United Faculty of Florida, Spring 2005

Perhaps the basic article is an unsigned editorial, Waiting Rarely Works: "Late Bloomers" Usually Just Wilt. For several decades, parents and teachers confronted with a first grader who could not read would hope that the child was a "late bloomer" who would cross some threshold a year or two later and catch up with the rest of the class. But during the last decade or so, several studies suggest that lagging children rarely catch up on their own.
There were two theories. The "brain maturation" theory suggested that different students mature at different rates, and that students who lagged in first grade would catch up later. On the other hand, the "skill deficit" theory suggested that students who lagged in first grade lagged because they lacked specific skills, and that they would not even begin to catch up until they developed those skills.
The column reports that several studies support the skills deficit theory. One set of studies reported that while late bloomers exist, they are rare: a "poor reader" in first grade has about a 90 % chance of being a "poor reader" in third grade. One study suggested that the critical skill deficit was "phonemic awareness": the ability to deal with the individual sounds making up words and associate those sounds with letters.
While these articles focus on K-3 (or K-6), one study indicates that reading improvement in absolute terms slows after sixth grade. (Suddenly, the gentle webmaster is reminded of Morris Adler & C. van Doren's lament that in the USA, there is no reading instruction after grade six.) Another study confirms the unpleasant corollary: those who were behind in first grade usually don't catch up by sixth grade and, ultimately, don't catch up in high school.
The "phoneme awareness" skill happens to be a basic one that some experts believe is reliably testable. Several of the articles argue that very young children should be screened for phonemic awareness and other critical skills, and those deficient should get remedial work at once.

The feature article, Preventing Early Reading Failure by Joseph K. Torgesen, the director of the Florida Center for Reading Research, begins with one explanation of the devastating spiral -- deficient students are unable or unwilling to effectively practice reading and thus never become any good at it -- and then turns to types of problems, teaching methods, screening and intervention.
Torgeson identifies two kinds of deficiencies. Some students have specific "phonological" weaknesses, but are otherwise competent in "oral language ability." Others, largely coming from deprived backgrounds, suffer a number of pre-reading deficiencies. (Curiously, he does not list as a third category, students suffering from specific disorders, such as dyslexia.)
Torgeson then turns to teaching methods, which is mostly a discussion of phonics instruction. Phonics has been a politically charged issue (a point he does not mention), but Torgeson sticks to the results of his studies, which suggest that while all students may benefit from phonics instruction, the greatest benefit would go to inadequately prepared students.
Screening would be best conducted orally by a teacher or aide, apparently one-on-one with the student. Several mini-oral-exams can be conducted through the year to monitor the student's progress. Torgeson gives little comfort to adherents of mass standardized exams.
Once a deficiency has been recognized, Torgeson recommends relatively immediate intervention. The deficiency should be explicitly addressed, without assumptions about other skills the students may or may not have. And this is a quantity time, not a quality time, intervention: students have to spend a lot of their time and energy to benefit. And throughout, students need emotional support and intellectual support, the latter consisting of a lot of specific guidance and direction.
The success rates of extant programs for K - 3 students vary widely, and "Intervention research has not yet discovered the conditions that need to be in place to enable every child to acquire adequate word-level reading skills in early elementary school." Success rates for grades 4 - 6 were more problematic, and even students with only "moderate" reading impairment fell further behind their "normal" classmates. Torgeson suggests one reason why older students are less successful: since reading is so difficult, they read only what they have to, and get much less practice.
This lack of success with older students haunts the entire feature, and Torgeson urges (1) early screening and early intervention, and (2) development of more effective intervention techniques for older students.

The unsigned editorial Preventive Medicine compares medical screening and reading skill screening noting that for both, time is of the essence. The editorial also warns against dropping history and science to make room for reading instruction, noting that history and science are what students read about (Torgeson would have said that if students don't have anything to read about, they won't read on their own).

This leads to a problem that that issue of AFT Educator did not address: do schools use books that children would want to read? Since Torgeson's results rely heavily on voluntary reading -- which probably has more animorphs and graphic novels than history or science -- this may be a serious issue. Especially now that school books are not just competing against non-school books, but also television.
One aspect of this problem was addressed in the latest issue of AFT Educator, in Barbara Feinberg's Reflections on the Problem Novel. Feinberg's own children do read, but the novels that her children are assigned are very dark, so much that her children avoid reading them. Feinberg's chief concern is about whether children are being exposed to "too much, too soon," but she does raise the question of what happens if schools make reading too unpleasant, at least too unpleasant for younger students who may not up to long sequences of emotional endurance tests.

What does all this say about college students?

• We have been warned. We already know of one situation in which the notion of "late blooming" may be deceptive. Our retention problems may also require early intervention, and that intervention might involve identifying and addressing specific deficiencies -- and these interventions are probably energy and time consuming.
• And how well do our students read? This is an awkward question, but try asking your freshman students to read out loud. How well do students read the text, and how much time and energy do students put into reading texts if their past experiences with texts were negative?

For more information, contact the Election Chair. For your convenience, there is a MS Word form on-line for making nominations .

It is part of the human condition that contracts do not magically enforce themselves. We have a contract -- the 2004 - 2007 Collective Bargaining Agreement (on-line as a 102-page PDF file), but for the terms and conditions to be followed, we have to make sure that they are followed. One way to do this is with the Grievance Process, which is described in Article 20 (pp. 57 - 64). The grievance process is different from that of the previous contract because the previous contract involved the Board of Regents, which no longer exists.

Here is an outline of the new grievance process.

There are two critical things to remember. First, a "grievance" is a formal complaint that the contract has been violated. It is NOT a complaint about an iniquity or a stupidity: it is not a contractual violation for someone to be iniquitous or stupid. A grievance is a complaint that a specific clause in the contract was violated in such-and-such a way.

The second thing to remember is that a grievance MUST be filed within thirty days of the time that the employee knew or should have known of the violation. If the grievance is filed late, it can be (and ALWAYS has been) rejected.

Here is the procedure, which presumes that the grievance is between a employee and an immediate supervisor (eg, the chair).

Step 1. For 30 days the parties will attempt to resolve the dispute informally. This period can be extended by mutual consent, but if the informal resolution of the matter is unsatisfactory, the grievant may demand a formal hearing, moving the grievance to Step 2.

Step 2. This is a hearing before a representative of the university, usually before a delegate of the Provost. The two parties can present evidence, and the university representative makes a ruling.

Throughout Step 1 and Step 2, the grievant is assisted by a volunteer, a union member working as a Grievance Officer, who has spent some time learning how the contract works and how the grievance works. (A grievant may elect to represent him/herself in the grievance process, or to be represented by legal counsel. Since most lawyers are relatively ignorant of labor law (!), this assistance is often at least as effective as legal representation. It is also cheaper.)

It is when Step 2 doesn't suffice that the fun begins.

Step 3. Both UFF and the USF Administration are drawing up a list of impartial arbitrators, and when Step 2 fails, UFF (not the grievant!) has the option of moving the case to "arbitration." The case is heard before one of the arbitrators, who can rule only on contractual issues (eg, the arbitrator can rule that an employee was denied tenure improperly and therefore should have another chance, as that is a contractual issue, but the arbitrator cannot rule that a faculty member denied tenure should get tenure, as that is a judgement call outside the arbitrator's competence); the arbitrator's rulings are final and set precedents (which is why the union is very particular about what cases to send to arbitration). Arbitration also costs the union lots of money (which, ahem, come from your dues).

There are several final points.

1st. If you are having problems with a supervisor, it is very important to be able to document what has happened. If things get ominous, start a journal, noting date, time, place, and specifics of relevant events, and save all documents (including e-mail: print out hardcopies, as courts have ruled that state machines are property of the state and can be monitored or even taken away by the state).

2nd. The employee has a contractual right to review their personnel file, and this is strongly recommended in order to ensure that material is not later withdrawn or added inappropriately. The employee should paginate and initial every page, and photocopy for their own records whatever they believe is relevant for their case.

3rd. You have not only a contractual right, but the right under federal law, to have a grievance officer come with you to any hearing at which you may be subject to disciplinary action; in fact, if you are at a meeting with your supervisor, and your supervisor starts to discuss disciplinary action, you have the right to suspend the meeting in order to get a grievance officer to attend a resumption of the meeting.

But if you have a problem, the first step is to contact our Grievance Chair, Mark Klisch. Please call even if it is a problem not addressed by the contract: we are keeping track of problematica to be addressed in future contracts (or by other means), and we need to keep informed about what is going on.

That's the process, and the gentle reader may notice that there is a lot of labor involved. The administration pays administrators to handle its side. The union must rely on volunteers. So we conclude with a call for volunteers. People who are interested in helping their colleagues in trouble, and who are willing to learn the grievance process and study the contract. We are planning for some grievance training this semester, so everyone interested in attending should please contact our Grievance Chair, Mark Klisch.

During the last few weeks, union members nominated union members to run for these positions, and now the ballot packets are going out. EACH MEMBER OF THE BARGAINING UNIT WHO WAS A UFF MEMBER AS OF JANUARY 15 SHOULD RECEIVE A BALLOT: IF YOU DO NOT RECEIVE ONE BY THE END OF NEXT WEEK, CONTACT THE ELECTION CHAIR, Gregory McColm.

The ballot packets contain (1) instructions on a yellow sheet, (2) a ballot on a blue sheet (with races on BOTH sides), (3) descriptions of candidates on two white sheets of paper stapled together, (4) one small blank envelope to hold the ballot, and (5) one regular sized envelope addressed to UFF, with a PRINT NAME and a SIGNATURE line on the upper left hand corner.

Fill out the ballot: notice you can write in someone's name and vote for that "write-in candidate," however only UFF members may be elected. Notice that you vote for one candidate in each of the four executive races, for up to eleven candidates in the senate race (the president is ex officio a senator), and for up to five candidates in the delegate race (the president is ex officio a delegate).

Here are the offices you are voting on.

• The President is the chief executive officer and chief spokesperson for the chapter. This includes representing the chapter to the state office of UFF, overseeing the USF office, etc.
• The Vice President assists the president.
• The Secretary takes minutes and maintains other records as the chapter directs.
• The Treasurer pays the bills.
• The UFF Senators represent USF at the (usually two) statewide meetings of the UFF Senate, in April and September. The UFF Senate is the legislative body of UFF.
• The FEA Delegates are part of the UFF delegation representing UFF, as a union local, in the annual meeting of the Florida Education Association Delegate Assembly, which is the legislative body of the FEA. It is a huge assembly, of the largest union in the state.

If you choose to mail by campus mail, just deposit it in the campus mail. If you choose to mail by first class mail, PUT A STAMP ON IT before mailing. ALL BALLOTS MUST BE RECEIVED BY MARCH 10. Ballots will be counted on March 11 at the union office, NEC223, at 2 pm. All union members are invited.

For afficionados, this is case number 1D-03-4689, and both the docket and Judge Benton's opinion are on-line.

For USF faculty, the stakes are substantial: do the old arbitration precedents still hold? For faculty in the universities still without contracts, the stakes are a lot higher: they would get the protection of the terms and conditions of the old contract, and the negotiating advantage that the old contract provides. But this is about more than the Florida State University System. And in a sense, it is about more than the national concern among unions (and national giddiness among anti-union governments) about whether unions can be reorganized out of existence. The ultimate question is whether a state agency like PERC has to obey a law it doesn't like. And the court has said quite bluntly that it does.

A look at the comparison between the Board of Governor's request and the Governor's proposal is interesting: see an administration worksheet. The State University System was appropriated $ 2.182 billion last year, and assuming a somewhat optimistic 2 % inflation rate, the SUS would need over $ 2.23 billion the coming year to keep even at current levels (eg, same number of students). The BOG requested $ 2.313 billion, which would probably be less than a 4 % increase after inflation. The Governor recommends $ 2.064 billion, probably an 8 % cut after (an optimistic projection of) inflation.

There are several interesting items:

• Despite many public complaints, the Governor recommends that the state continue to renege on its commitment to match donations, which will probably make fundraising more difficult.
• Access to higher education is cut by three fourths, and a collection of programs for building the research programs -- including all funding for Centers of Excellence -- are zeroed out.
• The Florida Retirement System is having a rate increase. This is a Carl Hiaasen moment. Political junkies will recall that the FRS lost $ 335 million in the Enron mess, and more recently FRS money was used to bail out the politically connected Edison Schools, which is now seeking to assume management of "failed" schools in Florida.

As the press has observed, the cuts are to be made up by squeezing students. This may be complicated. An Executive Summary for the January BOG meeting (it is on-line) says that while there used to be a legal cap preventing students from being charged more than 25 % of the costs of their education, the current rate was 30 %. Of course, some states charge up to 52 %. There have been proposals to raise tuition across-the-board, to create new tuition systems that will generate more money (by greatly increasing the load on certain segments of the student population), etc.

The Legislature is in session, and this being Florida, it is hard to guess what will ultimately come out.

Each year, each employee in the bargaining unit is supposed to be presented with their annual Employee Performance Evaluation, evaluating their performance (where applicable) in "teaching effectiveness," "contribution to the discovery of new knowledge, etc," "public service that extends professional or discipline-related contributions to the community," "participation in the governance processes of the institution...," and "other assigned university duties." The entire procedure and methodology is outlined in Article 10 of the contract, available on-line as a huge PDF file.
It seems that some employees have not been getting their evaluations on time, or perhaps even at all. There are two major consequences:

• If the evaluation was not conducted by the time salary raise and bonus decisions are made, the affected employee may not get a raise or bonus to which the employee would have been entitled.
• If the evaluation was not conducted in time to be placed in a tenure or promotion packet, then the packet may be deficient.

About timeliness. According to Section 10.3 A (1) of the contract, "The proposed written evaluation, including the employee’s annual assignment which was furnished pursuant to Article 9.3, shall be provided to the employee within thirty (30) days after the end of the academic term during which such evaluation will be made." For an employee evaluated for the calendar year 2004, this language could be construed to give a deadline in January (as the evaluation process starts with teaching evaluations the previous year), but such evaluations have often been completed later in the spring semester, and apparently the Provost's office construes this language to give a deadline in late May (thirty days or so after the end of the semester).
Whatever the case, a faculty member evaluated for the calendar year 2003 should have received their evaluation long before December, 2004, and it was just such a delay that moved the Provost's Office to send a letter to Deans and Chairs advising that this semester, employees evaluated for the calendar year 2004 should receive their evaluations by the end of May. May, 2005, in case anybody asks.
So an employee being evaluated for the 2004 calendar year who does not receive their evaluation during this semester has a serious problem.
We often don't notice evaluations (they seem merely another piece of paper that we're supposed to handle, and we handle so much paper), but as employees are held responsible for what evaluations say, employees should take them very seriously. Especially when they are missing.
This brings us to an important point. The contract may say that the Administration must evaluate us in a timely manner, but it also says that employees must file complaints in a timely manner. Article 20 of the contract provides for filing a "grievance," ie, a formal complaint, filed at the Provost's Office, that the contract has been violated. This complaint must be filed within 30 days of "the date on which the employee knew or reasonably should have known" of the violation. That means that if an employee knows or should have known that the evaluations should have been returned by a certain date, and the evaluations weren't, the employee has thirty days to file a grievance.
That means that an academic employee who does not receive their annual evaluation on time (end of May, according to the Provost's Office) should act -- by the end of June. If an employee waits several months, the administration may legitimately refuse to address the delay, or any damage that resulted from it.
This burden on the employee to complain, and to complain within thirty days, holds for all grievances. One typically cannot wait half a year and then complain; employees have a contractual obligation to complain in a timely manner. While it is true that in the grievance that generated the Provost's letter, the Provost waived the thirty day limit, in general the Provost has no obligation to do so -- and usually does not.

About errors. There is one related problem. Suppose an employee gets their evaluation and it contains factual errors or some other weirdness. What should the employee do? The old principle of law is that silence betokens consent. So an employee does not want to consent to an evaluation, what should the employee do?
First of all, by 10.3 A (1), an employee has the right to consult with their supervisor about the evaluation during the evaluation process. Then when the evaluation is presented, the employee should sign the evaluation: the signature does NOT betoken consent; it merely says that the employee has looked at it. The employee gets a copy of the evaluation. The employee has the right to respond (in writing, in comments to be attached to the evaluation in the employee's personnel file) to the evaluation. The employee also has the right to speak to the supervisor's supervisor about the evaluation. And as usual, worried employees are encouraged to contact the union: our Grievance Chair, Mark Klisch, can be reached at . Finally, if the employee wishes to file a grievance, the thirty day deadline holds here as well.

In conclusion, it would be a good idea to read Article 10. Notice that 10.1 (A) says that the annual evaluations are not to be the only basis for personnel decisions. Notice that 10.3 (A) says that if an employee is found deficient, the employee's supervisor shall assist the employee in addressing the deficiency. Notice that 10.3 (B) (2) says that Sustained Performance Evaluations (the every-seven-year post-tenure review) is based solely on the contents of the employee's personnel file. But you can't defend your rights if you don't know what they are.

There have always been tensions between teachers and students, and usually governments let parents and local administrations worry about this. Historically, government involvement in teacher-student relations is not very positive (witness the tendency of newer repressive regimes to use students to spy on teachers, and the tendency of older repressive regimes to rely on teachers to indoctrinate students). In liberal democracies, government intrusion in teacher-student relations are often media stunts: they're not really so much to solve a problem (and sometimes it's not clear what the problem is, anyway) as to create photo-ops for the studiedly outraged politicians.
Florida is the latest stop of a campaign of many media stunts, led by David Horowitz, editor of Front Page magazine, and director of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. (He is also one of the columnists for Townhall, which is perhaps the pre-eminent...agency...for "conservative" pundits.) While his political biography follows a stereotypic "neo-conservative" trajectory -- he was a leftist in the 1960s and 1970s, and edited Ramparts magazine -- he rejects the label "neo-conservative."
Indeed, unlike most "neo-conservatives," he spends little time rationalizing the application of force in politics and diplomacy, and instead poses as a spokesman for marginalized groups against a leftist academic establishment. His National Campaign to Take Back our Campuses (whose motivational work is a pamphlet on Political Bias in America's Universities) includes an organization called Students for Academic Freedom; notice that the SAF makes little pretense of being a student-run organization), which has been pushing an Academic Bill of Rights, which the National Campaign has been hawking to state legislatures across the country.
One of the state legislatures that bit was ours: Assemblyman Dennis Baxley has presented the Academic Bill of Rights to the House; the bill was modified and retitled Student and Faculty Academic Freedom in Postsecondary Education (HB 837). According to the University of Florida Independent Alligator, Baxley said that the bill was aimed at professors who "misuse ... their platform to indoctrinate the next generation with their own views," giving as an example, "Some professors say, ‘Evolution is a fact. I don’t want to hear about Intelligent Design [a creationist theory], and if you don’t like it, there’s the door.'"
There are several possible reactions, the most straightforward being to respond to Baxley's (and Horowitz's) public rationales. Representative Dan Gelber did this when (as the Alligator reported) Gelber warned that this act would enable a student to sue a professor who insisted that the Third Reich's Holocaust actually occurred. Similarly, the American Association of University Professors issued a statement that somewhat laboriously makes the following points:

• Students are often graded not on the content of their arguments, but on their form. (Even in the natural sciences, a lot of the grade relies not on whether the answer was correct, but on how the student reached the answer.) This bill might allow a student to challenge a low grade given to poor work on the grounds that the conclusion presented differs from the teacher's own beliefs.
• The rationale for the law calls for a diversity of opinion, but since the diversity is usually infinite, it invites the courts to come and decide which of the diverse array of opinions is reasonable. For example, following Baxley's Darwin-versus-Genesis example, a court would have to worry about other options, like Hesiod's Greek Theogony (which, unlike Genesis, actually is connected to paleontological work in Antiquity), pre-Darwinian scientific models like catastrophism and polycreationism, and of course the insistence of many native Americans that their ancestors did not cross from Asia.

Addendum added April 6: On April 5, USF UFF President Roy Weatherford debated Dennis Baxley, and he subsequently sent us this message:
This is the substance of a message I sent today to various higher education leaders and organizations around the nation who are concerned with this threat to academic freedom. The response has been so uniformly positive that I thought I would forward it to our USF constituency and thank the UFF members at USF who make it possible for me to do this kind of work defending academic freedom.

Today I taped a segment of “Democracy Now” wherein I debated Rep. Dennis Baxley, chair of the Education Council of the Florida House of Representatives and sponsor of HB 837, "The Student and Faculty Academic Bill of Rights”, which is in fact another devious right wing name for an attack on academic freedom.
The taping went fairly well. It will be broadcast at lots of different times in lots of different markets, mostly PBS, Pacifica, and independent listener supported radio and TV stations but also a couple of satellite systems including, I think, the Dish network.
Here’s the link to the web page on which you can listen to or view the segment and check to see if and how it is broadcast in your area. I expect the link will only be active for a short while. Go to this link.
During the debate I made a point of mentioning that I was speaking for the Florida Education Association primarily but also represented the views of all three national higher education faculty organizations: The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), The National Education Association (NEA), and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), speaking together with one voice for the first time and united in our opposition to this bill. Amy Goodman seemed particularly impressed by that and asked me about it after we finished taping. She took my card and said they might be following up on this.
In solidarity,
Roy Weatherford
813.240.4101

Readers may recall that summer school salary was one of the most contentious issues in bargaining. It has been contentious ever since, long ago, UFF won in bargaining a contractual clause (see 8.4 B (3) of the collective bargaining agreement) stating that faculty teaching during summer are to be compensated at the same rate as during the year. Eliminating this clause was one of the Administration's priorities in the reorganization, and the UFF and the Faculty Senate are justly proud that the clause is not only in the new contract, but also in the new personnel rules.
The Administration is toying with a way to weasel out of it. The trick is that a preceding clause (8.4 B (1)) says that "available" summer positions will be offered to in-unit faculty. The Council of Deans thinks that"available" means after assignments have been made to adjuncts and graduate assistants, or carved up as team teaching assignments. This from a memo from the Dean of Education, which says that the Council of Deans composed a list of Criteria for Supplemental Summer Assignments. (The language curmudgeon grumbles that the list is of directives and recommendations, but not criteria.) Item (3) is: "Departments are encouraged to use creative ways to distribute limited summer funds. Examples include but are not limited to: team teaching and judicious use of adjunct faculty and graduate assistants." Hopefully this directive is subordinate to the spirit of (1): "... Departments should prioritize their course offerings based on student needs."
At first glance, this directive or recommendation seems like a pragmatic response to limited funds. But this is part of a pattern of priorities. Just last week the Board of Governors met at USF and issued directives that we will...produce...so many teachers, so many nurses, so many this, so many that, as if issuing directives makes it so. This is a Master's Program, by a directive of the Board; that is an accredited campus, by a directive of the Board; USF is a Research I university, by a majority vote. The Board allocates the funding its experts recommend (without any faculty input at all) and this makes it so.
This is more than just a circumvention of the contract, bad as that is. It is also another nickle-and-dime compromise on the road that will in the end reduce USF to little more than an overglorified community college. And we are sorry to see that the Administration is trying to make this compromise quietly, rather than publicly presenting it to the Board, and to the press, as an example of what USF is being reduced to, and will be reduced to, unless the Board and the Legislature reverse their policies.

The union responded by filing a chapter grievance alleging that the administration had injured the chapter by directing USF’s lower management to violate the provisions of the new collective bargaining agreement, which says that “Available supplemental summer appointments shall be offered equitably and as appropriate to qualified employees ('employees' means "bargaining unit faculty").

The administration promptly scheduled a meeting to discuss the grievance. Associate Provost Phil Smith told our grievance chair, Mark Klisch, that the grievance had no merit because if anyone were injured by this action it would be individual faculty, not the union. Nevertheless, he said that it was not the intention of the administration to deprive faculty of summer teaching assignments. He offered to send a memo to the Academic Deans and Directors clarifying the university’s position.

Meanwhile the Faculty Senate had been independently pursuing the issue. Thus the second memo says:

Both the faculty union (UFF) and the Faculty Senate have raised concerns that the referenced criteria could be interpreted as encouraging those making summer teaching assignments to rely heavily on adjuncts and graduate teaching assistants to deliver the summer instructional program to the detriment of regular 9-month faculty. Such is not the intention of the referenced criteria promulgated as part of the February 28th memorandum.

The memo goes on to say that “priority in summer assignment should be given to regular 9-month faculty” and faculty should not be limited to a one course summer assignment.

But then in the final paragraph it says that the original criteria should be posted in each department.

We believe it is clear that each department should first offer scheduled courses to regular faculty before any alternative instructors are involved. If your department is not following this standard, the individual faculty who do not receive the opportunity to teach are entitled to immediately file grievances. Mark Klisch cannot investigate the practices of every department himself – he needs the rest of us to check and see if our departments are not giving priority to our faculty. Then he can process the grievances that are the practical means to seek redress.

Remember, the union is not a bunch of outsiders getting paid to conduct investigations, it is just us, working together to protect our individual and collective rights.

As mentioned in the last Biweekly, Florida Assemblymen Dennis Baxley said that he was dismayed by the exclusion of creationism from college biology, and introduced a "Student and Faculty Academic Freedom in Postsecondary Education Act" (from a template provided by a think tank in Los Angeles; see last week's article). As mentioned two weeks ago, the bill enumerates various things (balanced presentation of controversial topics in class, equitable distribution of activities fees, etc.) that students and (junior?) faculty have a "right to expect." No one really knows what this language means, so there is the danger that one court could construe it to be meaningless while another could construe it to mean that people can sue if their expectations were not met.

It was this latter concern that led the Department of Education Legislative Analyst to project that passage of this bill would require that the State University System spend an additional $ 4.2 million per year on new legal staff. (See the House analyst report.) And it is this latter concern that moved UFF, and our national affiliates, and other organizations like the AAUP, to condemn the bill. The UFF Senate resolved:

Whereas, House Bill 837/Senate Bill 2126 would interfere in student-professor relations, infringe on academic freedom, place Florida at a competitive economic disadvantage attracting and retaining the best faculty, compromise the educational experience of the student, and violate democratic rights guaranteed by the Florida and U.S. constitutions, the United Faculty of Florida opposes House Bill 837/Senate Bill 2126.

The union has been very active opposing the bill. Speaking on behalf of the union, UFF President Tom Auxter told a Legislative committee (during the unbalancedly brief time that they granted him) that the bill will seriously damage our ability to recruit first-rate faculty to Florida. Then UFF USF President Roy Weatherford debated Representative Baxley on the nationally televised “Democracy Now” program. Speaking as Higher Education Director of the Florida Education Association and as the designated spokesperson for our affiliates, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association and for the American Association of University Professors, Weatherford said that we especially object to three provisions of the bill. First, it "specifies that faculty may not introduce controversial subjects when they're inappropriate, but it provides no mechanism or means for determining who gets to say what is 'controversial.' Somebody, evidently, will have the right to tell us what we cannot say in our classroom..." Second, that the bill "says that students have the right to expect that alternative views will be presented," and noting that Baxley had mentioned the exclusion of creationism from biology classes, Weatherford asked whether the quasi-Marxist theory called "Lysenkoism" also should be presented in class (Baxley then claimed he had not really meant that creationism should be taught in biology classes -- it is not clear then what he had meant). Finally, Weatherford noted the $ 4.2 million price tag, which Baxley called a drop in the bucket compared to other "diversity" measures universities take. The exchange is on-line.

Media reaction to the bill seems somewhat negative. On March 16, the Palm Beach Post warned that in a more left-wing climate, such law could backfire on Baxley's allies, and on March 23, the Post recommended that Baxley read Orwell's "1984." On April 7, the St Petersburg Times editorialized that the good news was the Bush himself opposed the bill, while columnist Howard Troxler saw the problem as a confusion of critique with attack: "We live in an age when nobody needs any facts. In this modern day, you can believe any old thing you want, and if the facts get in the way, ignore 'em." USF Chapter Treasurer and Professor of Psychological and Social Foundations Sherman Dorn wrote in the April 8 Palm Beach Post and the April 11 Lakeland Ledger that this was another example of Legislative meddling in the universities: "The 2000 Legislature dismantled the Board of Regents when it refused to approve a new program that then-House Speaker John Thrasher wanted for his alma mater. And last year, the Legislature made Florida a national laughingstock by trying to force a chiropractic school on Florida State in disregard of faculty judgment." On April 10, the Gainesville Sun reported that Baxley said of the lack of any enforcement mechanism in his bill that the bill is "a lofty guidance tool of philosophy ... There is no causative action." Student newspapers have also weighed in, as noted in -- faculty concerned about Florida's reputation take note -- Nature, in which an article dated April 6 (see the April 7 issue) and entitled "Professors bristle as states act to mould lecture content" quotes Baxley complaining that, "I've been called an ass in the school newspaper at the University of Florida ... and that demonstrates exactly what I am talking about."

It is not at all clear to this webmaster what Baxley's bill would do about a student newspaper that called a politician names.

Anyway, on April 11, Tom Auxter sent a letter to the faculty. The bill is still winding its way through committees.

Florida Assemblyman Dennis Baxley's bill on "Student and Faculty Academic Freedom in Postsecondary Education," designed to protect "conservative" students from "liberal" professors, seems stalled and observers optimistically predict its demise. But of course, anything can happen while the Legislature is still in session. The obstacle appears to be the Senate's skepticism about the bill; the Senate Analyst's report contains many concerns, including a Socratic lament about the bill's failure to define its terms.

This is an update on the bill: see the previous episodes in the March 31 Biweekly and the April 14 Biweekly.

Baxley sounded resigned to the bill's death, admitting that "it might be on life support" and announcing that he thought he had made his point, and that he had initiated something that would lead to positive results. He met with the university presidents who, according to press reports, were unconvinced that there was a problem to address. Baxley's chief piece of evidence was a student newspaper cartoon of Baxley; it is not clear if Baxley invisions a student's academic freedom as extending to making fun of Florida Legislators. (The cartoon is on-line.)

Meanwhile, the bill was just condemned by the Florida Association of Community Colleges. You can follow the bill's progress on its home page.

Again, this is just the Florida part of a national campaign, pushed by an arm of David Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture: this arm, called Students for Academic Freedom, calls for students to report biased teachers via an on-line form. Meanwhile, one of our affiliates, the American Federation of Teachers, had its annual Higher Education Conference, which devoted a lot of time to planning to fight the national campaign that is pushing these bills: see a brief account of the meeting.

It is not clear what the goals of this campaign is. It could be an attempt to eviscerate the Academy. It could be a cynical campaign of media stunts designed to generate excitement and donations. This campaign involves many interests, who may have a variety of motives. The current bill may indeed be dead (although the coroner hasn't signed off on it), but the campaign isn't going away.

Readers may remember that in February, the First District Court of Florida ruled that the terms and conditions of the 2001-2003 contract were still in force after the contract expired (see the February 17 Biweekly). This is what the UFF had been contending (and the Administrations denying) all along. Technically, the adversaries are UFF and the staff union AFSCME versus the Public Employee Relations Commission (PERC, the state's labor agency for public employees, whose commissioners have all been appointed by Governor Bush) and, hiding behind PERC, the UF, UWF and FSU Administrations.

Since February, FSU and UWF appealed, the appeal was denied, and the last avenue for them is an appeal to the State Supreme Court, which UFF's legal advisors regard as last ditchery. The results of the current rulings are: the terms and conditions of the contract were in force since January 7, 2003, so that all administrations that violated those terms and conditions (at behest of scofflaw boards of trustees) are now in a legally awkward position. Meanwhile, those universities that have not bargained a new contract still have the terms and conditions of the old one (USF has a new contract, so our relations with our Administration and Board are governed by our new 2004-2007 contract).

Ultimately, this ruling's greatest effect may be to prevent similar stunts in the future: an employer cannot get rid of a union or a contract by reorganizing. USF Professor Surrendra Singh, who is UFF's chief grievance officer, called this the biggest contract enforcement decision of our lifetimes. And its effects will reach across the nation, and to all unionized employees.

More on this in the upcoming Uncommon Sense newsletter.

Other Business

The community colleges have been dealing with mandatory drug testing and fingerprinting. No doubt this recurrent issue will be coming our way again.

The Graduate Assistants' Union is putting a lot of effort into health insurance. (Thesis directors: what sort of health insurance do your students have? Yes, this is a problem that can affect not only the student, but the professor whose research program involves the student...).

The universities are increasingly relying on adjuncts. The result is a lot of adjuncts, with no job security, no benefits, and poor work conditions. (There is also the credential problem, but that's for the accreditation agencies to chew on.) And not just adjuncts: about half of all new hires to "permanent" positions are non-tenure-track. Since tenure was originally designed to protect academic freedom in the classroom (!), this raises some serious problems...like the future of tenure itself. UFF decided to study the problem further; both our national affiliates have decided that if universities are going to hire vast numbers of adjuncts, the affiliates will try to unionize them. At least, this effort might help slow the drift towards the Walmart-ization of American academia.

UFF has had a problematic relationship with Sami al-Arian. He originally got in trouble for incendiary speech, and both the speech and the trouble worried many at USF. His dismissals (plural) were of dubious legality, which worried UFF, as any union is necessarily a creature of law. Our history with him makes the spectacle unfolding in downtown Tampa painful. Our members have a variety of views about him, and UFF itself takes no position on his speech and activities (real and alleged), but we do believe that not only he but the country deserves a proper trial.

At the April 1 meeting of the USF Chapter Meeting, the USF Chapter of the UFF resolved to express its concern about the current legal proceedings and call for a fair trial even if that meant moving the trial to another state, to send a silent representative to the opening of formal proceedings, and to make a similar motion at the UFF Senate; for more on the Chapter's actions, see the Minutes for April 1 at . On April 3, the UFF Senate was dismayed by accounts (which have been reported in the mainstream press) of how al-Arian had spent 23 hours a day in a windowless 6' x 9' cell, how he was prevented from reviewing evidence on his case, and so on. Whether or not he is guilty, we should expect the corrections departments behave in a responsible and professional manner. (We expect the same of the officers of the court!) And so the Senate decided to send a silent representative to the opening of legal proceedings, and made the following statement:

"The United States of America is and must be a nation of laws, and the legal process must be serious, rational and equitable. So we are dismayed by the treatment of the defendant during his incarceration. A denial of due process to anyone is a threat to us all. And so for the sake of the rule of law and the protection of American rights and liberties, we call for a full and fair trial of the case of Sami al-Arian, even if that entails moving the trial to a different state."

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