief at the death of a bad idea. That doesn’t mean the legislative session would end up a winner, by any means. It just prevents a thoroughly horrid year from become even more catastrophic. The budget has been slashed, and the legislature ruined the merit-based system for assigning Centers of Excellence funding in the state. But sometimes we’ll take small comfort where we can.

According to the Tampa Bay Gazette report on the LGBT Alumni Society’s Annual GALA Reception and Awards ceremony (p. 17), Tampa’s mayor criticized USF for not providing domestic partner benefits:

Dr, Wilcox praised the USF Pride Alliance as a leader helping the University to increase its tolerance for diversity. He also shared his vision of USF earning the prestigious Association of American Universities status. “No city can be truly great without an AAU University,” he said. Mayor Iorio accepted the challenge, but also reminded Dr. Wilcox that a universities [sic] should be a leader in the community with regard to social progress, referring to her 2004 executive order establishing Domestic Partnership benefits for City employees, while USF still does not offer such benefits.

UFF does not think there is any conflict between the two challenges: The vast majority of AAU universities have domestic partner benefits.

The St Petersburg Times higher education reporter blogged in the late afternoon that the House leadership had pulled the senate’s constitutional proposal on education governance off the floor calendar, and according to what she wrote, that makes bringing it up in the next few days very difficult. If so, it is a tiny measure of hope that one bad measure was stopped.

It is a small consolation in a very bad budget year, and one in which the legislature took the majority of money set aside for merit-evaluated proposals for Centers of Excellence and gave it to a low-rated project. As the Tampa Tribune editorial on the subject noted, “Consider the handling of the Centers of Excellence money a preview of the shenanigans to come if this effort [to gut the Board of Governors] succeeds.”

If the university system has dodged the governance bullet, the next issue to watch is whether Governor Crist attempts to strike the modest tuition hike from the appropriations bill.

Last Friday, department chairs and school directors made one point clear with the Provost: there had been insufficient open discussion about reorganization issues within colleges. In an e-mail to chairs over the weekend, the Provost agreed to address budget issues separately and on a different schedule from anything that falls under “realignment” for longer-term reasons.

In the past few months, several faculty have made comparisons between our current situation and the recent book by Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (you can read an online summary of her argument). Klein argues that advocates of free-market or neoliberal policies have deliberately crafted a strategy of waiting until a natural or economic disaster strikes and then pouncing with policies that would never be approved in a stable environment. I have heard the argument that there are always ideas and vague plans for restructuring that float around USF, and they become viable when there is a shock such as the current budget crisis. Whether or not the idea is tied to the concrete circumstances we face, it becomes far more likely.

There is also the sociologists’ term institutional isomorphism (JSTOR article) to describe the diffusion of institutional structures. In some cases, the parallels are coerced, as when the No Child Left Behind Act required that all states receiving Title I fund (for the education of poor children) also agree to test all children, every year, in grades 3-8. In other cases, the parallels come through a normative process, and there is no doubt that the language of the USF Strategic Plan is all about this type of institutional isomorphism. Our Board of Trustees wants us to be AAU (the American Association of Universities), AAU eligible, or at least like AAU institutions. This institutional ambition isn’t new at USF, and plenty of other institutions have trod in the prior path of higher-status institutions (or tried to follow the trajectory of aspirational peers, if you prefer that language). And to some extent, faculty and departments will use such isomorphic tendencies to their tactical advantage when seeking faculty lines, operational support, and so forth.

But now we face a budget crisis, and anyone who looks at the university should fear that USF’s language of AAU status is looking less realistic and more like the “high school script” that almost all high schools follow, which Mary Metz described almost two decades ago. Are we an AAU-worthy institution, or will we just play one in the movies? The aftermath of reorganization beyond budget cuts will be embedded in the academic culture of an institution. The productivity costs of reorganization are real, and while they may be justified in some cases by budget savings, to use the budget crisis to reorganize beyond what is necessary has impeded the type of transparency that both Renu Khator and Ralph Wilcox promised.

Reorganization may be useful, or it may drive faculty away from USF and set us spinning our wheels for several years just responding to the reorganization. The chairs are correct: the two sets of decisions (addressing the budget crisis and addressing long-term issues) need to be done on separate schedules.

(This entry is adapted from a longer discussion of the WST, AFA, IBL, and ISLAC situation.)

I am in one of the departments that may be affected by departmental reorganization within USF. My dean has called a meeting with my department for this afternoon, and I strongly suspect that we will be merging with another department. The faculty in both departments have made their preferences known, as has our dean to the provost, but I suspect we’re merging anyway. There are some important practical matters after merger to pay attention to, and this is solely about those practical matters.

Transitions on annual evaluations: faculty have the right under Article 10 to be evaluated every year under procedures and disciplinary criteria that department employees approved by vote. When departments merge, the annual evaluation policies for the component units will almost certainly be different, and department faculty have at least three choices:

• Draft an entirely new set of evaluation procedures.
• Adopt one of the former department’s procedures as the procedure for the entire unit, entirely or with slight modifications.
• Vote to treat faculty from the former departments separately and under the former procedures of their former departments for a transition period, until there is time to craft a unified set of procedures.

If my department is merged, as I suspect, I will recommend the last option to my current and future colleagues; we don’t need to be spending our time and energy on something when we can agree on a transitional framework that will last us for a year or so.

Tenure and promotion issues: The bottom line for the chapter is that reorganization should not force tenure-track faculty to educate a new batch of colleagues about their work at the department/unit level. At a consultation between the UFF-USF chapter and the administration Tuesday, the administration agreed to written, binding agreements so that tenure-track faculty could retain continuity of colleagues for T&P evaluation purposes. The devil’s in the details, and the chapter will be looking after those details for any affected tenure-track faculty.

Summer teaching opportunities. The common expectation of both UFF and the USF administration is that each unit has an explicit set of procedures on offering teaching opportunities (covered under Article 8). Merging departments will not be able to address the transition in the same way as for annual evaluations, and it is important that faculty in any merged units talk in the summer and craft a single policy in the fall, well before summer 2009 comes around.

Other governance issues. While most other departmental governance issues are outside the collective bargaining agreement, merged units will also need to figure out how to handle governance. In some cases (as in course/program approval processes), transitional arrangements with minimal disruption may be possible.

Have more questions on practical issues? E-mail me!

There are hundreds of employees at USF who are not represented by any union, and this is what can happen if your employer can change the terms and conditions of employment at whim: USF is shrinking non-reappointment notice requirements for those outside bargaining units. Inside the unit, apart from soft-money (grant-funded) positions, a professional employee has one semester’s notice for the first two years and one year’s notice afterwards. Outside the bargaining unit, the new rules give only 30 days’ notice of nonreappointment in the first two years and three months’ notice afterwards. Non-reappointment is ending employment without cause; in the unit as well as out of it, USF has the right to terminate people with cause, after due process. One of the protections for professional employees inside the bargaining unit is a longer non-reappointment period.

This week, Anthropology Chair Elizabeth Bird’s column appeared in the St Petersburg times: Florida’s War on Knowledge. In it, Professor Bird captures the problems with Florida higher education policy and the dangers with budget cuts and a threatened governance change.

The public needs to know more about the effects of budget cuts, and the position of the UFF chapter is that all faculty at USF should participate in educating the public and policymakers. See http://faculty.ourusf.org/educate-the-public/ for more information on the chapter’s gift-card drawings tied to educating the public.

Going up for tenure and needing help putting together a proposed list of external reviewers? Put together a small group of colleagues and you get a mini-workshop brought to you.

Here’s what you do:

• Find a colleague or two to work with: both must be union members or willing to sign up (this is a member-only mini-workshop)
• Check my calendar for times before 2:30 pm that I am free (I generally am not free after 2:30 pm)
• Get a room
• Send me an e-mail with two proposed time slots (45-60 minutes are enough, if you’re at Tampa, and if you’re at another campus, I’ll figure out the drive time).
• I’ll respond within a day or two to say if I can make one of those times.
• I bring materials, you bring a list of potential reviewer nominations and what you know about them

On Friday, the UFF-USF chapter approved a resolution that urged the maintenance of separate identities for the Department of Women’s Studies, the Department of Africana Studies, the Institute on Black Life, and the Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean. The resolution focuses entirely on the intellectual value of having separate identities. That focus does not mean that faculty and the UFF chapter do not want USF to save money. But faculty do not want the budget crisis to be an opportunity for other changes that endanger our shared academic values.
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