UFF-USF

Good boss, bad boss: Which are you? is a lively NY Times article that links to a number of list and quiz websites with crazy-workplace stories and other tidbits. My favorite from the My Bad Boss contest (from Working America):

Someone in your family has died unexpectedly. You are devastated, but feel touched when your normally cheap boss sends flowers to the funeral. The next month, you find out your boss has taken the money for flowers out of your paycheck!

Apparently this item was taken from a real story submitted by the victim of this maneuver.

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 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.

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.

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.

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).

UFF/USF Chapter Meeting
December 14, 2007
CDB’s on Fowler Avenue, Tampa

In attendance: J. Martin, B. Welker, A. Shapiro, P. Terry, S. Wohlmuth, N. Kwon, K. de la Peña McCook, R. Weatherford, M. Klisch, M. Kaplan, S. Tauber, J. Noonan, G. McColm, S. Dorn, R. Evans, H. Hechiche.
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