UFF (Faculty Union) Biweekly on Social Media, Summer Doldrums, and an Adjunct Update

UFF Biweekly United Faculty of Florida -- USF System Chapter 29 June 2017 Email not displaying properly? View it in your browser

Chapter Meeting Tomorrow in Tampa The Chapter will meet tomorrow Friday at 12 noon in Perkins Restaurant in Tampa, on 5002 E. Fowler Ave. (at the intersection of E. Fowler Ave. and N. 50th Street, on the southeastern corner of USF Tampa). Lunch is on us, and all USF employees are invited, especially UFF members and employees thinking of becoming UFF members. Here is Friday's agenda. The Chapter will meet this summer on June 30, July 14, July 28, and August 11, at 12 noon. All meetings - except the July 28 meeting - will be at Perkins Restaurant in Tampa on 5002 E. Fowler Ave.; the July 28 chapter meeting will be on USF St. Petersburg at a location TBD. Come and check us out. $ 500 Travel Scholarships for UFF Members The USF Chapter of the UFF will award six $ 500 Travel Scholarships for fall and spring. This will be for travel for participation in a professional activity. All applications are due by August 9, and only UFF members are eligible. In addition, no recipient of the Fall 2016 or Spring 2017 cycles of travel grants, and no member of the UFF USF Executive Committee, is eligible to apply. The six recipients shall be selected by lot at the August 11 chapter meeting. There are two new conditions: When presented or published, any research or presentation facilitated by this scholarship must acknowledge that the work was partially supported by the United Faculty of Florida. After the work is presented or published, the recipient will compose a short (200 words or so) description of the research, scholarship, or creative work, for publication in the Biweekly. This initiative is part of our membership campaign. If you would like to become active in the UFF USF Membership Drive, contact the Membership Chair, Adrienne Berarducci (click here). Join UFF Today! Download, fill in, and mail the membership form. Benefits of membership include the right to run and vote in UFF chapter and statewide elections; representation in grievances (UFF cannot represent a non-member in a grievance or litigation); special deals in insurance, travel, legal advice, and other packages provided by our affiliates; free insurance coverage for job-related liability; and the knowledge you are supporting education in Florida. Come and join the movement. Grievances If you have been the victim of a violation of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, you have thirty days from the time you knew or should have known of the violation to file a grievance. If you are, and at the time of the violation were, a dues-paying member of the United Faculty of Florida, you have the right to union representation. To contact the UFF USF Grievance Committee, go to the online contact form. For more information, see our web-page on grievances; see also the main article (left). Visit Us on Facebook Visit the United Faculty of Florida at USF Facebook page. This page is a place where UFF members can exchange thoughts and ideas. The page is "public", but only dues-paying UFF members are eligible to post items on the page. If you are a UFF member, ask to join on the page, or contact the Communications Committee. The Committee will invite every UFF member that asks to join. So check us out. UFF members are welcome to join, and non-members are welcome to look.		IN THIS ISSUE Social Media, Summer Doldrums, and an Adjunct Update In the Four Musketeers, Cardinal Richelieu (Charlton Heston) is confronted with a dubious death warrant he had unwisely given to Lady de Winter. "Hm," said that old spider, "One should be careful what one writes...and to whom one gives it. I must bear those rules in mind." Social Media Strikes Again. Academic freedom is an issue again as faculty quotes (and misquotes) zing through the internet. For more on what some of us write, see below or click here. Summer Doldrums. Halfway through the summer, the to-do list is nowhere halfway complete. For commiseration and advice from the (upper stratosphere of the) internet, see below or click here. Adjunct Update. USF adjuncts wait for the PERC's decision. For the latest, see below or click here. On July 3, 1776, John Adams - one of the five members of the committee that wrote the Declaration of Independence - wrote a letter to his wife Abigail saying that on July 2, Congress had unanimously approved the Declaration. "I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more." Of course, Congress still had to ratify the thing, which is why we celebrate on the Fourth. So have a Happy Independence Day, even if it is two days late. Social Media Strikes Again Professor Smith posts a comment on his Facebook page, expecting half of his fifteen followers will read it any maybe two will comment. Instead, it goes viral, it hits network news, and the university administration panics and issues a sequence of contradictory statements between admonishments from faculty organizations. Politicians are outraged, pundits pontificate, and students enjoy the spectacle. While News of the Weird would say that this story has recurred too often to justify further attention, the chattering classes can't resist. For example: June Chu, Dean of Pierson College at Yale University, wrote snarky and occasionally offensive restaurant reviews on Yelp. The student newspaper found out, and she resigned during the uproar. Johnny Williams, Associate Professor of Sociology at Trinity College, shared ferocious tweet from a Son of Baldwin. It was interpreted as sanctioning the shooting of Senator Steve Scalise in Washington, D.C. Responding to threats, the college was briefly closed, and Williams apologized. Trinity College, which had prepared for such a crisis, has put him on leave. Sometimes, it's students who get in trouble. Harvard has just rescinded ten offers of admission to students who posted sexist, racist, or otherwise obscene material in what those students evidently thought was a private Facebook chat. These episodes range from the entertaining - Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe's tweets were recently called "an important vector of misinformation and conspiracy theories on Twitter" - to the disconcerting - Iowa Assistant Professor Sarah Bond published a column on classical art and modern racism and became a target of internet trolls. (Disconcerting because publications in journals can now percolate down to the trolls.) More alarming is the proliferation of personal and anonymous threats against faculty for things they wrote - or didn't write. Several things are going on here. Social media seems almost designed to circumvent the frontal lobe. Cerebral executive functions are what prevent you from greeting your Aunt Myrna with, "Did you go off your diet?" They are also what screens your own speech and conduct. It takes a moment to engage these executive functions, just long enough to get out a tweet. And the ease of posting comments, blog posts, and the like, can seduce users into forgetting that once it's out there, it's out there. Many sites rely on advertising, and they charge by the number of hits. This creates an incentive for attractive hyperbole. Hence clickbait: many surfers will click on "NJ college fires prof for insensitive remarks on Fox News, and traffic (and consequent advertising revenue, not to mention attention) increases. In fact, Campus Reform, which posted the above article, is one of several sites specializing on pursuing academics. The American Association of University Professors has defended academics who get in this sort of trouble, and our contract protects academic freedom. And two sociologists have issued a call for action. We should not allow ourselves to be censored or silenced - one thing society needs from academia is honest counsel - and we should stand together for academic freedom. But since it is not in our interest to be misunderstood, it may be wise to be careful with this beguiling technology. Summer Doldrums Last week, Summer Session A ended, and there is no way to sugarcoat the truth. Today is the fifty-sixth of the 108 days of summer. In theory, we should be 52 % through our summer list. In the 20 April 2017 Biweekly, we noted that some experts and highly organized people were sharing some advice for making this a productive summer. It should come as no surprise that as summer slithers past, the advice continues. Some experts told the Chronicle of Higher Education that unlike the rest of the school year, summer time is unstructured and faculty are more isolated. Some faculty recommend writing groups, partly to have someone else who will ask you about your progress during the previous week. One English professor - and productivity coach - recommends setting up a time map for the summer as a way of imposing structure. Iron Joe Bob Briggs advised, "Write every day; there is no other way." Anthony Trollope, who outraged the literary snoot set by comparing writing with carpentry, would get up at five in the morning and, facing his watch, write for three hours - and then count the words. Trollope couldn't be bothered with plot - which requires thinking quietly - which is why Paul Silvia told our English professor that one should count plotting out the novel (or article) as writing time. Of course, we now recall Victor Hugo's warning that thinking about writing is different from thinking in order to write: "Thought is the toil of the intelligence, reverie its voluptuousness. To replace thought with reverie is to confound a poison with a food." One interesting bit of advice is to keep track of how one is using one's time. After all, if summer frees up a lot of time, that freed up time must be somewhere, and a time diary can help track it down. But there seems to be no one formula: if one author does his writing in a noisy, smoke-filled cafe while sipping absinthe while another writes on an easel in a windowless and Spartan room sound-proofed with cork, the only thing they have in common is that they are writing. Adjuncts Update Following up on the previous Biweekly, the lawyers for the SEIU and the USF Board of Trustees have made their case to PERC, and now the wheels are turning. Meanwhile, the SEIU has posted a web-page for Frequently Asked Questions and another for a petition. Stay tuned.

		LOGISTICS Chapter Meeting tomorrow Friday, June 30, at Perkins Restaurant, on 5002 E. Fowler Ave., in Tampa. Click here for the agenda. Click here for the minutes of the previous meeting. We will have lunch at the meeting. All UFF members are invited to attend. Non-members are also invited to come and check us out. Come and join the movement. Membership: Everyone in the UFF USF System Bargaining unit is eligible for UFF membership: to join, simply fill out and send in the membership form. NOTE: The USF-UFF Chapter website is http://www.uff.ourusf.org, and our e-mail address is uff@ourusf.org. About this broadcast: This Newsletter was broadcast from uff.ourusf.org, hosted at ICDsoft.com, and is intended for all members of the UFF USF Bargaining unit (USF faculty and professionals at most departments). A (usually identical) version will be broadcast to USF-News and USF-Talk from mccolm@usf.edu. If you do not want to receive the UFF Biweekly, you can unsubscribe below. If you do not receive the Biweekly, but want to, e-mail a message to gmccolm@tampabay.rr.com.