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United Faculty of Florida, Fall 2010

August 26, 2010

WELCOME NEW FACULTY & PROFESSIONALS!

All faculty (except those in the College of Medicine, along with many chairs and directors) and many professionals (including advisors, counselors, and librarians) are members of the "Bargaining Unit", i.e., the people who the United Faculty of Florida (UFF) represents.

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 covering 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 at http://faculty.ourusf.org/join-uff/ ). Membership dues are 1 % of salary, somewhat less than the 10 % to 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. 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 fall schedule of chapter meetings will be set at the Chapter Meeting tomorrow Friday, at noon, in EDU 161 on USF-Tampa, with sandwiches and soda pop provided by the Chapter. Come and check us out.

We also have two websites, one on-campus and one off-campus.

This "UFF Biweekly" is sent out every other week, the day before a chapter meeting. All members of the Bargaining Unit should receive it; if you do not, please contact us.

MARK KLISCH STEPS DOWN AS BARGAINING AND GRIEVANCE CHAIR

Dr. Mark Klisch, a psychologist in the USF-Tampa Counseling Center, is retiring at the end of the fall semester, and has stepped down as chair of the UFF-USF Grievance and Bargaining committees. The Chapter Council has confirmed Sonia Wohlmuth of the World Languages Department at USF-Tampa as incoming Grievance chair and Robert Welker of the School of Accountancy at USF-Tampa as Bargaining chair for the remainder of the 2010-11 term.

The Chapter Council and the Chapter also unanimously resolved: "That the USF Chapter of the United Faculty of Florida expresses its profound gratitude to Dr. Mark Klisch for his years of exemplary service to the United Faculty of Florida, to the University of South Florida, to his colleagues, to students, and to the community."

Dr. Klisch served as UFF-USF Grievance Chair for more than a decade, and represented the union for a broad range of grievances on behalf of individuals at USF and on behalf of the Chapter, on issues ranging from academic freedom to annual leave. "Mark is skilled at presenting a grievance in writing and in a formal hearing," said Chapter President Sherman Dorn. "A good deal of what Mark accomplished over the years was due to his people skills, from helping aggrieved colleagues figure out what concerns are grievable to persuading management that it's in everyone's interest to address a grievance immediately."

"Mark was well-known around the entire state as a grievance chair with a level head and sure judgment," said United Faculty of Florida statewide President Tom Auxter. "Faculty and professional employees at USF have been very lucky to have Mark's services as grievance chair for more than a decade. It's now time for others to step up to the plate."

Incoming Grievance and Bargaining Chairs Sonia Wohlmuth and Robert Welker are looking for UFF members interested in the grievance and bargaining process, for both committees are seeking new members. "A chapter's ability to enforce the contract depends on many members' knowing how to analyze and prepare grievances," remarked Wohlmuth, and Welker affirmed that "The bargaining committee not only needs many eyes, but it needs to be broad-based so that the union's bargaining position represents faculty across the disciplines and throughout the system." The UFF will run grievance and bargaining training sessions on September 24 & 25 at the Wyndham Westshore in Tampa, and any UFF member interested in participating is encouraged to contact Chapter President Sherman Dorn, or Sonia Wohlmuth for grievance training or Robert Welker for bargaining training.

Any UFF member seeking help with a possible grievance is encouraged to contact Dr. Wohlmuth, phone (813) 974-2231, or office CPR 449 in USF-Tampa.

UNIONS CAN HELP WITH LAYOFFS

Unions can often help employees in trouble. Unions enforce the contracts that they bargain, and enforcement often consists of defending the rights of employees whose contractual rights have been violated. That includes layoffs.

Layoffs are a central issue in any labor contract. At one extreme, if an institution faces a financial emergency, it may need the ability to jettison some operations – and hence some people – in order to survive. At the other, a layoff situation can provide cover for management to get rid of employees management happens to dislike. As a result, unions and managements tend to bargain contracts that will provide management the flexibility it needs in an emergency while limiting the caprice it can exercise in the process – and requiring that the administration provide reasonable assistance to laid off employees.

The power of contractual language was seen recently at the University of Florida, where Assistant Professor David Therriault of the Department of Educational Psychology was laid off last year. In May 2009, UF President Bernie Machen announced anticipated layoffs of nine faculty through merging, reorganizing, and eliminating programs – including the educational psychology program.

The contract required that the administration attempt to find laid off employees alternative positions within the university. Despite Therriault's history of scholarship and pursuing external funding, the administration did not make much effort to keep Therriault. In addition, Therriault was up for tenure, and the administration deemed him ineligible to apply.

Meanwhile, the UF College of Education continued hiring new faculty.

The proceedings took nearly a year (grievances go through a sequence of "steps" before reaching an external arbitrator), but last June, an external arbitrator ruled that the administration must give Therriault another year (he was employed while the grievance went through the system) and a chance at tenure.

What persuaded the arbitrator was UFF's argument that the administration should have made a more serious effort to find Therriault an alternative position – as required by the contract. The administration's argument that Therriault's tenure application had been rendered moot was waved away, and Therriault will have a shot at tenure.

Meanwhile, Therriault and two colleagues were awarded a half million dollar grant from the NSF.

This is not the only layoff case that has bitten the UF administration (they attempted to create a one-person Vietnamese language unit and then treat that as a layoff unit), and it is not clear how a very small number of layoffs, some of them bungled, have helped the university.

But one important lesson is that an official notice is not fate: often, there are options, and often, the union can help. But the United Faculty of Florida will not represent an employee who was not a member of the union (at the time of the violation), so join today by filling out and sending in the form posted at http://faculty.ourusf.org/join-uff/.

September 9, 2010

ABOUT USF RAISES

Compensation is a critical issue in any contract and is a mandatory topic of collective bargaining. At USF, in the UFF Bargaining Unit, compensation usually consists of "base salary" and various bonuses. The UFF Bargaining Team focuses on base salary because a bonus is a one-time thing, while increments on base salary last forever.

Typically, raises are of the following kinds:

Historically, faculty surveys have indicated strong support for Fixed, Merit, and Compression & Inversion raises, and considerable skepticism of Discretionary raises. That is why the UFF Bargaining Team has pushed in that direction. The BOT has pressed for Discretion.

Of course, a lot depends on starting salary: if Professor Smith is hired at twice the starting salary as Professor Jones, and they receive the same percentage raises, then twenty years later, Professor Smith will still have twice the salary as Professor Jones.

To sum up, the salary any USF employee has is the result of a determination of starting salary, and the subsequent raises.

USF SALARIES

For context, we observe that according to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory employees (nonfarm) was $ 19.04 in July. An employee paid that amount for forty hours a week for 52 weeks would earn about $ 39,600.

Education makes a difference: in 2009, the Department of Labor reported that the median weekly earnings of an employee with a doctoral degree was $ 1,532 (which would produce an annual income of about $ 79,700 assuming vacations were paid). Still assuming paid vacations, a "professional degree" would bring in about $ 79,500; a Master's $ 65,400, and a Bachelor's $ 53,300.

Let's refine the context a bit. The Chronicle of Higher Education's Almanac reports that the average pay of a full-time professor at a public doctoral institution was: for full professors $ 112,569; associate professors $ 78,375; and for assistant professors $ 66,754. (The Chronicle did not report on any other categories of employees, although the Chronicle did report that among public research institutions, 49 % were tenured or tenure-track full-time employees, while 27 % were non-tenure-track full-time.) Restricting attention to Florida, at public doctoral institutions, the average pay for full professors was $ 106,877, for associate professors $ 74,042, and for assistant professors $ 65,740.

The American Association of University Professors conducts a similar annual survey, which is posted on-line. It reported that for the last academic year, at public doctoral institutions, the average salary of a professor was $ 116,750; of an associate professor $ 80,463; of an assistant professor $ 68,718; of an "instructor" $ 45,805; of a "lecturer" $ 52,529; of an "unranked" faculty member $ 56,254. Clearly the two surveys employed different methodologies and hence got slightly different numbers, but we can at least get a ballpark idea of what the salaries are.

Now that we know what national and state figures look like, let's turn to USF. To keep from mixing apples and oranges, we concentrate on base salaries for full-time faculty with nine-month contracts. From August 2010, the figures are: $ 101,593 for a full professor, $ 74,941 for an associate professor, $ 66,305 for an assistant professor, and $ 53,132 for an instructor.

There are several caveats. For example, salaries vary, with some people earning below and some above; it may be more useful to get the range of salaries. The minimum and maximum salaries are interesting, but they are usually eccentric; one can get a better impression of the range of most salaries by looking at the lower quartile (the 25th percentile), the median (the 50th percentile), and the upper quartile (the 75th percentile). Here goes:

For professors, the minimum was $ 43,515, the lower quartile was $ 84,391, the median was $ 98,697, the upper quartile was $ 110,961, and the maximum was $ 197,344. (For Distinguished Professors, salaries ranged from $ 90,067 to $ 231,734, with a median of $ 125,728.)

For associate professors, the minimum was $ 30,908, the lower quartile was $ 64,027, the median was $ 69,510, the upper quartile was $ 77,911, and the maximum was $ 177,010.

For assistant professors, the minimum was $ 36,280, the lower quartile was $ 56,100, the median was $ 60,000, the upper quartile was $ 70,000, and the maximum was $ 155,000.

For instructors, the minimum was $ 28,860, the lower quartile was $ 43,080, the median was $ 48,938, the upper quartile was $ 62,947, and the maximum was $ 90,000.

We will continue our exploration in the next issue.

September 23, 2010

DEFEND YOUR RIGHTS BY FILING FOR TRAVEL!

Should a faculty member or professional employee file documentation of travel if the travel is not going to be reimbursed? YES, ALWAYS INFORM YOUR SUPERVISOR OR CHAIR -- IN WRITING -- OF JOB-RELATED TRAVEL. There are several reasons to do so:

For all of these reasons, it is important that you document travel in advance.

USF SALARIES II: SALARIES ACROSS CAMPUSES

At the last report to UFF, there were 1,649 employees in the UFF-USF Bargaining Unit, and determining "average" salaries is a complicated business. To avoid adding apples and oranges, we do not look at part-time people, and we separate 9-month and 12-month employees. In the previous Biweekly, we included people on various kinds of leaves or sabbaticals, but this time we do not; including employees on leave compromises uniformity while excluding them introduces bias, so there are complications either way.

Since most employees in the Bargaining Unit are on nine-month contracts, we start with them. But first, a word about the mischievous word "average". This usually means either the "median" (half the people are above the median, half are below) or the "mean" (take all the money and divide by the number of people). In many distributions (including the standard normal/ Gaussian/ bell curve), the mean and the median are close together; not so in distribution of wealth. For example, if nine people have $ 1 each and one has $ 10, the median will be $ 1 and the mean will be $ 2: the mean will tend to float above the median when a few people get a lot more than everybody else.

Here are the means and medians for instructors, assistant professors, associate professors, and professors (provided that there are more than just a handful in those positions) in the colleges at USF-Tampa. Here we divide the College of Arts and Sciences into its three schools. Here are employees on 9-month contracts:

CAS Humanities:

  • For instructors, median = $ 40000 and mean = $ 40400.
  • For assistant professors, median = $ 56076 and mean = $ 55871.
  • For associate professors, median = $ 65975 and mean = $ 67282.
  • For professors, median = $ 87063 and mean = $ 88445.
CAS Natural Sciences and Mathematics:
  • For instructors, median = $ 47567 and mean = $ 47887.
  • For assistant professors, median = $ 65000 and mean = $ 64935.
  • For associate professors, median = $ 68221 and mean = $ 68383.
  • For professors, median = $ 97199 and mean = $ 97633.
CAS Social Sciences:
  • For instructors, median = $ 49396 and mean = $ 50877.
  • For assistant professors, median = $ 58861 and mean = $ 62100.
  • For associate professors, median = $ 70273 and mean = $ 71115.
  • For professors, median = $ 101381 and mean = $ 103499.
The College of Behavioral and Communication Science:
  • For assistant professors, median = $ 65000 and mean = $ 61841.
  • For associate professors, median = $ 68776 and mean =$ 69967.
  • For professors, median = $ 99511 and mean = $ 99699.
The College of Business:
  • For instructors, median = $ 74957 and mean = $ 69824.
  • For assistant professors, median = $ 149084 and mean = $ 135438.
  • For associate professors, median = $ 121999 and mean = $ 122620.
  • For professors, median = $ 126989 and mean = $ 132425.
The College of Education:
  • For instructors, median = $ 46464 and mean = $ 46536.
  • For assistant professors, median = $ 58070 and mean = $ 58854.
  • For associate professors, median = $ 65588 and mean = $ 68450.
  • For professors, median = $ 87180 and mean = $ 89374.
The College of Engineering:
  • For assistant professors, median = $ 79352 and mean = $ 81084.
  • For associate professors, median = $ 92137 and mean = $ 91984.
  • For professors, median = $ 107753 and mean = $ 117365.
The College of the Arts:
  • For assistant professors, median = $ 56000 and mean = $ 53085.
  • For associate professors, median = $ 64997 and mean = $ 65242.
  • For professors, median = $ 90882 and mean = $ 90028.
The other regional campuses are relatively small, so we put them in single units. Some have so few people in certain positions that we omit them as statistically meaningless.

Polytechnic:

  • For instructors, median = $ 63264 and mean = $ 62552.
  • For assistant professors, median = $ 65000 and mean = $ 72924.
Saint Petersburg:
  • For instructors, median = $ 55431 and mean = $ 56968.
  • For assistant professors, median = $ 54290 and mean = $ 58352.
  • For associate professors, median = $ 67092 and mean = $ 77016.
  • For professors, median = $ 108442 and mean = $ 112513.
Sarasota/Manatee:
  • For instructors, median = $ 53212 and mean = $ 57658.
  • For assistant professors, median = $ 58934 and mean = $ 68544.
  • For associate professors, median = $ 70118 and mean = $ 88331.
We will continue our survey in succeeding issues of the Biweekly.

September 25, 2010

UFF AND USF TRUSTEES SIGN FINAL LANGUAGE ON TENTATIVE AGREEMENT; RATIFICATION VOTE ONLINE THROUGH OCTOBER 5

Yesterday morning, representatives of the United Faculty of Florida and the USF Board of Trustees signed final language on the last six open articles of a complete collective bargaining agreement. If ratified, the tentative agreement will protect the existing layoff article in the contract, which has been used in grievance arbitrations across the state to protect jobs at other Florida universities. UFF made concessions on several issues and as a result, the contractual language on layoffs will remain unchanged for three years if the contract is ratified.

All PDF files of the tentative agreement are posted on-line -- and the agreement includes the following key provisions:

  • Merit-pool raises of 1.5% for 2010-11 and 2.0% for 2011-12, eligibility including faculty and professional employees with at least 3.0 on the last annual evaluation, and for 1.0% in administrative discretionary increase authority for each year of the contract, with discretionary authority sunsetting on August 6, 2013.
  • Domestic partner health insurance stipend program (implemented earlier through a Memorandum of Understanding).
  • An increase in the ratio of one-semester full-pay sabbatical slots to eligible tenured faculty from 1 in 30 to 1 in 25.
  • Continuation of 9% base raise and a doubling of the flat amount of base raises for promotions (on top of 9%) for tenured and library faculty.
  • Setting promotion raises for instructor promotions at 6%, retroactive to August 9, 2010, for instructors who have already received notice of promotions.
  • No change in layoff language providing protections for tenured faculty and employees with at least five years of continuous service.
  • Continuation of supplemental summer teaching pay, with a cap of $12,500 for a three-hour course (prorated by course hours). The cap sunsets on August 6, 2013.
  • The discipline article adds a clause clarifying what job abandonment consists of in the context of summer classes.
  • A significant reduction of release units for chapter operations. Chapter President Sherman Dorn and statewide UFF Executive Director Ed Mitchell, who represented the chapter in the formal impasse process, strongly recommend approval of the tentative agreement. "We made some concessions to preserve the existing layoff article," explained Dorn. "This is an imperfect contract, but it has important gains in several areas, and it avoids the imposition of a significant erosion of rights." A Q&A on the contract appears below.

    The ratification vote for all faculty and professional employees in the bargaining unit is now open at http://votingplace.net/uffusf until the end of business Tuesday, October 5, using the codes distributed for the prior ratification election in early September. In-unit faculty and professional employees who do not currently have those codes should request another copy be printed and sent by campus mail by completing a short form at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/H62XZB3 by the end of business on Tuesday, September 28, 2010. (That allows time for codes to be distributed before the end of ratification. Requests made after Tuesday, September 28 may be significantly more difficult to satisfy.)

    Questions and Answers on the Tentative Agreement

    Q.IF THE CONTRACT IS RATIFIED, WHEN WILL FACULTY AND PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYEES RECEIVE RAISES?
    A.The tentative agreement requires that 2010 raises be implemented within six weeks of the Trustees' ratification of the agreement (which would come after UFF bargaining unit ratification). Administrators have told chapter leaders that they expect raises to be implemented well before the six-week deadline. If ratified, the collective bargaining agreement would require that 2011 raises be implemented on August 9, 2011.

    Q.WHY DOES THE TENTATIVE AGREEMENT GIVE LOWER RAISES FOR PROMOTED INSTRUCTORS THAN FOR TENURE-STREAM AND LIBRARY FACULTY?
    A.UFF's consistent position has been that instructors who have been promoted should receive 9% raises to base. That is both fair to the lower-paid instructors and in the public interest given the disproportionate responsibility of instructors for undergraduate education. The Board refused to meet us on this issue, and if the impasse process had concluded, we anticipated that the Trustees' bargaining committee would meet as the legislative body and impose 6% promotion raises. It is a partial but insufficient compensation for that concession that the guaranteed second year of a 2.0% merit-raise pool would likely give many instructors slightly more than a 2.0% raise. In addition, the discretionary raise authority given the administration would allow but not require the administration to give promoted instructors more than the minimum 6% raise.

    Q.IF THE CONTRACT IS NOT RATIFIED, WHAT HAPPENS?
    A.UFF Executive Director Ed Mitchell says that if the bargaining unit fails to ratify the tentative agreement, UFF and the Board of Trustees returns to the impasse process. There would be no raises until the end of the impasse process, and the Trustees' bargaining committee would likely impose contract language that removes a number of rights that the tentative agreement preserves, including layoff language that would undermine the value of tenure.

    Q.HOW CAN I GET ANSWERS TO OTHER QUESTIONS I HAVE?
    A.Email Chapter President Sherman Dorn (sherman.dorn@gmail.com), or ask a question anonymously at http://formspring.me/uffusf -- additional questions and answers will be posted at the union chapter blog at faculy.ourusf.org

    October 7, 2010

    UFF-USF EMPLOYEES VOTE TO RATIFY 2010 – 2013 CONTRACT

    From September 24 to October 5, employees of the UFF-USF Bargaining Unit voted in favor of ratifying the Collective Bargaining Agreement – the contract – negotiated by the United Faculty of Florida and the USF Board of Trustees; 96.7 % of those casting ballots voted in favor of ratification. The leading features of the new contract are:

    • It is still about a hundred pages long, and applies to all employees in the Bargaining Unit.
    • There are no changes in 23 of the 29 articles. In particular, there is no change in Article 13 on Layoffs and Recall. Readers will remember that Article 13 was the initial and central article in dispute. Several other Florida universities have attempted to target specific individuals for layoff, and UFF those layoffs. UFF is winning so far (at great legal expense – many thanks to the Florida Education Association for providing the lawyers and picking up much of the tab), and UFF is winning when the contracts involve the same layoff language that we were defending in these negotiations. The USF Board of Trustees (BOT) proposed new language for Article 13, but in the end, Article 13 goes into the new contract unchanged. Article 13 does NOT bar layoffs, but it does provide some protections and restricts the administration's discretion in choosing who to lay off.
    • The promotion track for instructors was funded and instructors will receive 6 % promotional raises. Readers will recall that UFF had fought for instructor track promotions for many years, and that the UFF and BOT Chief Negotiators had tentatively agreed to the track itself on February 19, as a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that UFF-USF employees and the BOT then ratified. After the MOU was ratified, the issue remaining was the amount of the raise itself. The default language in the 2008 -2009 contract set raises at 9 %, and UFF publicly hoped to win instructor raises at that level. But that is not how it came out, and the contract just ratified set that raise at 6 % of base salary. For other promotions, librarians and tenured/tenure track faculty get 9 % raise plus a bump for promotion.
    • The other raises were merit raises of 1.5 % for 2010 – 2011, 2.0 % for 2011 – 2012, and 0 % for 2012 – 2013. In addition, the BOT has the authority to make discretionary raises of up to 1 % of the salary base for each of those three years. Summer salaries are paid at the same rate per course hour as during the year, but capped at $ 4,167 per course hour.
    • Over years of bargaining, the United Faculty of Florida has won releases (similar to the administrative releases assigned to chairs, directors, etc.) for some union volunteers to conduct labor-intensive operations of the union, like processing grievances, conducting bargaining, administration and communication (like this e-newsletter), and membership. BOT Chief Negotiator John Dickinson told UFF that the BOT needed a "symbolic gesture" of union austerity in these hard economic times, in the form of a cut in releases. Hence the 46 % reduction in releases; UFF will make the necessary adjustments during the life of this contract – although the cut does make volunteers even more welcome.
    The CBA will come into effect once the Board of Trustees votes in favor of ratification (they are scheduled to vote TODAY), and will remain in effect until August 6, 2013. The new contract is posted
    on-line as separate articles.

    USF STAFF VOTE TO RATIFY 2010 – 2011 CONTRACT

    While UFF-USF employees were voting on a new contract, so were staff. USF staff are represented by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). USF Staff have just ratified a contract that will last one year, and has a 1.5 % base salary raise structured in a similar way to UFF-USF employees' merit raises. This is the first raise coming from the university in many years for a group of employees that include people on food stamps.

    Readers will recall that during the last academic year, bargaining with AFSCME went into impasse, and thus before a Special Magistrate; although AFSCME accepted the recommendations of the Special Magistrate, the BOT did not, and took advantage of (their interpretation of) Florida labor law to impose their own language on the contract (see the Biweekly article), an action with long-term consequences that are still playing out. We hope that this new contract will be a step in the right direction.

    This contract is on today's BOT agenda, posted on-line. Also on the agenda is a new contract with USF graduate students (who are represented by the Graduate Assistants United (GAU) chapter of UFF); this contract provides increased health insurance coverage ($ 1,600 per year for a graduate assistant on a half-time assignment). And a "reopener" – i.e., newly bargained articles in a standing contract – with USF police (who are represented by the Police Benevolent Association) that provides a wage increase based on a pay-for-performance program.

    UFF SENATE MEETING, PART I: THE FALL ELECTION

    The UFF Senate is the primary policy-making body of the United Faculty of Florida, and it meets twice a year in central Florida to hear reports and make plans. It met during the September 25, 26 weekend, and the major topic was the upcoming election. Although this is a midterm election, FEA Public Policy Advocate Pat Dix told the UFF Senate that "This is one of the most crucial election cycles of our time."

    (And people are saying this in other states: one vice president at "a university in the Midwest" wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education that, "Many pro-education senators, representatives, and governors are expected to go down in defeat," and then asked, "So now, in the final days of the campaign, what should we do?")

    Actually, many of these races are quite close, and the United Faculty of Florida is encouraging members, supporters, friends, acquaintances, and bystanders to get involved (and as USF Associate Vice President for Government Relations Kathleen Betancourt recently advised, employees have the right to get involved as long as they are acting as individuals and not as state employees, e.g., not politicking in state buildings or with state equipment). In particular, UFF (statewide) Executive Director Ed Mitchell advised using mail ballots if that would make sure that one votes: "This election is absolutely critical to public education, and everyone in public education should make sure to vote."

    The primary election issues addressed at the meeting were:

    Meanwhile, UFF-USF has been working locally (off-campus, of course). At one UFF meeting, Florida House District 60 candidate Russ Patterson dropped in (the FEA has endorsed him). UFF members discussed the connection between this election and the future of Florida's economy, and Patterson said that "Alex Sink will lead Florida into the Twenty-first century, protecting our environment and improving our education so that we have Twenty-first century jobs."

    October 21, 2010

    UFF SENATE MEETING II: ROUGH WEATHER AHEAD

    The primary policy making body of the United Faculty of Florida is the UFF Senate, which meets twice a year to hear reports and make plans. As reported in Part I of the UFF Senate meeting report, the Sept. 25, 26 meeting was dominated by election concerns. But facing a long period of economic rough weather, much of the meeting was dedicated to facing hard times.

    USF is one of the ten universities with faculty and professionals represented by UFF. UFF also represents faculty and professionals from twelve colleges, and graduate assistants from four universities, including USF.

    The meeting was preceded by workshops on bargaining and, since administrations and boards of trustees have been known to violate contracts (!), workshops on the grievance process, on arbitration of grievances, and on "unfair labor practice" proceedings. (These proceedings are expensive, and UFF will only represent dues-paying UFF members.)

    UFF Executive Director Ed Mitchell informed the Senate that the number of arbitrations has doubled over the last year. Fortunately, UFF is backed by its affiliates (like the Florida Education Association), which have been providing the lawyers and paying many of the bills. (All UFF members are members of the FEA, which represents K-20 teachers across the state, and dues money pays the legal costs.) Times getting hard, UFF does not expect the tide to recede anytime soon, and some problems are a bit surprising (one of the chapters representing graduate assistants is having difficulties with graduate assistants not receiving their paychecks on time, or having "weird" deductions on their paystubs).

    Contract violations are not the only problem: there are also boards of trustees. A number of institutions are at bargaining impasse, and while impasse is supposed to produce a recommended compromise by a neutral third party (a "special magistrate"), a board can reject the recommendation and then impose its own language. This is an extremely tricky process – there are several laws that boards can wind up violating – and it creates a spectacle. Nevertheless, there are several rogue boards in the state – including one at a college that has gone through three impasses in three years and whose board has just imposed language that, among other things, eliminates some grievance rules, some privacy of personnel files, and some tenure protections.

    There was a discussion of the apparent illegality of an unelected board imposing its own language in impasse, but fixing case or state law would be complex and require not only years but also cooperative judges and/or legislators. For the short run, UFF Executive Director Mitchell focused on the trustees themselves, claiming that trustees who would like reappointment have to be careful about pleasing, or at least not displeasing, whomever appoints trustees.

    The appointment of trustees brought the discussion back to the fall elections. For example, the state constitution mandates that each university board of trustees have thirteen members, of which five are appointed by the governor and six by the State University System Board of Governors. And fourteen of the seventeen members of that Board of Governors are appointed by the governor.

    UFF USF Chapter President Sherman Dorn said, "UFF supports Alex Sink largely because she will be a much better governor than Rick Scott in many ways. But we also support her because of the appointment power of governors; she was a trustee at Wake Forest University and understands the proper role of governance boards. I have told friends that Rick Scott has a history of mismanagement that may extend to how he appoints individuals to the Board of Governors and Boards of Trustees. I believe Alex will make sensible appointments to the Board of Governors and Boards of Trustees." The FEA has endorsed Alex Sink.

    USF SALARIES III: GENDER, ETHNICITY, AND SENIORITY

    Every year, the Chronicle of Higher Education issues an Almanac of vital statistics in higher education, while the American Association of University Professors issues an annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession. (Both surveys were nationwide, but with different methodologies, and hence different numbers.) One issue that is touched upon in these two surveys but not explored very deeply is the gender and ethnicity of the faculty at rank.

    For example, the 2010 Almanac reported that the proportion of faculty at rank were:

    • For instructors, 46 % were male, 78 % were White, 5.3 % were Asian, 7.5 % were Black, 5.9 % were Hispanic, the rest other or unknown.
    • For assistant professors, 53 % were male, 71 % were White, 10.5 % were Asian, 6.5 % were Black, 3.8 % were Hispanic, the rest other or unknown.
    • For associate professors, 60 % were male, 81 % were White, 7.8 % were Asian, 5.5 % were Black, 3.3 % were Hispanic, the rest other or unknown.
    • For full professors, 74 % were male, 86 % were White, 7.1 % were Asian, 3.4 % were Black, 2.4 % were Hispanic, the rest other or unknown.
    According to the AAUP's report, in public doctoral institutions, the instructors are about 40 % male, the assistant professors about 54 % male, the associate professors about 61 % male, and the full professors about 78 % male.

    Neither report went into salaries by gender or ethnicity.

    Looking at fulltime 9-month faculty in the UFF USF bargaining unit, as of August:

    • 45 % of the instructors are male, with the mean male salary being $ 56,381as opposed to the mean female salary of $ 50,145. 82 % are White (mean salary $ 52,982), 5.5 % Asian/Pacific (mean salary $ 63,130), 4.9 % Black/African American (mean salary $ 48,175), and 4.3 % Hispanic/Latino (mean salary $ 51,193).
    • 52 % of the assistant professors are male, with the mean male salary being $ 68,336 as opposed to the mean female salary of $ 63,822. 64 % are White (mean salary $ 65,408), 18 % Asian/Pacific (mean salary $ 70,012), 7 % Black/African American (mean salary $ 66,184), and 6.1 % Hispanic/Latino (mean salary $ 66,179).
    • 57 % of the associate professors are male, with the mean male salary being $ 78,432 as opposed to the mean female salary of $ 70,329. 77 % are White (mean salary $ 73,272), 8.7 % Asian/Pacific (mean salary $ 85,356), 7.1 % Black/African American (mean salary $ 80,578), and 6.4 % Hispanic/Latino (mean salary $ 70,538).
    • 76 % of the full professors are male, with the mean male salary being $ 104,464 as opposed to the mean female salary of $ 92,346. 79 % are white (mean salary $ 100,701), 12 % Asian/Pacific (mean salary $ 108,756), 2.4 % Black (mean salary $ 98,518), and 4.4% Hispanic/Latino (mean salary $ 106,470).
    One issue that was not addressed in either the AAUP survey or the Almanac is age. We cannot address that issue directly, but we can look at seniority. One of the more intractable issues at USF arises from recurrent anecdotes that salaries of longstanding faculty do not appear to be keeping up with the market, or with the salaries of new hires. This is a complex issue, and it is usually addressed by comparing salaries of individual faculty with the observed salaries of faculty at rank and discipline in surveys such as the annual Oklahoma State University Faculty Salary Survey. For a more global picture, we can ask (of a moderately uniform population) if salaries of faculty at a certain terminal position decline with the amount of time said faculty have been at rank at USF.

    Consider full professors who achieved their rank between 1990 and 2005 inclusive. We compute the current mean base salary of in-unit professors achieving rank in 1990 ($ 93,269), in 1991 ($ 123,202), in 1992 ($ 91,321) and so on up to 2005 ($ 113,702), and stop there as in 2006 we start seeing full professors sans tenure (!). We compute a linear regression on current mean base salary versus years since promotion, and get a line approximating mean salary per years of service, and this line corresponds to a decrease of $ 596 in current annual salary per year since promotion. It appears that on average, the longer a full professor has been at rank at USF, the less the professor earns.

    November 4, 2010

    THE FLORIDA EDUCATION ASSOCIATION MEETING, PART I

    The United Faculty of Florida is not alone; it is a union "local" in the Florida Education Association (FEA), with about 140,000 members from educational institutions of all levels, from kindergartens to colleges and universities. It is the largest union in Florida.

    The primary policy-making body of the FEA is the Delegate Assembly, which meets annually. This year, 734 delegates (and 102 guests) met from Thursday, October 28, to Saturday, October 30, and its theme was "Everyday Heroes" – a take on the title of the recent film "Waiting for Superman". Also on the agenda was the election, housekeeping issues (from bylaws to the budget), and plans for spring (more on the budget, and plans for spring, in the November 16 Biweekly).

    While there was little discussion of the film "Waiting for Superman" itself, it cast a long shadow. Distributed by Participant Media, a film and TV company that handled such films as An Inconvenient Truth, Charlie Wilson's War, Fast Food Nation, and Syriana, the film "... [embraces] the belief that good teachers make good schools, ... [and] offers hope by exploring innovative approaches taken by education reformers and charter schools that have—in reshaping the culture—refused to leave their students behind" (see the film's website).

    The controversy over the film centers on the "innovative approaches" featured, in particular, on the advancement of a business model much favored by fly-by-night companies. If school resources, student home life and background, external political or commercial interference, chemical pollution, etc., have little impact on student learning and performance, and if teaching is a job that can be performed by semiskilled workers, then one way to improve educational performance is to replace unsatisfactory teachers (unsatisfactory teachers being readily identifiable).

    Of course, these "education reformers" are making a stack of assumptions, and some of them have financial conflicts of interest in doing so. FEA invited two keynote speakers to the Assembly, and one of them is one of the film's most prominent critics. Diane Ravitch was Assistant Secretary of Education from 1991 to 1993 (during the first Bush administration), and was appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board (which oversees federal testing) by President Clinton's Secretary of Education. She was an early supporter of the No Child Left Behind Act pushed by the second Bush administration, but she has become disenchanted with the Bush II approach. She presented her views during her address.

    Ravitch started by noting that one group of reformers – whom she described as "corporate reformers" – claim that public education is broken beyond repair, so it must be replaced by a privatized system in which teachers serve at the pleasure of the companies that run (or own!) the schools. She focused on several aspects of the corporate reform argument. For example:

    • There are approximately four million teachers in the United States, and about nine percent leave teaching annually. Firing the bottom ten percent annually would increase the recruitment demand to about half the total number of U.S. college graduates per year: the proposal of the corporate reformers is logistically impossible.
    • Contrary to the anecdotal evidence presented in Waiting For Superman, charter schools do not, on average, outperform public schools. (Ravitch presented evidence that the opposite was true.) One charter school featured in the movie actually has extraordinary financial resources, which led Ravitch to claim that the resources available to a school makes a critical difference in what that school can do for its students.
    The other keynote speaker was Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, who told the FEA that "It is time to put the interests of children first." Like Ravitch, Morial claimed that school performance depends substantially on the resources available. "I am bothered by the rhetoric in this country that demonizes teachers."

    Since that rhetoric has entered the political arena, and thus has substantial effects on teachers and the educational system, delegates devoted much of their time to making plans for dealing with the political situation. We will turn to this in the next Biweekly.

    USF SALARIES IV: YEAR-ROUND UFF EMPLOYEES

    The University of South Florida is open through much of the year, and about a third of the UFF USF Bargaining Unit employees are employed through the entire year. Many have fixed hours, which makes vacations, sick leave, and last minute developments into more than an unofficial shuffle in scheduling.

    Some of these employees have familiar titles. As of August, there were 59 assistant professors, 51 associate professors, and 56 professors, as well as 104 instructors, instructional specialists, and instructional librarians, all working full time, year round. There were 41 other librarians, 76 "assistants in" [fill in department name] and 30 "associates in" [fill in department name]. There are also coordinators, counselor/ advisors, program directors, psychologists, research assistants, and a few minor titles as well.

    When looking at the salaries of year-round employees, one must remember that this is their entire salary: a year-round employee is usually not in a position to supplement their income with summer employment or extra funding – although a number of the assistants and associates live (or die) by soft money. Anyway, here are some mean (base rate) salaries (as of August):

    • Assistants in [fill in department name]: $ 69,680.
    • Assistant Librarians: $ 49,388
    • Assistant Professors: $ 76,735
    • Associate Professors: $ 93,853
    • Associates in [fill in department name]: $ 77,781
    • Associate Librarians: $ 55,627
    • Coordinators: $ 56,233
    • Counselor/Advisors: $ 48,882
    • Instructors, Instructors I, Instructional Specialists, Instructor Librarians: $ 58,497
    • Librarians: $ 70,004
    • Professors: $ 134,264
    • Program Directors: $ 77,511
    • Psychologists: $ 67,051
    • Research Assistants: $ 65,326
    This concludes our four-part series on the salaries of the employees of the UFF USF Bargaining Unit. But no report would be complete without at least a glance at the Administration. After all, the annual Almanac of the Chronicle of Higher Education reported median salaries of senior administrators (at doctoral institutions) during the 2009 – 2010 academic year: $ 437,500 for a Chief Executive of a system, compared to $ 375,000 for a Chief Executive of a single institution (President Genshaft earns $ 395,000).

    The Chronicle also listed 26 positions (some of which USF has), with median salaries ranging from $ 109,390 (for the Chief Admissions Officer) to $ 480,468 (for the Chief Administrator of the Medical Center / Hospital). Deans ranged from $ 128,391 (for a Dean of Mathematics) to $ 410,961 (for a Dean of Medicine), or, more realistically, from $ 153,734 (for a Dean of Continuing Education) to $ 285,000 (for a Dean of Public Health).

    Despite pages of numbers, one point that the Chronicle fails to make is that there are a lot of "administrators". As of September, USF listed 2,058 "administrators" – and that being an incomplete list, as we will see. Compensation is more complex, making it more difficult to make comparisons (66 of the administrators on 1.00 FTE have $ 0 as their base salary). But in general, the median base salary was $ 51,500, with 15 % making at least $ 80,000 (in base salary). These are people who work to keep the university going, and being classified as management, do not have the protection of a union.

    But these are not the people we normally think of as Administrators. In the organizational chart posted on the USF site, we see twenty senior administrators for the USF system – excluding USF BOT Chair John Ramil.

    Salaries of senior administrators are harder to come by. Some are listed as faculty, some as administrators, and some apparently elsewhere. The most comprehensive list is probably the on-line listing provided by The Tampa Tribune, but we've found at least two missing names (and one error), so when we cross-check and merge lists, we get a sort of Frankenstein list, which lists only nineteen salaries (one senior administrator not appearing on any of the lists). Among those nineteen of determinable salaries, Dr. Frankenstein reports that the salaries ranged from $ 110,000 to $ 525,000, with a median of $ 192,074 and a mean of $ 243,376.

    We were able to compile a similar list of salaries of twelve of the thirteen deans at USF Tampa (the Dean of Medicine not being among the thirteen), and of those twelve, salaries ranged from $ 138,499 to $ 285,469, with a median of $ 212,508 and a mean of $ 211,632.

    November 16, 2010

    FACULTY WIN IN FSU LAYOFF CASE

    Twenty professors at Florida State University won back their jobs after an arbitrator ordered FSU to rescind layoffs of tenured faculty. The November 5 ruling by Stanley H. Sergent, an attorney from Sarasota, came in response to legal actions filed by the United Faculty of Florida (UFF) claiming the layoffs violated the union contract and should be reversed.

    The arbitrator's remedy for violating faculty rights is unambiguous: "The University is directed to rescind the layoffs of all tenured faculty grievants and permit them to continue in their positions as if no layoff occurred…. Should any grievant … accept alternative employment in contemplation of the layoff becoming effective …, that grievant will have the choice of resuming employment at FSU at the next appropriate time, such as the next term or academic year."

    The FSU administration argued that the layoffs were necessary responses to budget cuts. But the arbitrator found that the administration's method violated the contract. While the administration was supposed to designate organizational "layoff units" and then lay off faculty (within parameters set by the contract) within the layoff units, the arbitrator found that the administration exceeded its authority in by eliminating and recombining programs in "arbitrary and unreasonable" ways that show "blatant manipulation of the layoff units." The process "appears to have been a subterfuge to avoid having to comply with Article 13.2(a), which requires that tenured faculty be laid off last." The arbitrator also pointed out several cases in which he refutes claims made by administrators about how they decided which faculty to eliminate.

    The faculty union, represented by UFF attorney Tom Brooks, successfully argued that "the University misapplied the layoff article by targeting individual faculty in purely academic programs rather than taking a more traditional objective approach that respected the importance of tenure. In short, the University abused the relatively broad discretion it had under the layoff article to such an extent that the arbitrator felt compelled to intervene."

    Jack Fiorito, the UFF FSU chapter president, said, "Because tenure is so important for protecting academic freedom and shared governance, this is a win for all faculty. If faculty members feel like even the tenured people dare not speak up, then the non-tenured faculty members certainly are not going to speak up."

    Tom Auxter, statewide UFF president, stated that "in this economy, with budget cuts looming and without laws effectively protecting tenure and academic freedom, the contract is all we have left to defend faculty against abuses of power and violations of rights. The eyes of the nation have been on this case, and faculty across the nation can now see how important collective bargaining is for the survival of the profession."

    Ed Mitchell, UFF Executive Director, stated "this case is about respect, respect for the faculty and respect for the contract. UFF is pleased that FSU President Barron is moving quickly to comply with the arbitration award and rescind the layoffs."

    Sherman Dorn, UFF USF chapter president, said, "This shows the value of union membership. If the grievants in this case had to defend their jobs with outside lawyers, it would have cost them tens of thousands of dollars. Because the United Faculty of Florida will use its resources for members, and state and national affiliates provide support, it is essential that any faculty member in a state looking at substantial budget cuts in 2011-12 join her or his union so the union can protect their rights in cases of layoffs."

    The United Faculty of Florida represents faculty at Florida’s eleven public universities & New College, ten public colleges, one private college and the graduate assistants at four public universities. UFF WILL ONLY REPRESENT UNION MEMBERS IN GRIEVANCES, INCLUDING GRIEVANCES OVER LAYOFFS: to join UFF, go to http://faculty.ourusf.org/join-uff/ and download, print, fill in, and mail in the form.

    Targeted employees were in anthropology, oceanography, mathematics and science education, physical education, textiles, and visual arts / scenic design. See the Inside Higher Ed article and the arbitrator’s award.

    THE FLORIDA EDUCATION ASSOCIATION MEETING, PART II: PREPARING FOR HARD TIMES

    The FEA Delegate Assembly is the primary policy-making body of the Florida Education Association, which in turn is the K-20 teacher's union in which UFF is affiliated. The FEA Delegate Assembly meets every year to prepare for the coming year, and this year it met just before the election to prepare for hard times. Most of the preparations for the election had already been made, and many delegates were looking towards the next two years.

    Unfortunately, the FEA's preferred candidates for statewide offices lost in the election. And not only in statewide offices: of the three UFF members in the state legislature, only one remains (Michelle Rehwinkel Vasilinda, House District 9 – whom the Biweekly erroneously listed as a state senator in the October 7 issue). On the other hand, while the UFF USF Political Committee had designated the election of Alex Sink as the chapter's top short term political priority, the UFF USF PC had also designated passage of the "Fair Districting" Amendments 5 and 6 as the chapter's top long term political priority. And both these amendments passed.

    As St. Petersburg Times columnist Howard Troxler observed, passing these two amendments may be the most important decision made by the Florida electorate this year. The immediate consequence was, of course, lawsuits by unhappy incumbents. But after the litigation, it means that the Florida house and senate leadership will no longer be able to just draw the lines that they want to draw; they will have to draw lines that will stand in court. That makes individual legislators far less dependent on the good will of the leadership, it makes it far more likely that legislators will face – within two to four years – far more heterogeneous districts, and so it will make legislators far more dependent on the good will of their constituents.

    This may be the most substantial reform in Florida politics since the fall of the old Pork Chop Gang five decades ago. (During the first half of the Twentieth century, the Florida legislature did not redraw district lines as population grew in the cities, so half a century ago the legislature was controlled by a fifth of the state – and the Pork Chop Gang that controlled the legislators from that fifth. The Supreme Court's "one man one vote" rulings put an end to this practice, and since then successive legislative leaderships relied on gerrymandering to maintain their power.) Over the next few years, the leverage of grassroots-based organizations like FEA will likely increase while the leverage of the entrenched Tallahassee interests will likely decline. This will affect what the FEA will be able to accomplish in dealing with the legislature.

    As legislators come to depend more on their constituents, the FEA will depend more on its grassroots to educate legislators. That means having rank and file faculty and professionals visit their own legislators to get the message across. In particular, UFF is organizing USF faculty and professionals to visit legislators in the Tampa Bay counties, and this spring, UFF will ask faculty and professionals to visit Tallahassee during the legislative session.

    For higher education in general and USF in particular, the greatest problem is the budget. Earlier this year, the projected deficit was about six billion dollars, nearly a tenth of the entire state budget. Recent projections are closer to $ 2.5 billion – but with an asterisk that could mean anything. There will be enormous pressure to cut higher education (after a decade of disproportionate cuts). UFF hopes to send messages like:

    • Many nations are supporting higher education to position themselves in a trade network that grows increasingly dependent on high technology goods and services. Any region that fails to support higher education is knocking themselves out of the game.
    • During a recession, many people return to school for training and certification. Meanwhile, college age students are more likely to go to college than to enter the workforce directly. As a result, higher education depresses joblessness while creating clusters of economic activity, and ultimately providing more highly trained workers for the recovery.
    • Higher education is an engine of growth, especially during recessions. It follows that cutting higher education during a recession is counterproductive. More specifically, for institutions like USF where many students are building their futures and where frontier research is making new opportunities, the public is getting the biggest possible bangs for their bucks.
    During the next few months, UFF will be asking USF faculty and professionals to tell their own stories of USF's success to legislators. This is an educational process, for many legislators do not actually know what the universities are doing, and are wary of supporting universities because they have merely been assured, in abstract terms that they many not fully grasp or accept, that universities are doing great things. As educators, we know that what the legislators need are examples.

    The next semester will be a busy and critical time when many of the decisions made will affect us for years. UFF hopes to work with the faculty senates and the administration to protect USF's future.

    December 2, 2010

    HAPPY WINTER SOLSTICE!

    Whatever one's religious, cultural, ethnic, or other feelings about the coming holidays – from the old Shinto celebration of the re-emergence of Amaterasu (the sun goddess) to the pre-Christian Latvian celebration of Ziemassvetki (which included singers dressed in costumes going from house to house) – one must admit that there are an awful lot of holidays. Perhaps there is something very important to us about this time of year.

    The winter solstice has long commanded the attention of our species. The neolithic mound at Newgrange, Ireland, is oriented towards the rising sun of the solstice, while Stonehenge is oriented towards the setting solstice sun. Back then, surviving winter was a struggle that societies had to prepare for. And a morale boost could come from a festival celebrating stories of the triumph of light over darkness, the return of the sun, or the rebirth or return of a primary god. Hard times may be ahead, but Amaterasu will be lured out of her cave and the green will return.

    We face several years of hard times, and we live in a society that tends to project its current situation indefinitely into the future. But long ago, when we had a more cyclic view of nature, the long solstice night was actually an assurance that these hard times will pass, and since they will pass, it matters how we weather them. As Tom Paine commented of another winter, "The present winter is worth an age, if rightly employed; but, if lost or neglected, the whole continent will partake of the evil...."

    WHAT ARE CONTRACTS GOOD FOR?

    The arbitration victories UFF won over layoffs at the University of Florida, Florida State University, and other Florida universities remind us that laws do not exist because people are well-behaved; laws exist in order to encourage at least tolerable behavior while discouraging misconduct. The same goes for contracts. Commercial societies need contracts; one recently recurring story is the developing nation that discovers that commerce requires contracts. Trust, but get it in writing.

    The same is true even for a non-profit institution with a noble mission, like a university. Memory plays tricks, where people stand depends on where they sit, and different people see things differently. Without a written contract, a sequence of entirely reasonable rationalizations of what ought to be done can lead to all sorts of mischief.

    And in an emergency (real or apparent), administrators are as prone to panic in a crisis as anybody else. Administrators don't often recognize this, and they often claim that they need greater flexibility to deal with an emergency without interference. But a contract is a useful brake to prevent the university from being stampeded by a frightened administration.

    Here is the brake. The U. S. Constitution states that "No State shall ... pass any ... Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts...", and the Florida State Constitution states that "The right of employees, by and through a labor organization, to bargain collectively shall not be denied or abridged." The State of Florida and its agencies may have limited powers to do things with contracts, but anything that they do to contracts face legal tests.

    On the other hand, a university administration can unilaterally change regulations and policies, even by unilaterally changing the procedures by which those regulations and policies are enacted. Facing a crisis, or a temptation, a contract is a more formidable shield for university faculty and professionals than any regulations.

    Times being what they are, perhaps we should take a closer look...

    KNOW YOUR CONTRACT! (PART I)

    It is the old civics lesson: you ought to know your rights. The reality is that few rights are self-enforcing: quite frequently, people lose their rights out of sheer ignorance. Knowing one's rights is an important form of self-protection.

    And there is also the problem of decision-making. The contract is an integral component of the university's decision-making system, which is why it is sometimes dispiriting to hear of committee meetings where a contract issue comes up and no one knows what the contract says, or how to find out what the contract says.

    Now that we have a contract that is to remain in force until succeeded on July 1, 2013, perhaps we should take a look at it more closely. After all, it is the primary statement on the terms and conditions of our employment. So this is the first of a series of articles on the contract, and what it looks like. To facilitate and encourage participation, we have placed the contract on an experimental site, where people can look at the separate articles and even make comments (more about how to do this below).

    Let's start at the beginning: the experimental site is currently http://shermandorn.com/multisites/cba2010/ . There are 31 articles and seven appendices. A lot of them look technical, and they are, but they are also important to the integrity of the whole. In subsequent articles, we will look at them further.

    For the moment, let's look at an article covering a subject that we are all familiar with: tenure. Scroll down to Article 15, and you are looking at three pages worth (1,354 words) of legally enforceable text. So what is tenure? Actually, it doesn't say what tenure "is" (the courts say that it is a property right, and there are estimates of its market value), but scattered through the contract are assertions of the rights of tenured faculty, so the contract does say what effect of tenure is to be. If you scroll to the bottom, to section 15.9, you will see one effect: annual reappointment each academic year (except for resignation, retirement, layoff, or removal for just cause) – that's the sort of thing, like air, that one takes for granted as long as it doesn't go away. It won't go away: it's in the contract.

    The article even addresses how one gets tenure. At this point, one might compare Article 15 with pages 69 – 71 of the USF Faculty Handbook. On page 69, the handbook describes criteria for granting tenure, and also says that "In addition [to teaching, research/creative activities, and service], collegiality and participation as a citizen of the University are an integral part of faculty performance." Does this mean that "collegiality" and "participation as a citizen of the University" will be evaluated in tenure decisions?

    The Faculty Handbook is composed by the USF Administration, and could be changed tomorrow. The Collective Bargaining Agreement – the contract – was bargained by both sides, and cannot be changed by any unilateral action. And what Article 15 of the contract says (in sections 15.3 and 15.4) is that the Administration will compose criteria in writing, that these criteria must be available to any faculty member (from the department office or college office), that tenure-track faculty are advised of the criteria annually, that the Administration must notify UFF of modifications in tenure criteria, that modifications do not take effect for a year, and that any tenure-track faculty member who was on their tenure-earning track for at least three years could elect to be considered under the old criteria. And again, all these conditions on tenure criteria are in the contract, and cannot be unilaterally adjusted.

    So "collegiality" and "participation" (whatever they mean) are criteria only if they appear (preferably intelligibly) in the written criteria, which are always available so that the faculty governance bodies can debate them openly.

    Finally, notice the little blue bubbles on the page of Article 15. These are where the comments live. Scroll down to section 15.5 B, which addresses a recurrent issue: USF has gremlins that sneak into file cabinets and insert contraband of questionable provenance into tenure packets. As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up, and indeed UFF has settled several grievances on the misbehavior of gremlins. Anyway, subsection 15.5 B addresses this issue (take a look, again at Article 15-Tenure). If you click the little blue balloon to the upper right of subsection 15.5 B, the box at left will produce a comment by "Greg McColm" advising tenure applicants to check their packets regularly. One could scroll down in that box and "reply" with a comment of one's own, with two provisos to keep out spammers and other net critters:

    • Before any comment is entered, the commentator must enter a CAPTCHA code (the usual "type in the word appearing in the picture" test) to see if you are human being.
    • To prevent comment spam, the very first comment any commentator enters on the site must be approved by the moderator. Once any commentator has had a comment approved, all subsequent comments by that commentator will be automatically posted. All substantive comments will be approved.
    We encourage all USF faculty and professionals to visit the site, look over the contract, and make comments (which will be read by the Bargaining Committee, which is already looking ahead to 2013). We will look at other articles in subsequent issues of the Biweekly.


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