Chapter Meeting Tomorrow in Tampa

The Chapter will meet tomorrow Friday at 12 noon on USF Tampa in EDU 161. There will be sandwiches, snacks, pop, and sweets. All USF employees are invited, especially UFF members and employees thinking of becoming UFF members. On the agenda: preparing for the rest of the semester - and the chapter election next year. Come and check us out.

The remaining UFF Chapter Meetings this semester will be on November 3 & 17, and December 1 in EDU 161. Come and join the movement.

This year, the USF Chapter of the United Faculty of Florida will be celebrating the Holiday Season with two events.

• Our Annual Holiday Social will be on Tuesday, November 28, from 11 am to 2 pm, in the Marshall Center's Sabal Room (MSC 3700, on the third floor, just to the right and around the corner from Top of the Palms); all UFF USF employees, UFF members and non-members alike, are invited to attend.
• The Annual Toy Drive conducted by the West Central Florida Federation of Labor will collect new, unwrapped toys for children ages 0 - 18. Toys can be brought to a Chapter Meeting (see above), to the Holiday Social, or delivered to the receptionist at the USF Tampa Department of Mathematics & Statistics (CMC342), attention Greg McColm.

Join UFF Today!

Download, fill in, and mail the membership form. Benefits of membership include the right to run and vote in UFF chapter and statewide elections; representation in grievances (UFF cannot represent a non-member in a grievance or litigation); special deals in insurance, travel, legal advice, and other packages provided by our affiliates; free insurance coverage for job-related liability; and the knowledge you are supporting education in Florida. Come and join the movement.

$ 500 Travel Grants for UFF Members

The USF Chapter of the UFF will award six $ 500 Travel Scholarships for next spring and summer. This will be for travel for participation in a professional activity. All applications are due by November 28, and only UFF members are eligible. In addition, no recipient of the Spring or Summer 2017 cycles of travel grants is eligible to apply. The six recipients shall be selected by lot at the December 1 chapter meeting. For more information, see the Travel Scholarship Flyer.

This initiative is part of our membership campaign. If you would like to become active in the UFF USF Membership Drive, contact the Membership Chair, Adrienne Berarducci (click here).

Grievances

If you have been the victim of a violation of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, you have thirty days from the time you knew or should have known of the violation to file a grievance. If you are, and at the time of the violation were, a dues-paying member of the United Faculty of Florida, you have the right to union representation. To contact the UFF USF Grievance Committee, go to the online contact form. For more information, see our web-page on grievances; see also the main article (left).

Visit Us on Facebook

Visit the United Faculty of Florida at USF Facebook Group page. This page is a place where UFF members can exchange thoughts and ideas. The page is "public", but only dues-paying UFF members are eligible to post items on the page. If you are a UFF member, ask to join on the page, or contact the Communications Committee. The Committee will invite every UFF member that asks to join. So check us out. UFF members are welcome to join, and non-members are welcome to look.

Kudo Correction

In the 7 September 2017 Kudo, the Biweekly caption was incorrect. We have corrected the caption in Archived Article. The Biweekly regrets the error.

IN THIS ISSUE

Union Meetings I: The Senate

The USF Chapter of the United Faculty of Florida is one chapter of a union "local", the United Faculty of Florida, which represents many higher education faculty and professionals throughout the state. Among the elected positions in the Chapter are the senators, who represent USF in the biannual meetings of the UFF Senate. The Senate was originally scheduled to meet last month, but that meeting was cancelled because of Hurricane Irma. So the Senate met two weeks ago, and here is a report.

• The UFF Senate. The fall senate meeting often focuses on the spring legislative session, but there is more than that going on. For details, see below or click here.

Meanwhile, there has been an interesting development in one of the academic freedom cases mentioned in the previous Biweekly.

• Weirdness and Academic Freedom. It seems that one of the academic freedom cases involved an academic being beleaguered by ... Russians. For details which (as Dave Barry would say) we are not making up, see below or click here.

The UFF Senate

The UFF Senate is the primary policy-making body of the United Faculty of Florida, and it meets twice a year to hear reports, work on the budget, and do other business. 114 senators met in Tampa during the weekend of October 21 & 22 in Tampa. It was the first senate meeting for (statewide) UFF President Liz Davenport, the first African American to hold that office. Her predecessor received a plaque in gratitude for her service.

From left to right: UFF President Liz Davenport, former UFF President Jennifer Proffitt, UFF Vice President Catherine Leisek,

President Davenport started by quoting George Bush's October 19 speech in which he said, "We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. At times, it can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together." And she quoted Barack Obama saying, "Instead of looking for ways to work together and get things done in a practical way, we’ve got folks who are deliberately trying to make folks angry ... because it provides a short-term tactical advantage."

The Florida Legislature will be meeting early next year, January 9 to March 9. "The legislature is a challenge to all of us," reported UFF Executive Director Marshall Ogletree, who reported that the state Board of Governors and the various university boards of trustees were increasingly micromanaging their institutions. Perhaps not coincidentally, a growing number of colleges are asking for UFF representation (all public universities in Florida are already represented). Meanwhile, the Contract Enforcement Committee reported a growing number of grievances.

There is a Bargaining Council for the university chapters, and it met on Saturday evening to hear reports from around the state. Here are two recurring issues.

• Hurricane Irma. Several universities closed for a week or more, but they responded in a variety of ways. Some, like USF, left the semester schedule as it is. Some extended the semester: at least one university administration consulted with the faculty senate president (who consulted with UFF) before doing so, while another administration did not.
• Bargaining. Several universities are bargaining new contracts right now (bargaining at USF starts in fall of next year), and several chapters reported greater animosity at the table. This does not necessarily mean negativity from their administrations - although a few places did report that. At each university, UFF represents faculty and professionals when it bargains with a delegate of the board of trustees. Traditionally, the university administration represents the board in bargaining, but nowadays, many boards (including USF's) choose a private lawyer to represent them.

In the previous Biweekly, an article on The Heckler's Veto described how faculty are getting blowback and harassment for what they say and write. One of these was Drexel University Professor George Ciccariello-Maher, whose satirical tweet about "white genocide" generated blowback so alarming that Drexel pulled him out of the classroom - and is now "investigating" his "conduct." But The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reports that the tweetstorm that so alarmed the Drexel administration took off when @TEN_GOP, a product of the Internet Research Agency (the Russian "troll farm" featured in testimony before Congress on Tuesday concerning the 2016 election) shared a screenshot of Ciccariello-Maher's white genocide tweet to its 61,949 followers. From there it was picked up by two writers (one a freelancer from Brietbart), an organizer of the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and USA Today.

The Chronicle of Higher Education observed that this is not the only time @TEN_GOP has gone after American higher ed. And the New York Times reported that similar Russian efforts target many American movements, while Wired reports that in Russia itself, social media are used for social control.

Sometimes we should not take social media blowback at face value. Sometimes the smoke is generated from a smoke machine.

Meanwhile, members of the UFF USF Facebook Group have been posting additional academic freedom stories. Check them out.

LOGISTICS

Chapter Meeting tomorrow Friday, November 3, on USF Tampa in room EDU 161.

• Click here for the agenda.
• Click here for the minutes of the previous meeting.
• Click here for the minutes of the October 6 meeting.

Membership: Everyone in the UFF USF System Bargaining unit is eligible for UFF membership: to join, simply fill out and send in the membership form.

NOTE: The USF-UFF Chapter website is http://www.uff.ourusf.org, and our e-mail address is uff@ourusf.org.

About this broadcast: This Newsletter was broadcast from uff.ourusf.org, hosted at ICDsoft.com, and is intended for all members of the UFF USF Bargaining unit (USF faculty and professionals at most departments). A (usually identical) version will be broadcast to USF-News and USF-Talk from mccolm@usf.edu.

If you do not want to receive the UFF Biweekly, you can unsubscribe below. If you do not receive the Biweekly, but want to, e-mail a message to gmccolm@tampabay.rr.com.