Draft agenda, UFF-USF chapter meeting
June 13, 2008, 12 noon
CDB’s (Fowler @ 51st)
Provost Wilcox has just released a letter on realignment of several colleges: Arts & Sciences, VPA, School of Architecture, and FMHI. Nothing about this was said at the Board of Trustees meeting this morning.
The bargaining teams for UFF-USF and the Board of Trustees met this afternoon. Before the meeting, the chief negotiator for the BOT team let UFF-USF know that they were waiting until the BOT approved the 2008-09 budget before presenting proposals on the salaries and benefits articles. The UFF-USF chief negotiator presented the chapter’s third proposal on salaries. (Since June 2007, the BOT team has not presented any counter-proposal on salary.) UFF-USF also presented a proposal on one of the technical articles (on amendment and duration).
There was discussion but no concrete language proposed on several other topics.
Bill McClelland, president of AFSMCE Local 3342, spoke with WMNF last week (MP3) about the budget cuts and staff layoffs. In the interview, he discusses the grievances that AFSCME has filed over staff layoff procedures.
Twenty years ago, Frank Borkowski became USF’s fourth president, promising to raise the institution’s research activities and national profile. Per-pupil state funding of Florida’s universities peaked halfway through his tenure with a downward trend since, and yet USF’s profile today is one of a major research university. That says much about the work of hundreds of faculty, but there have been costs to the institution. As state funding falls yet again and all of Florida’s universities face unstable and unpredictable funding, we need to see what that 20-year trajectory has done to faculty work: it has encouraged administrators to created a de facto differentiated staffing model, without a clear set of rewards for anyone. While President Genshaft has talked about rewarding academic superstars (her choice of words from the fall 2007 state of the university address), and while the provost puts together a task force without asking the faculty union to participate on the steering committee, we all need to understand that we already have a differentiated staffing model, and it’s one that is demoralizing or demeaning to many employees.
Draft agenda, May 30, 2008, UFF-USF chapter meeting
Noon, CDB’s (Fowler at 51st)
Sherman Dorn, Rod Evans, Susan Greenbaum, Hiba Hechiche, Mark Klisch, Jana Martin, Lynn McBrien, Greg McColm, Steve Permuth, Arthur Shapiro, Paul Terry, Bob Welker, Keith White, Sonya Wolmuth Read the rest of this entry »
The budget reduction outline for USF Health is now online. There are 2 layoffs from COPH, but the outline doesn’t specify whether those positions are staff or faculty, and given the <1.0 FTE in hard money for most Public Health faculty, I’m not ruling out the possibility of in-unit layoffs there until I hear otherwise, but the probabilities just went down dramatically (and that’s true for both staff and faculty).