But first...
UFF will be expanding its organizing campaign next year, and we are seeking members interested in helping grow our union. We have paid Organizing Fellows positions! To apply, contact the Chapter Secretary.
There is an old cartoon of a someone in bed in an apartment, waiting for fellow upstairs to drop the other shoe - but the fellow upstairs is a caterpillar, with a lot of shoes. So it goes at the University of Florida, where almost every day brings a new revelation, development, or investigation into academic freedom there.
The USF Chapter of the United Faculty of Florida will meet tomorrow Friday at 12 noon on Zoom. On the agenda: the chapter election, critical race theory, 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. 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.
Whatever the preferences of FSU, UCF, and USF, much of the Florida Establishment regards the University of Florida as the flagship university, so what happens in Gainesville matters for the rest of the state. In particular, if shenanigans are permitted in Gainesville, then it won't be long before they are permitted everywhere else. For that reason, like it or not, Gainesville matters.
In a previous episode, three UF faculty members had been barred from testifying in a lawsuit seeking to overturn a new voting law. This inspired sharp criticism over the violation of academic freedom. The UF Administration clarified its position, announcing that the faculty could testify, only not as paid expert witnesses. This tactical retreat satisfied no one, and the criticism continued, most ominously from UF's accreditor. Meanwhile, it seems that UF had similarly denied permission to a faculty member to testify on a lawsuit seeking to overturn the state's ban on mask mandates.
Incidentally, the grounds for the denials was the state's new expansive conflict of interest policy. It appears that as UF is a public agency, some UF administrators believed that permitting faculty to participate in lawsuits against the state - or at least in lawsuits that the political leadership finds inconvenient - entails a conflict of interest. Whatever one may think of the morality of this argument, it is not legally frivolous, for it rests on a rather curious U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the Los Angeles District Attorney may discipline a prosecutor for repeatedly and obstinately accusing the Los Angeles Police Department of misconduct - just as the LAPD was crawling out of a scandal involving fabrication of evidence, perjury, shootings, stolen narcotics, and so forth. Unsurprisingly, this decision has inspired officially approved mischief.
Since the last episode, there have been a number of developments, including a 274-page a Report of the Faculty Senate Ad Hoc Committee on Academic Freedom. Meanwhile:
Meanwhile, in a case that could serve as a precedent, a tenured Florida Atlantic University professor posted doubts that the Sandy Hook massacre occurred and was subsequently fired for not reporting his blog on his conflict of interest form (FAU said that he was insubordinate in repeatedly refusing to report the blog). He sued to get his job back and lost in court, and then appealed to the Eleventh Circuit court; his appeal was just denied. So must blogs, twitter accounts, Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, and the like be reported on conflict of interest forms?
This is far from over. Stay tuned...
The governor's office and the Board vehemently insist that they have never given any instructions to bar testimony, destroy research data, change course syllabi, or otherwise interfere with the scholarly operation of the university. And the denials are not incredible: the alternative is to have the entire chain of command - from the dean's office up - clogged with intelligence reports on troublemaking faculty. The governor has other things to do, and besides, his office would prefer to be able to plead ignorance if anything embarrassing came to light.
On the other hand, the spectacle of VIPs denying responsibility for interfering in politically inconvenient scholarship brings to mind Bill & Jeff Keane's comic Family Circus. One of the recurrent characters is a sprite called Not Me, who, the family's children insist, is responsible for all the mishaps and infractions in the household.
Politicians are often allergic to having their fingerprints on their more covert efforts. For example, the historian Garrett Mattingly described an order sent by Queen Elizabeth to Sir Francis Drake commanding him not to "offer violence" to any of King Philip's ports or ships while simultaneously doing "your best endeavor (avoiding as much as may lie in you the effusion of Christian blood) to get into your possession such shipping of said King or his subjects..." (This instruction was sent to Drake after he set sail.) We all know what Drake did with whatever instructions he had - and that, of course, is precisely what the Queen intended.
When executives delegate authority, there are often several implicit - or at most oral - understandings. Certain kinds of troublemaking shall not occur - or if they do occur, shall be suppressed - and the executive shall not be bothered by the details. For example, turning to the Queen's domestic affairs, considering the number of cases that Sir Francis Walsingham's secret police investigated, it is unlikely that the Queen was personally cognizant of more than a handful of them. But she knew what Walsingham was up to; that's why she hired him.
Chapter Meeting tomorrow Friday, December 17, 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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