IN THIS ISSUE

Faculty Retention

Are you happy in your work? One way to measure if employees are happy in their work is to see if they stay. For example, retention of K-12 teachers has long been problematic, so much so that 538 reports that the pandemic-induced spike in resignations and retirements is not that dramatic in comparison with the chronic problem. With this in mind, the Biweekly conducts its fifth survey of...

Retention at USF. With consolidation, covid, funding, politicians amok, and murder hornets, one might worry about a spike in attrition. But it seems that compared to USF's chronic retention problem, any spike is not particularly noticeable. For details, see below or click here.

Three more items of interest.

Readers may have noticed a Biweekly Extra last weekend with a report by the UFF USF Chief Negotiator on the bargaining session last week. The report was that the USF Administration team - which represents the USF Board of Trustees - had no reaction to the UFF proposals. The Administration team proposed a cumulative 5.1% average merit raise over the next three years - contingent on the Legislature coming up with the cash. (Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 6.2% inflation over the twelve months ending last month, and despite a widespread view among economists that the current inflation is due to supply chain glitches, some experts suspect that this inflation will be here for a while.) In addition, the USF Administration desires broad authority to make major unilateral changes in assignments.
Our Chief Negotiator says: "What is the guiding principle of the USF/UFF in it's current collective bargaining negotiations with the USF/BOT? UFF won't back down by Tom Petty (a native Floridian) and the Heartbreakers. LISTEN TO IT. If you ever went to a University of Florida home football game and heard the whole stadium signing that song it will stay in your mind forever. The USF/UFF WILL NOT gore the great majority of the 1600 or so employees of the University of South Florida that it represents on the horns of the BULL in order to benefit a few.
And it's that time of year again. The West Central Florida Labor Council - the local AFL-CIO body with which the USF Chapter of UFF is affiliated - is conducting its annual toy drive. Because of the pandemic, the drive is asking for donations rather than toys. The Labor Council has a website for anyone who would like to make a donation.
The academic freedom issue continues to simmer. Gainesville, which featured a university president chewing a shoe, got most of the media attention. The Tampa Bay Times reported that UFF called on the AAUP and the AAU to investigate and that the entire affair raised the problem of political meddling in academia - and three more UF faculty have joined the lawsuit against the university Meanwhile, the Chronicle of Higher Education warned that support for academic freedom is declining. The Times also reported on the proposal to dilute tenure that the 4 November 2021 Biweekly described; we continue to hear reports that this proposal is snaking around Tallahassee. (There is also a bill called Racial and Sexual Discrimination to prohibit public agencies "from providing mandatory training for employees or students which espouses certain concepts," including certain "divisive" concepts and those that "scapegoat" or "stereotype" races or sexes - nudge, nudge, wink, wink.) For more, see the items on the (statewide) UFF website.

And we would like to make two corrections. For the broadcasted version of the 4 November 2021 Biweekly: Nikki Fried is the Florida Commissioner of Agriculture, and for the 5 November Extra, UFF can only represent UFF members in grievances. The Biweekly apologizes for the errors.

Chapter Meeting Tomorrow on Zoom

The USF Chapter of the United Faculty of Florida will meet tomorrow Friday at 12 noon on Zoom. On the agenda: the latest from the University of Florida, the presidential search, administrators who misrepresent the state of bargaining, tenure in 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 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.

Join UFF Today!

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. Here is the membership form. Come and join the movement.

Professional Scholarships

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.

Grievances

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.

USF United Support Fund for Food Pantries

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.

We are on Social Media

Yes, we are on social media.

We have a Facebook group: see United Faculty of Florida at USF. 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, and the moderator will invite every UFF member that asks to join. Non-members are welcome to look (but you need a Facebook account to do that). So check us out.
We have a blog: see The USF Faculty Blog. This has news items as they come up.
We are twitter-pated: follow us on Twitter via @UffUsf.
We even have a You-Tube channel: check out our videos

If you want to help with media matters, contact the Communications Committee chair.

Retention at USF

The last two yeas have been particularly hard on USF. The Legislature forced USF to consolidate (without providing the university with additional resources to do so) and the pandemic hit. Thanks to the Administration's optimistic assumptions about university finances, and to the bad faith of the Legislature, the university's finances are complicated - the details of which are somehow obscure. Meanwhile, the university transitioned to what turned out to be a transitional presidency, all without a strategic plan (a new one, featuring all the currently fashionable fields, is now being refined).

One obvious question is how this affected how the rubber hit the road. One measure of that is faculty retention.

The Biweekly has looked at retention in the past. These are figures for employees in the UFF USF Bargaining Unit, i.e., excluding staff, administrators, various professionals, most of the Medical school, etc.

In the 10 September 2015 issue, the Biweekly concluded that while most assistant professors who apply for tenure receive it, only half of the assistant professors even make it to their sixth year.
In the 23 June 2016 issue, the Biweekly concluded that attrition among instructors was worse than among assistant professors - and even among associate and full professors, about a third departed during the previous six years.
In the 5 December 2019 Issue, the Biweekly looked at retention at the college level, and found that over the previous four years, retention was weakest in the Tampa Library (which, by percentages, had the worst attrition (two-fifths all employees left in four years) and the smallest number of new hires) up to Arts & Sciences and Business (both of which lost only one-fifth of their faculty in two years and largely replaced them).
In the 28 June 2020 issue, the Biweekly looked at retention by sex and ethnicity over the previous eight years, and found that except for dismal retention of native American faculty - whose numbers are so low that this result probably isn't statistically significant (although it is significant that the numbers are so low as to not be statistically significant), attrition among professors were largely in the same range while retention among instructors were notably stronger among Asian / Pacific faculty and weaker among Hispanic / Latin faculty.

We now look retention of faculty over the last two years in those college-level units that had at least fifty employees in 2019. We classify faculty according to which college-level unit they were in as of 2019, i.e. before the consolidation-mandated reshuffle. All these figures are based on snapshots of the UFF USF Bargaining Unit taken in mid-November.

college-level Unit	Number of faculty in unit 2019	% of 2019 faculty remaining at USF in 2020	% of 2019 faculty remaining at USF in 2021
ARTS	86	90%	78%
BEH	153	92%	78%
BSN	94	94%	87%
CAS	601	91%	82
EDU	101	91%	80%
ENG	179	95%	88%
NURSING	61	87%	72%
PUB HEALTH	64	97%	89%
USFSM	88	84%	73%
USFSP	155	92%	83%

Public Health lost only a ninth of its 2019 faculty during those two years while Nursing and Sarasota / Manatee each lost over a fourth. But what may be most striking is, that in comparison with previous surveys, USF retention does not appear dramatically different from what it has been in the past.

There are two ways of looking at this. On the one hand, there has been a lot of noise about employees in all sectors of the economy leaving their jobs - so much that some politicians (not mentioning names) have cut big holes in the social safety net to force people back to work. (With limited success: businesspeople are still complaining about retention and recruiting - which have inspired snarky retorts about job conditions and pay). One could argue that USF does not seem to have been overly affected by the current retention crisis.

But on the other hand, faculty retention is still a longstanding issue at USF. As of last Friday, among employees in the UFF USF Bargaining Unit, the median number of years of service at USF is ten years. This is not because of we have a lot more faculty than ten years ago - the UFF USF Bargaining Unit has been relatively stable at about 1,600 employees for at least two decades. Faculty just don't stay. And building a great university requires faculty willing to make long-term commitments to the institution.

So the question becomes: what is happening? Is USF a steppingstone to better things? (If so, what better things?) Do employees get dissatisfied and go sideways to comparable institutions that are nicer to employees? Do they depart academia altogether? Just asking.

LOGISTICS

Chapter Meeting tomorrow Friday, November 19, 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.

If you do not want to receive the UFF Biweekly, you can unsubscribe below or contacting the Chapter Secretary. If you do not receive the Biweekly, but want to, contact the Chapter Secretary.