The USF Chapter of the United Faculty of Florida will meet tomorrow Friday at 12 noon on Zoom. On the agenda: the University of Florida, the tenure poroposal, fake news, educating the Legislature, and more. And here are the minutes for the previous meeting.
Any employee in the Bargaining Unit may attend, but you must have an invitation: contact the Chapter Secretary to get one. This fall, we are meeting on October 22, November 5, November 19, and December 3. Meetings this semester will be online.
Meetings and events are posted on the Events Calendar of the UFF USF Website. Come and check us out.
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The UFF USF Chapter of the United Faculty of Florida will distribute six $ 500 Professional Scholarships to UFF (USF System) members for professional travel (e.g. to attend & present at a professional meeting), equipment for classroom / hybrid / online teaching, or page charges during this academic year. But you must be a UFF member. If you are a member, you can submit a 200-word proposal for professional activities during Fall 2021, Spring 2022, or Summer 2022 by November 30 to the chapter secretary by November 30. Be sure to include your name, title, address, the details of the professional activity, and a brief description of its importance. For more information, see the program flier.
If you have been the victim of a violation of the Collective Bargaining Agreement or the recent Memorandum of Understanding, 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 Grievances Page.
Many of our students are struggling during this crisis, and the USF Foundation is supporting the USF Food Pantries to help out. They are accepting non-perishable donations, but one can also make monetary donations for the pantries at St. Petersburg, Sarasota / Manatee, and Tampa. See also the Student Health Services Feed-a-Bull site.
Yes, we are on social media.
Last Saturday, the University of Florida (UF) Administration announced that it had denied requests by three faculty members to "participate in a lawsuit" seeking to overturn Florida's new voting law, Senate Bill 90. Such a restriction is extraordinary - faculty are presumed to have the academic freedom to speak and publish in matters concerning their own expertise and having experts available to testify on matters of public concern is presumably part of the mission of a public university. Extraordinary restrictions would seem to require extraordinary justification, but all the Administration's first statement said was permitting such testimony is "adverse to the university’s interests as a state of Florida institution," although the statement did not explain how the testimony could be adverse to the university's interests.
The UF Administration's first statement provided the spectacle of an AAU university thrusting itself into the academic freedom doghouse recently occupied by Chapel Hill (another AAU member), which proved irresistible to the press. Soon Florida's two top newspapers, the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times, were covering the story. The news went national, with stories in outlets like AP, CNN, The Hill, the New York Times, NPR, Politico, Slate, and the Washington Post.
American embarrassments being good copy for the foreign press, the story is being picked up by foreign outlets like the Guardian and the Independent. The story was also picked up by the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed. The Conversation, which is supported by both USF and the University of Florida (and other universities) reviewed the legalities of the situation.
Returning to Gainesville, the United Faculty of Florida
sent a letter to UF President Kent Fuchs reminding him that, "As a public institution of higher education, the university has an obligation, to quote its mission statement, 'to share the benefits of its research and knowledge for the public good,'" and issued a press release stating, "The United Faculty of Florida will do all that is within our power to protect the First Amendment rights of higher education faculty, students, and staff across the state."Others also made statements. Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Nikki Fried tweeted, "... when they come for our First Amendment, it's on the Gator Nation to stand up & fight." AAUP Executive Director Julie Schmid tweeted, "The university’s attempt to muzzle these faculty members violates their academic freedom." And the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) issued a statement reminding the UF Administration that a similar affair in New Hampshire resulted in a $ 350,000 settlement.
Most ominously, UF's accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), sent UF a letter asking what's going on: accredited public institutions are supposed to be relatively insulated from politics (see also the report in the Tampa Bay Times, and the Times' article on the context).
The UF Administration then sought to clear up a misunderstanding. Faculty can testify, just not as paid expert witnesses. This clarification did not satisfy the three faculty and USF Emeritus Professor Darryl Paulsen asked in a Tampa Bay Times column, "In other words, expert witnesses can say what they want as long as they are not paid?"
But it was more than a misunderstanding: it seems that the UF Administration barred a pediatrician affiliated with UF from testifying - for free - in a lawsuit to overturn the state's ban on mask mandates in schools. And then it turned out that the UF Administration has repeatedly barred faculty testimony. The mechanism for barring the testimony was the same, UF's Conflicts of Interest Program. All this led ten members of Florida's Congressional delegation to complain that the UF Administration had tried to "muzzle professors" and AAAS Science editor-in-chief Holden Thorp to write Stand Up for What You Believe, President Fuchs: At the University of Florida, the time for strategizing and threading needles is over.
And possibility that the problem was the content of the testimony and not the compensation is underlined by fact that Florida International University is allowing a faculty member to testify in support of the voting law.
A 28 July 2021 article in the Alligator reported that "UF faculty is recognized internationally providing insight on issues such as COVID-19, national elections and Cuba’s humanitarian crises." But the UF Administration wants to block inconvenient testimony concerning some of the Legislature's priorities. One can only wonder what other legislative priorities the University of Florida Administration might similarly protect - at the expense of the university's reputation and standing.
For more media reaction, see the UFF page on news coverage of this affair.
Meanwhile, just under the mass media's radar...
Early last week, provosts for institutions in the Florida State University System were presented with a draft policy for "comprehensive periodic review of tenured faculty," and were asked to provide feedback - which would be forwarded to someone the Legislature with enough political pull to have the provosts look at a document. The provosts were given a day or so to respond, and we understand that reactions were mixed. At any rate, here are some high points.
Exactly what this new proposal is all about is unclear, but there was some speculation that some legislation was in the wind. That would not be too surprising, as several states have recently moved against tenure.
Two of the problems Uhlfelder noted - that despite the fact that academic tenure was developed to protect teachers, it is now a perk for researchers, and that it is granted most readily to white males - are still true. In addition, during the last quarter century tenure has increasingly been restricted to a shrinking academic elite, leaving the majority of faculty out in the cold even though all faculty need protection. The tenure system may be due for reform, but not a reform that reduces it to confetti.
Chapter Meeting tomorrow Friday, November 4, at 12 noon, via Zoom. All UFF USF members are welcome: for the Zoom link, contact the Chapter Secretary.
All UFF members are invited to attend. Non-members are also invited to come and check us out. To get the link to Zoom, contact the Chapter Secretary. Come and join the movement.Membership: Everyone in the UFF USF System Bargaining unit is eligible for UFF membership: to join, simply fill out 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.
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