Winter Solstice is coming. In Arizona, the Hopi and Zuni will celebrate the return of the kachina spirits, bringing the Sun back with them; the Hopi holiday is Soyal and the Zuni holiday is Shalako. In Persia, families will celebrate the night before Yalda with nuts, pomegranates - and watermelons, for luck. Meanwhile, in China, families will celebrate Dongzhi and remember their ancestors. To agricultural societies, the return of the Sun after the Solstice was a matter of survival - and in a world when celestial objects were willful divinities, a matter of hope. So holiday festivals cluster around the Solstice, and perhaps we who live in our insulated industrial world should take the Solstice as an opportunity to remember that there is a world out beyond our appliances, CGI effects, and internet politics.
Speaking of CGI effects, the great American tradition seems to consist of North European evergreens, a Mediterranean calendar, the almost universal habit of given presents to children, and football in the afternoon.
The USF Chapter of the United Faculty of Florida will meet tomorrow Friday at 12 noon on Zoom. On the agenda: the Legislature and Critical Race Theory, selecting an Election Committee, selecting recipients of the professional scholarships, 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 will be the last chapter meeting of the semester; the next chapter meeting will be on January 14.
Meetings and events are posted on the Events Calendar of the UFF USF Website. Come and check us out.
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.
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.
Yes, we are on social media.
In the midst of a pandemic and a budget crunch, we seem to have a pressing need for...a football stadium. In September, USF Board of Trustees Chair Will Weatherford told an enthusiastic crowd that a USF football stadium is an idea whose time has come. "These student-athletes … our 50,000 students … the alumni, faculty and administration, they all deserve a stadium on this campus. I'm here to tell you we're going to do it. It's going to take a lot of work. It may take a little time. But if I know anything about USF and the Bulls spirit, it's that we're never shy about having bold ambitions and going after them."
Football is big at USF - the Crow's Nest reported that on September 11, the Gators defeated the Bulls before a packed audience in Raymond James stadium. But this raises the question of why USF should build a stadium for hundreds of millions of dollars when we can rent Raymond James for less than $200,000 a game. After all, even if USF had a stadium, per-game operating expenses will likely run into tens of thousands of dollars anyway (not counting tens or hundreds of millions for occasional renovations).
Football has long been part of higher education's public image. The fact that the game has had such a grip on the college community suggests that its importance for morale should not be discounted. That grip may extend beyond graduation and beyond the immediate university community. For example, just looking at finances, while almost all college football teams are money pits there is evidence that college football is useful for extracting donations from alumni (and, presumably, appropriations from legislators). And in addition to finances, there is the longstanding argument - older than the Greek games of Antiquity - that sports build morale and cohesion in a community.
The original 1956 plans for USF called for a football stadium at the southwest corner of campus, but President John Allen was skeptical of intercollegiate athletics. It wasn't until the early 1990s that football boosters persuaded a wary Board of Regents and USF President Francis Borkowski that football would help USF become one of the top 25 public universities. While boosters played up the prestige and financial benefits, some observers were more skeptical: sports writer Michael Sokolove, writing in the New York Times, warned USF that one could regard "...big-time college sports ... as a sucker's game, one with many more losers than winners," with universities aspiring to be the next Notre Dame or Duke - leveraging a winning football team to build a winning university. But that is not what usually happens, and Sokolove quoted James Shulman saying, "Schools get on a treadmill, and there's no getting off ... They have to stay on; they have too much invested." Nevertheless, several USF administrators told Sokolove that football was "the tip of the marketing sword." (For a chronology of USF football, see a timeline posted by the Tampa Bay Times.)
So now we have a football team. Our students are increasingly on campus, and the team plays at Raymond James, ten miles away. A Conceptual Planning Study conducted in 2017 projected that a new college stadium would cost $194,240,634 to $202,382,356 - although comparisons with other stadiums in light of USF's ambitions suggest that a stadium could well cost half a billion dollars. (This is the sort of sum that inspires one to recall that at the last UFF-USF bargaining session, the USF Administration salary proposal for the next three years would not cover inflation over the last year - during which we got no general raise at all.)
A football stadium moved to the front burner with Chairperson Weatherford's speech. Since then, some faculty told the USF Oracle that other things needed money more than football (and the Oracle's co-editor thought that this was not the time to build a stadium) but the USF Board of Trustees added progress towards a stadium to President Law's list of priorities.
Contra Chairperson Weatherford, the issue is not whether we deserve a new stadium
. The issue is whether the cost of the stadium would be justified by its enabling the university to carry out its mission to serve its students and the community. And considering the fiduciary responsibility of the USF Board of Trustees, that is the issue that the Board should focus on.Chapter Meeting tomorrow Friday, December 3, 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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