UFF-USF

The group of plaintiffs in the lawsuit over the Board of Governors’ constitutional authority refiled their lawsuit Monday in Tallahassee. The judge in the case had ruled early in January that the plaintiffs, including the Board of Governors, did not have standing to sue in state court.

This lawsuit is about tuition authority (a crucial question this year!) but more generally about who controls Florida’s universities. In 2002, the United Faculty of Florida supported the constitutional amendment that created the Board of Governors, as faculty were tired of seeing legislative politics deciding educational issues. If the Board of Governors wins this lawsuit, future decisions may have political overtunes, but we will see far less of the shenanigans of the past decade, where legislative influence and not educational need determined whether new schools were built, and on which campuses.

A decision is not going to happen for several months at the lower-court level, and any decision is likely to be appealed until the Florida Supreme Court decides the issue.

In talking with legislators, it’s crucial to explain how budget cuts at USF affect students and the general public: For students, cuts result in larger classes, fewer courses offered, larger problems in scheduling classes needed for graduation. And that’s for the students who are admitted; USF will have to turn away more students as a result of cuts. As the St Petersburg Times reported earlier this week, the universities will be shutting out more students as the peak of the baby boom echo reaches adulthood over the next few years.

Editorial boards around the state have commented recently on higher-education budget, including the Tampa Tribune, the St. Petersburg Times, and the Florida Sun-Sentinel, and reporting on the consequences of budget cuts continues in the Times, Palm Beach Post, Miami Herald, and elsewhere.

When you talk with legislators, always explain the real-life consequences of budget cuts for students and those who will not become students because of the cuts.

Some recognition is due several administrators at the University of South Florida for recent actions or consistency:

• A dean who worked to help faculty protect the tenure process in a college
• A dean and associate dean who helped find a grant-funded position for a professional employee who otherwise would have been laid off
• An administrator who took time to address the personal needs of individual faculty in a unique crisis
• A chair/director who protected tenure-track faculty research time in an emergency schedule shuffle
• Lakeland-campus academic administrators, who have continued to teach regularly-scheduled courses in their home departments.

The individuals in the first four cases are not named in part to protect confidentiality and in part to recognize that there are plenty of correct decisions made quietly by faculty committees and administrators. A faculty union’s job is to protect due process and faculty interests, and the chapter will point out where its perspective differs from that of the administration or BOT, but there are also plenty of correct decisions made.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

Approved unanimously at the January 11, 2008, chapter meeting:

Before the University cuts summer school, the University of South Florida should allow departments to explore alternative funding sources for summer 2008.

More information about this resolution will be available by the end of the weekend.

Update (January 17): Events overtook this. See the January 17 entry about the budget situation.

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.