UFF-USF

Update (2/21/08): Administrators have contacted the chapter in the past day to indicate that all of the individuals affected were in the College of Medicine, and that the timeline indicated in USF’s response was an estimate of HR as to when they could be reasonably sure the switch in processes would be complete. We’ve suggested creating intermediate benchmarks before the end of the fiscal year and will update this entry or write a new one when more information is available.

This morning, the St. Petersburg Times made available the state’s operational audit of USF for the last fiscal year, which essentially is a checkup on the university’s basic financial operations. There are a number of items you’d expect (the university needs to do a better job of checking up on the commissions that vendors owe it, check up on residency of students, P-Card controls), some items that affect employees in reimbursable costs (university-subsidized cell phone usage, or travel reimbursement per diems), and then a surprising finding:

Our test of termination pay for 5 employees who terminated during the 2006-07 fiscal year disclosed that 1 employee of USF Health had not been paid for unused leave. Subsequent to audit inquiry, the employee was paid for 92 annual leave hours totaling $1,818, 134 days after their termination date. A further review of USF Health records disclosed that as of June 8, 2007, an additional 12 employees who terminated between July 14, 2006, and March 19, 2007, had not been paid accumulated annual leave totaling $38,794. Of the 12 employees, 2 still had not been paid amounts due as of November 13, 2007.

In other words, the university did not pay attention to the leave time owed faculty who retired, resigned, or otherwise left their jobs. This was one of 13 findings in the operational audit, and USF’s Chief Financial Officer Carl Carlucci promised to fix all of them. Here is the order of the issues that he said USF would address, and the implementation dates:

• Travel Per Diem (finding 10), June 2007
• Imprest Bank Accounts (finding 1), January 2008
• Access To Business Applications (finding 11), January 2008
• Student Fees (finding 5), March 31, 2008
• Competitive Procurement (finding 8), March 31, 2008
• Information Technology – Application Environment (finding 13), March 31, 2008
• Decentralized Collections (finding 6), April 30, 2008
• Cell phones (finding 10), April 30, 2008
• Tangible Personal Property (finding 2), June 30, 2008
• Auxiliary Vendor Contracts (finding 3), June 30, 2008
• Auxiliary Credit Union Contract (finding 4), June 30, 2008
• Purchasing Cards (finding 9), June 30, 2008
• Leave Pay on Termination (finding 7), July 31, 2008

In other words, retiring employees owed a payout for leave time are at the end of the line, the very lowest priority, and the implementation date for fixing this is after the end of the current fiscal year.

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.

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

From one union member’s e-mail this morning, after reading about the figures reported to the AAUP:

How are the faculty salary raises calculated? As far as I know, none of us got any raise in ’07-08, but the chart shows an average of 2.1%. What do these numbers actually represent?

Good question. I’ll ask USF administrators that, and we’ll see what they say.

As is customary, 9-month faculty and professional employees will have double-deductions starting February 1 to cover summer insurance The one exception will be the February 29 paycheck, which will have no insurance deductions (as the 3rd paycheck in the month).

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.

Data submitted by USF to the American Association of University Professors shows the raises for continuing faculty slipping dramatically in two years, from 4.9% in 2005-06 to 2.1% for faculty this year. This slip happened for faculty at all ranks, and for both 9- and 12-month faculty. See the attached PDF file for more details.

USF faculty raise data, 2005-06 through 2007-08

In the Democratic presidential debate last night at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire, moderator Charlie Gibson asked a question of Hillary Clinton about two college professors making more than $100,000 (from the NY Times rush transcript):

MR. GIBSON: If you take a family of — if you take a family of two professors here at Saint Anselm, they’re going to be in the $200,000 category that you’re talking about lifting the taxes on. And — (laughter).

MR. EDWARDS: I don’t think they agree with you.

SEN. OBAMA: I’m not sure that that’s — (laughter) –

SEN. CLINTON: That may be NYU, Charlie.I don’t think it’s — (laughter) — Saint Anselm.

Senator Clinton is absolutely right. According to the AAUP salary survey data on St. Anselm, the mean salary for full professors at the college in 2006-07 was $77,400, and the mean salary for assistant professors was $49,600, about half of what Gibson assumed. (Clinton was underestimating the average full-professor salary at NYU, which was $149,500 in the AAUP survey. It’s probably close to $100K if you look at faculty overall.)

Gibson’s hypothetical shows an amazing ignorance of higher education, especially small private colleges.

At USF, the AAUP survey reports that full professors outside medicine made on average about $100,000 in 2006-07, but that hides considerable variation by discipline (music and English professors don’t make anywhere close to that). To put that into a national perspective, among Research I institutions, USF salaries for assistant, associate, and full professors rank in the fourth quintile, with more than 60% of research institutions paying more than USF does.