United Faculty of Florida, Summer 2009

Please contact me ( sherman.dorn@gmail.com, subject="Merit pay discussion") if you want to help organize a meeting in your building for UFF members to discuss merit pay and other salary issues.

Yours,

Sherman Dorn

USF Chapter President

United Faculty of Florida

Join UFF -- http://faculty.ourusf.org/join-uff/

All employees in the Bargaining Unit have the same contract, called the Collective Bargaining Agreement, which is posted on-line . UFF and the USF administration bargained this contract: two bargaining teams worked out the "terms and conditions of employment" including salary raises, tenure and promotion, academic freedom, discipline and the grievance process, assignments and evaluations, sabbaticals and health benefits, etc., etc., etc.

The UFF also enforces the contract by using the "grievance process" when the contract is violated. Any employee whose rights are violated can file a grievance, but UFF will only represent UFF members. Membership is NOT automatic: one must join (there is a membership form posted on-line: click here). Membership dues are 1 % of salary, somewhat less than the 10 % - 15 % charged by Hollywood agents.

Representation in grievances is not the only benefit UFF provides to UFF members: we also provide tenure and promotion workshops, subscriptions to journals on jobs and teaching, a variety of promotional bargains with various businesses, and insurance in case you get sued on the job. But UFF's most important mission is the contract.

UFF at the university is run by fellow faculty and professionals. It is a democratic organization whose officers and representatives are elected each spring; any UFF member – and only UFF members – can run and vote. And we meet at "Chapter Meetings", where any UFF member can participate and vote on business matters (when an issue is "presented to the Chapter," that means it was on the agenda of a Chapter meeting). The Chapter Meetings will be on alternate Fridays, at noon, with sandwiches and soda pop provided by the Chapter, starting tomorrow at SOC 258. Come and check us out.

We also have two websites, one on-campus at http://w3.usf.edu/~uff/ and one off-campus at http://www.uff.ourusf.org/ .

This "UFF Biweekly" is sent out every other week, the Thursday before a Friday chapter meeting. All members of the Bargaining Unit should receive it; if you do not, please contact us at uff@ourusf.org. In addition, all members of the Bargaining Unit should have received our hardcopy newsletter, UnCommon Sense, which this fall features profiles of our Bargaining and Grievance Chairs.

At the end of June, an arbitrator awarded UFF a complete victory on two grievances related to the administration's attempt in the summer of 2008 to take away annual leave from 12-month faculty and professional employees without bargaining the change with the UFF. The arbitrator's ruling said that the university has the right to manage the university on matters not covered by the contract, but those management rights are not a blank check to overrule employee rights, which include a right to schedule annual leave and not have it scheduled for us. The arbitrator's ruling is available at http://tinyurl.com/m6w8od.

In July, an arbitrator ruled in favor of the administration on a tenure grievance. In this case, because it concerns an individual whose privacy deserves to be respected, UFF will not place the text of the ruling online, but all faculty should understand the arbitrator's ruling and the consequences for tenure procedures. The grievance stemmed from a tenure case where there were several procedural flaws, including: someone added marginal comments in the tenure candidate's binder regarding the tenure candidate's publishing record, but that someone didn't notify the tenure candidate. The Collective Bargaining Agreement requires that when additional material is placed in a tenure or promotion file, the faculty member is promptly notified. The UFF argued that the addition of marginal comments without notifying the faculty member was a contract violation, and that the university should rehire the individual and give the grievant an opportunity to go up for tenure under a procedurally clean process.

The arbitrator agreed with the UFF that the addition of material without notice was a contract violation, but ruled for the administration for several reasons. First, the arbitrator noted that the associate dean at the time of the incident took several steps to cure the procedural flaw. In addition, the arbitrator was not convinced by the evidence in this particular case that there was a causal link between the procedural violation and the denial of tenure. There are two practical consequences of this decision for the tenure process:

1. The administration has an incentive to cure procedural flaws, and faculty should raise concerns about any procedural flaws as soon as they become evident. A significant reason for the administration's victory in this grievance were the steps the associate dean took to address procedural problems, and we expect that in the future, the General Counsel's advice to administrators will be that curative steps help the administration insulate itself from tenure grievances.
2. Tenure grievances will need to have a causal link to be successful. Given this arbitration decision, there is a reasonable chance that an administrator's willful failure to cure procedural flaws will be sufficient to win a tenure grievance in the future. The argument of the UFF was broader, that the process was sufficiently tainted to require rehiring and another opportunity to go up for tenure. The arbitrator disagreed with that argument, and the arbitrator's ruling puts the onus clearly on the grievant (and UFF) to demonstrate that procedural flaws led to a tenure denial.

These grievances were settled without having to proceed to arbitration, and the grievants were members of UFF. UFF policy does not allow the chapter to represent non-members in grievances, and if the grievants had not been dues-paying members of UFF at the time of the contract violations, they would have had to represent themselves or hire outside attorneys.

The USF Board's view of the world is posted at http://usfweb2.usf.edu/board/pdfs/Operating.procedures.revised.pdf, although there is a more recent Governance Policy document (posted at http://usfweb2.usf.edu/usfgc/resources/governanace_policy.pdf). The Board meets at least four times a year, with an agenda composed by the President. They directly oversee the Tampa campus (which includes Marine Science), while overseeing regional boards for the regional campuses – which are appointed by the main Board. Two regional campuses are within the "USF system" (Sarasota-Manatee and Polytechnic, at Lakeland), and one is free-standing (St. Petersburg). Each regional campus has an executive (a Chancellor at St. Petersburg, two CEOs elsewhere) who is appointed by and reports to the President, as does the Provost and other vice presidents.

To sum up, there is an organization chart, with all lines of authority running through the president's office. But this is not how things actually work, for governance is shared in two ways.

• The Student Government is not independent of the administration, but it has considerable authority of its own. It has three branches, an executive (whose president appoints student members to USF Presidential Advisory Council, and who serves as a member of the Board), a legislature that allocates over ten million dollars in student activity fees, and a judiciary.
• The Staff Senate is elected by staff members and serves as an advisory body to the President. "The mission of the STAFF Senate is to provide an avenue for effective communications between the Staff, the University President, and senior management," reads its mission statement. "The Senate will take a proactive role in working to strengthen the USF community and support the mission to become a 'Top 50 Public Extensive Research and Doctoral Institution'." Unlike the Student Government, the Staff Senate wields primarily moral authority.
• The Faculty Senate "...serves as the main channel of communication between faculty members and the central administration of the University. The Senate constitutes the principal advisory body to the President and Provost of the University and has the responsibility to review and make recommendations to them concerning decisions of the University on all matters pertaining to the welfare of the University, focusing particularly on those related to the academic mission."
• The A & P Council "...seeks to consider and make recommendations to the appropriate authorities on matters of interest to the University community." This council represents A & P employee concerns about the mission of the university.

• Local 3342 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees represents staff members at USF.
• The USF Graduate Assistants United Chapter of the United Faculty of Florida represents graduate students working as research and teaching assistants.
• The USF Chapter of the United Faculty of Florida (see also http://www.uff.ourusf.org/ represents faculty and professionals at USF.
• The USF Chapter of the Police Benevolent Association represents campus police.

Case in point: the UFF contract (for faculty and professionals) says that "On the part of the Administration, Academic Responsibility implies a commitment actively to foster within the University a climate favorable to responsible exercise of freedom, by adherence to principles of shared governance, which require that in the development of academic policies and processes, the professional judgments of employees are of primary importance." Shared governance is a contractual obligation.

So here is one way that governance is shared: with constituents of the university community via these organizations. The ability of these organizations to represent their constituents depends heavily on the participation of those constituents: when constituents are very active (as many were last spring, when the indirect funds in the budget became an issue of public concern), then the Administration will tend to address their concerns. On the other hand, when constituents are inactive, the Administration (which has many other things to worry about) will assume that all is well.

But there is another way that governance is shared: by continuous participation that is necessary simply to keep the university running.

Every college, school, institute, department, or other such unit should have a governance document, preferably posted on-line (ahem!); the Faculty Senate has posted a lecture and a kit just under its own documents posted at http://web.usf.edu/FacultySenate/documents.html; these can be adapted to a unit's needs as their members see fit. There are two critical points: a unit should be democratically run as much as possible, and most of the work – and most of the decisions, for the decisions tend to be made by those who do the work – is done by committees.

Technically, most of these committees are "advisory". But let us pause for a touch of realism. If a textbook committee plows through umpteen textbooks, and comes up with a recommendation, that recommendation is usually followed for practical reasons. And most of these decisions – from annual faculty evaluations to course proposals – are done by faculty because the hierarchy is not really competent to do much more than look at those decisions and see if they seem reasonable. So while the work of any one committee may look insubstantial, collectively there is an enormous amount of responsibility. This is the daily concrete work that keeps the wheels turning.

Power flows to those who do the work, however invisible. There is little power in saying that someone should do something: power comes from doing something that should be done. Administrators make a few big decisions while faculty, professionals, staff, and students make the vast number of little ones, and those little ones collectively define much of the function of the university as a whole. And even the big decisions cannot be made (successfully) in isolation from the rest of the university, for not only do the myriad little decisions create currents that the administration must navigate, but it is ultimately the faculty, professionals, staff and students (!) that do the work. A good administrator is an expert sailor of academic waters, while a dictatorial one is a shipwreck waiting to happen.

Around much of the globe, an elite education (or even a quality education) outside of the USA means a public education. The elite private institutions are largely American, and elsewhere "private" usually means for-profit and sometimes questionable. But that is changing: UNESCO issued a new report on "Private Higher Education" (posted on-line) saying that about 30 % of higher education enrollments in the world now are private. And public-private partnerships are part of that growth.

An institution might outsource a unit because it thinks that a private contractor might be cheaper, or more competent, or maybe (in this era of entrepreneurial innovation) it is the ideologically correct thing to do. And colleges and universities world-wide are outsourcing student recruitment functions, and sometimes student orientation and acculturation programs with them.

It used to be that international students flocked reliably to the USA. Universities here had old competitors – colonial powers like England and France – and newer ones like Australia and Canada. The new competitors actively sought students, which meant new recruiting measures. In Australia, recruiting companies (sometimes even business recruiting companies that expanded into educational recruiting) have networks of agents working areas with high densities of prospective students (like India and China).

Australia recently cut university funding, so their universities are increasingly dependent on streams of international students: by 2004, a fifth of all Australian higher education students were international. Many were ill-prepared, and universities found themselves paying the recruiting companies to teach English to the new students, sometimes before admission, and sometimes within a joint unit of the university and the company.

This recruitment-and-English-teaching industry expanded into Canada, Britain, and other (largely Commonwealth) countries, with mixed results, including wage and job security issues for employees who wind up in the new joint units. Such problems worry unions, especially when accompanied by a lack of transparency: the British University and College Union (UCU) grumbled that, "Deals with private companies are typically announced following long periods of secret discussion and managers attempt to muzzle public discussion of proposals at governing bodies by claiming 'commercial sensitivity'." (The UCU got steamed enough about the whole business to post a kit on "Privatisation and how to stop it" posted on-line.)

The USA would seem to be a strange target for this industry, for the big problem that students and parents and educators and pundits complain about here is the tangle of visa and security and other rules that international students face. There is a myth that this snarl of red tape started with 9/11, but the USA has a long history of hostile customs services, going back to the 1950s. The high tech industry is quite aware of what the problem is, and has devoted its efforts to (a) lobbying Washington and (b) making very real threats to move operations abroad. It is not clear what American universities would gain by imitating their Commonwealth competitors, which tend to be based in nations with less ferocious security requirements.

Privatized admissions and recruitment is not new in America. What was new for America was an institution that subcontracted an English Language unit to a private company, like Northeastern University did with Kaplan last year. Actually, it's not clear what the resulting Global Pathways arrangement is, since both Northeastern and Kaplan refused to discuss finances with the New York Times. But they told the Times that Northeastern handles the teaching (which Kaplan wanted to do), curriculum and admissions.

Shortly after Northeastern and Kaplan shook hands, INTO University Partnerships, an Australian newcomer launched by real estate tycoon Andrew Colin, signed an agreement with Oregon State University to recruit and oversee or manage or otherwise fiddle with OSU's English Language Institute. The perceived need was there: OSU's international enrollment had fallen by half to 5 %, and their long-range plan called for raising it to 9 %. But OSU's ELI promptly lost its accreditation with the Commission on English Language Program Accreditation (the CEA).

Now, INTO is talking with USF.

For better or worse, INTO generates lively copy. To the UCU's enumeration of INTO's financial losses and other sins, INTO responded with a press release (posted on-line) and a libel suit, to which UCU capitulated. (British libel laws are far more generous to plaintiffs than American libel laws, where the truth is an absolute defense.) And INTO founder Andrew Colin is unusually quotable: for example, "At one end you've got lecturers teaching ridiculous hours for peanuts without proper contracts. At the other end, you've got some heads [sic] of department on 48,000 pounds [$ 78,000] teaching 300 hours a year [that's almost seven courses at USF] and doing no research!" Colin has been an educational entrepreneur for years, but the founder of Real Estate Venture Capital Management LLP (revcap) is primarily a developer (he is building a $ 52 million dorm/classroom & lab building for OSU).

During the summer, several USF faculty and administrators visited England and Oregon to take a look, and since the September 13 e-mail, there has been little public information coming from the Provost's Office, though the value of any potential contract would be potentially tens of millions. The future of USF's English Language Institute (see their web-page) is at stake.

At the July meeting of the USF-Tampa Faculty Senate Executive Committee (documents posted on-line, Wilcox promised that he would not support any contract involving ELI unless an agreement provided for (a) maintaining ties between ELI and the academic programs to which it has provided research and training opportunities in the past, (b) maintaining ELI's accreditation, and (c) maintaining USF control over key academic matters. The relevant excerpt from the SEC minutes is below:

"The Provost pointed out that USF has absolutely no interest in partnering with anyone who cannot provide demonstrable success in prior partnerships, and who cannot assure continuity in the key issue of ethical practices. USF must, at all times, retain full authority over academic decision making. In addition, USF is not interested in partnering with anyone who might threaten the on-going accreditation of ELI."

Faculty and others have told UFF chapter officers that while some concerns have been addressed explicitly, questions remain:

• Who is required to approve a joint agreement on academic programs with a commercial entity? While the English Language Institute does not offer degrees, its teaching employees consider themselves faculty, it educates its enrollees, and its enrollees consider themselves students and live in student housing. ELI is a unit of the Department of World Languages and is linked to several academic programs. And the goal of a partnership would be to increase international enrollment in standard academic programs. Should such agreement require the prior approval of the Faculty Senate?
• Will future hiring of ELI teachers occur within an academic context, with a search committee and faculty vetting for permanent positions?
• Would the structure of the agreement complicate management and the ties with academic programs? Provost Wilcox has promised that any agreement would maintain current ties with academic programs and their units, and some faculty close to the issue have suggested that it is a very different operation to have a unit within an academic department and a unit that is outside and not under the direction of a department chair, dean, or governance committee of academics.
• What authority will faculty and academic administrators have over the presentation of USF programs to potential ELI participants? A public-records request of all material given USF visitors to INTO in England showed that all of the materials were in English, with no sample materials in the languages of potential students – Arabic, Portuguese, Mandarin, French, and so forth. USF has hundreds of faculty who could help assess recruiting materials in multiple languages, but that is only possible if academics have a chance to look at the material that potential recruits will see.
• Is INTO the best partner? INTO is not the only commercial player in the field of recruiting international students. INTO is the only such company that has sent visitors to USF, and that USF has investigated in depth (with trips to England and Oregon).
• Would the creation of a joint entity with a commercial firm create legal complications and undermine sovereign immunity? The university enjoys some protections from lawsuits because it is a state entity. If a contract is in the form of a joint entity, how would that affect the university's liability in the operation of ELI or how participants (and future students) are treated while at USF?
• What are the exit options if a joint operation does not work out satisfactorily? Would USF be able to extricate itself from the partnership without long-term damage to ELI and the programs it is tied to?

"...management is proposing less money than we received last year," reported the AFSCME newsletter. The USF Chapter of the UFF approved the following Letter to the Oracle:

The United Faculty of Florida supports USF AFSCME Local 3342 in their efforts to win reasonable wages and working conditions for the members. As faculty, we understand well the importance of the work that staff performs and we believe that the University should value and reward their critical efforts. Instead, however, the BOT and the administration has steadfastly refused to provide any increases from University funds since 2003, and it has been several years since the legislature mandated base raises for university employees. During the period between then and now, inflation has increased by 13 %. This means that staff has steadily lost ground. It is important to note that the wages and salaries earned by member employees were already unconscionably low. According to a salary study from 2007, 13 % were below the official poverty line (set for that year at under $ 20,000 for a family of four); 39 % were eligible for federal food stamps; and 88 % earn less than what is considered a "living wage". The people who do the heavy lifting and critical paperwork at the institution deserve to be able to avoid public assistance. They deserve to be able to support their families and build savings for the future. They deserve respect and reasonable remuneration.

• Faculty will be encouraged to visit legislators this fall, when they are in their home districts and have more free time (perhaps fifteen minutes or so) to discuss higher education with faculty. Legislators are not very sensitive to the particular needs of faculty, but they are very receptive to concerns of students, parents, and employers, and the UFF will be posting talking points on their Legislative News page.
• UFF is already gearing up for 2010 fall elections, which includes donations by its Political Action Committee. Since dues money does not go into the PAC, UFF relies on voluntary donations, including by payroll deduction. Politicians tend to be grateful for donations – which they remember – so the PAC tends to spread donations widely. UFF has posted information on this.

Transcending all these talking points was the long-term question of where Florida will be going after the recovery.

Despite the collaboration in Tallahassee described in the previous Biweekly, there seems to be an unusual number of conflicts in some Florida universities. UFF bargains and enforces contracts, and conflicts in both bargaining and enforcement were described in the UFF Senate meeting.

For example: bargaining at six colleges and universities is so completely stuck that impasse has been declared (which means that a mediator is brought in); the most recent was the University of Florida, where UFF declared impasse after FOUR YEARS of bargaining.

(To be fair to those six institutions, USF is also at impasse in bargaining with AFSCME, in part because the administration is unwilling or unable to provide a living wage to staff employees.)

And as for enforcement... Contracts are enforced by a grievance process: if the contract is violated, an employee or the chapter may file a grievance identifying the contractual item violated and proposing a remedy. Most grievances are resolved at the university level, but if it is not, the union may opt for arbitration.

Arbitration is expensive and sets precedents, so the union is careful about which cases are sent to arbitration: the cases are selected by a statewide Contract Enforcement Committee, which thus gets a panoramic view of how the universities are functioning. And the apparent view is: about half the university administrations are taking advantage of the economic downturn by undermining faculty rights.

"Business is quite brisk," reported the chair of the Contract Enforcement Committee, saying that seven new grievances have been approved for arbitration since summer. Most dramatic are layoffs; for example, Florida State University has laid off about twenty faculty, and the University of Florida went after tenured faculty while planning to hire a hundred new faculty. Meanwhile, several cases are in the on-beyond-arbitration world of Unfair Labor Practice complaints, which are decided by the Public Employees Relations Commission (PERC), who are appointed by the governor.

UFF Executive Director Ed Mitchell said that all this activity was a sign of the times, and the Contract Enforcement Committee expects business to keep booming. UFF statewide President Tom Auxter theorized that a number of presidents and provosts had become enamored of the "CEO model" of university leadership and were trying to assert more authority over members of their university communities. Auxter noted that this "CEO model" has not weathered very well recently. Perhaps the successful collaboration in Tallahassee last spring in saving the universities' bacon – a success we all hope will be replicated this coming spring – suggests a better model for how to do things in the years to come.

Prior to September 24, about 1,200 faculty signed an on-line expression, "In solidarity with students and staff / In defense of public education in California" (see the UC Faculty Walkout page). On September 24, participation ranged from five thousand people rallying in front of UC Berkeley's Sproul Hall to seven hundred at UCLA's Bruin Plaza to twenty at UC's brand new campus at Merced. Faculty participation varied, from carrying on as usual, to handing out syllabi and letting class out early (this was the first day of classes for many on the quarter system) to active participation, e.g., a UC Berkeley classics professor moved his class to a lawn by the picket lines and discussed civil disobedience and Plato's Crito.

It was the tuition hikes, the furlough, and the protests that got the media coverage. The University of California Associated Students (i.e., the student governments) and the University Professional and Technical Employees and ad hoc faculty groups organized the efforts.

Administration responses varied. UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said that, "Students should be upset, and they should be expressing their opinion on the fee increases." UCLA Chancellor Gene Block hid in his office while subordinates greeted students by giving them one of Block's business cards and then slipping away.

The proximate issues were tuition hikes (tuition had just been jacked up ten percent and the regents are proposing to raise it by a third), involuntary furloughs (faculty would be asked to take furloughs on their non-instructional days – which means, of course, that the work that had to be done on those days would done for free), and pay cuts and layoffs.

Part of the problem was UC's opaque finances and recurrent financial scandals – especially executive pay scandals that entertained readers of The San Francisco Chronicle and provoked the legislature into having PricewaterhouseCoopers conduct what turned out to be an embarrassing audit. When the crisis hit, senior professors publicly accused the state administration of squirreling away hundreds of millions of dollars. UC system President Mark Yudof's politically tone-deaf responses – he actually wrote in an op-ed piece that when some students are forced to drop out for financial reasons, classroom crowding will be alleviated – didn't help matters. But when Yudof pointed his finger at the state government, he may have had a point.

A quarter century ago, a sixth of California's state budget went to higher education while 3 % went to the prisons. But as salaries of senior administrators rose at an accelerated rate, those senior administrators warned about the long-term threats posed by new constitutional restrictions on taxation and budgeting. And California's Postsecondary Education Commission proposed the word that not even Governor Ronald Reagan had dared to whisper: tuition.

Undergraduate tuition is now $ 7,788 per year (compared to USF-Tampa's $ 3,917) and Higher Education gets nine percent of the California state budget, as opposed to the prisons' ten: per student funding has fallen by a half in less than two decades. Meanwhile, one of those constitutional restrictions has paralyzed the government: it takes a two-third majority to pass a budget. While a majority of both houses of the legislature would like to raise taxes and allocate money to education, that majority is not large enough to pass the budget the majority proposes. UC administrators currently guess that the system faces a 20 % cut in state funding.

California, the pundits are saying, is ungovernable. They also say that there's no solution to this crisis. What that means is that no one knows what is going to happen. For higher education observers, one of the most interesting questions is what the Academic Senates will do. The Academic Senates had recommended against furloughs or pay cuts for employees making less than $ 40,000 a year, for having some furloughs fall on instructional days, and for full disclosure of the UC system budget. They were ignored by the President and the Regents, and when the Academic Senates stood aside wringing their hands, a substantial fraction of their faculty constituents took matters into their own hands.

Meanwhile, the chapter grievance referred to the 2009 Business Week ratings of undergraduate business programs, which ranked USF's programs 101st in the country. USF was last among the ranked programs in student-faculty ratio, and the student surveys ranked USF 96th in the country for undergraduate business programs. "Why should anyone be surprised that two years after USF doubled the size of many of the business lecture classes, students and Business Week are giving the college a thumbs down?" Dorn asked. "To any administrator who wants to lard up classes with bodies and overload teaching faculty, I have one question: how do students benefit when you exploit faculty?"

He's called Mr. Politician, and for several months, he's been circulating the net, accepting wads of cash, cutting education funding, and blaming teachers for everything. The Florida Education Association's Make Our Schools a Priority campaign has been sending out videos of his latest media events.

Mr. Politician is the reason why the Florida Education Association devotes a lot of time and energy to Tallahassee. That's where the state budget is put together, and that's where the laws are made. So that's where the annual Delegate Assembly often focuses its attention.

Of course, contracts are bargained and enforced throughout the state, and indeed the Delegate Assembly started by enumerating major confrontations where FEA had assisted and supported member locals – one of these being the University of Florida's violation of layoff procedures – but National Education Association president Dennis Van Roekel noted the immediate problem early in his address: next year, all fifty states face budget cuts. Meanwhile, 1.2 million students drop out each year. But Van Roekel was not advocating that we simply react to events; instead, he proposed that we "imagine a different future," and work towards goals of our own.

One goal mentioned frequently was fixing the revenue stream. FEA has long pushed for tax and budget reform, and there are signs of at least verbal support among Florida's movers and shakers (this being the era of global competitiveness, the business community is beginning to recognize the need for a competitive school system). What that brings in the long run depends on transforming verbal support into action in Tallahassee, but for the short run, the FEA has proposed A Penny for Florida's Future, namely an extra penny on the sales tax over three years. This would help schools recover from constricting budgetary problems immediately, while the fact that it's only for three years would help focus attention on a long-term solution to the problem.

In addition, Florida Chief Financial Officer – and gubernatorial candidate – Alex Sink addressed the Assembly. (Her campaign workers distributed signs and bumper stickers, and she has already set up a website.) She described herself growing up in Georgia, watching cars heading towards Florida, which she said she saw as an "idea of opportunity." She described herself as a "math person", saying that mathematics is all about solving problems. But she was also a businesswoman, and said, "We cannot build a vibrant new economy without a strong educational system," and then more pointedly, "Florida needs a leader who knows and sees that it's time to begin investing" in education. FEA has endorsed Sink in the 2010 Democratic primary for governor.

Making education a priority requires drumming up public and political support. For more on the FEA Delegate Assembly, see the meeting page.

That point was emphasized by Bob Chanin, who is retiring as General Counsel to the NEA after half a century of service. His presentation was a variation of his farewell speech at the NEA national Representative Assembly, which is posted on YouTube. At that meeting, Chanin spoke of how he started working with the NEA during a transitional period:

In the early 1960s, "NEA concluded that ... it is not unprofessional, unethical, or immoral for teachers to make a living wage, for teachers to have fringe benefits, and most important, for teachers to have a voice in determining the conditions under which they spend every day of their working lives. NEA recognized that collective bargaining was how to achieve these things, and it accepted the need to change philosophically from whatever it had been until that time, to something called a labor union, whatever that was." And the NEA was incredibly effective: during the mid-1960s, half the states gave teachers the right to collectively bargain, and teacher associations bargained thousands of contracts.

And why is the NEA and its affiliates being targeted? "I will tell you why. It is the price we pay for success. NEA and its affiliates have been singled out because they are the most effective affiliates in the United States." And NEA is such an effective organization because "we have power, and we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us hundreds of millions of dollars in dues each year because they believe that we are the unions that can most effectively represent them. The unions that can protect their rights and advance their interests as education employees."

This speech raised a stir in the blogosphere; apparently what the Cato Institute's Neal McCluskey calls a 'high-brow "professional employee organization" wouldn't talk this way. Well, perhaps it was a little blunt. But with dangerous shortages of teachers with critical skills, high turnover in faculty at schools for lower class children, and about half of all new teachers leaving the profession during their first five years, it's clear that improvements in American education depend on improving the terms and conditions of employment of American teachers.

Compared to a Hollywood agent – who might charge 15 % to bargain and enforce a contract – the 1 % dues deduction isn't bad. In fact, suppose that one year, the union wins a 3.02 % raise rather than a 2 % raise; that means that for the rest of your career at USF, your salary will be 1 % higher than it would have been if the union hadn't won that extra 1.02 %. You could donate that 1 % (tax deductible job expense) that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise and enjoy the benefits of UFF membership on the fruits of that one higher raise. So come and join the movement: it's as easy as following the link to http://faculty.ourusf.org/join-uff/ .

• The November 27 press statement on problems with the proposal, and
• The November 30 press statement on the threat of union-busting, and
• A legislative alert.

The Review also declined support, and Weiner was left to deal with the case herself. In the end, she agreed to purge online postings of all mention of the case. (Students of poetic justice will notice that the case, and the unhappy participant, is immortalized on the University of Oregon's student newspaper website.)

With such lawsuits joining the more familiar discrimination, harassment, and grading cases, faculty may wonder if they should spend a hundred bucks or so on insurance. The American Association of University Professors offers job liability insurance to its members, and AAUP President Cary Nelson told the Chronicle of Higher Education that "Far fewer people carry it than should carry it." While many institutions (like Oregon!) promise to defend faculty, Nelson notes that sometimes (as often is the case in grading disputes – not to mention tenure battles) the administration itself is the opponent.

Fortunately, the United Faculty of Florida maintains a million dollar umbrella to protect UFF members; but this protection applies only if they were UFF members at the time the alleged action took place. Just another perk of membership in a litigious age.