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UFF Biweekly
United Faculty of Florida -- USF System Chapter
28 January 2021
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IN THIS ISSUE

Winter

America is in a dark winter, according to the epidemiologists, and there has been a lot of surreal behavior lately. And colleges and universities across the nation are wrestling with financial issues.

  • Taking Care. We are still in the midst of the pandemic, and not just individuals, but institutions and governments need to take care this winter and spring. For more, see below or click here.
  • As the Budget Turns. The Board of Trustees approved a plan for imposing cuts. For more, see below or click here.
  • USF's Financial Position. UFF commissioned a review of USF's financial position. For more, see below or click here
Meanwhile, the USF Chapter of the United Faculty of Florida is conducting its election this spring. Four offices are open, and we have twenty UFF senate seats and ten FEA seats to fill. WE NEED YOU! See the Call for Nominations for details.

In addition, the statewide United Faculty of Florida, which represents faculty at all public universities in Florida as well many public colleges (and graduate assistants at four universities, including USF) is holding elections as well. Members will receive instructions by mail on how to nominate candidates and how to vote.

Yes, you have to be member to participate. To participate in the chapter election, either as a candidate or as a voter, you must be a UFF member by February 26, the deadline for receiving nominations. So join today!

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 chapter election, USF' financial situation, the latest on the pandemic and teaching online, 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. We are meeting on alternate Fridays at noon over Zoom. 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.

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.

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.


Taking Care

Historians have described some surreal behavior in past pandemics, from flagellant movements to persecuting minorities accused of spreading the disease. Covid-19 is not comparable to the Plague, but we are seeing some strange behavior.

  • The Kansas Board of Regents decided that the financial hole created by the pandemic justified a new policy to suspend or fire tenured faculty without declaring financial exigency. "Handcuffing our ability to ensure financial strength in the name of tenure is counter to its purpose," said one trustee, although why dismissing tenured faculty when the financial situation was not exigent is unclear. (Editorial comment: this shows the value of having a collectively bargained contract that one side cannot unilaterally rescind.)
  • Meanwhile, in Florida, Pensacola State College mandated that each faculty member teach at least two classes this spring "face-to-face," and declined faculty requests to teach synchronously online even if they have medically documented illnesses that place them at high risk.
  • And the University of Florida denied many faculty requests to teach online. UF President W. Kent Fuchs said that, "our best shared opportunity to retain full funding for our university and thereby protect the jobs of our employees is to provide more of our students with the full educational experience and opportunities they had before COVID." (There are concerns that the Legislature will punish institutions that don't teach face-to-face.) On January 22, President Fuchs sent an email to students telling them about a new feature on their GatorSafe app that would allow them to report faculty who taught courses online that should be taught face-to-face. The feature was subsequently removed, but students are still encouraged to turn in miscreant faculty. The Washington Post reported the faculty requests were being funneled through UF's Americans with Disability Act (ADA) review team, which had denied accommodations to a Type I diabetic despite that disorder being on the CDC's list of risk factor illnesses (although the Post reported that Type I diabetes was not on the UF ADA's list, which raises interesting questions about UF's ADA office). UF admitted to the Post that UF has not set benchmarks for going back online amidst a surge.
Pensacola State College and the University of Florida administrations may be pandering to Tallahassee, which is increasingly prone to ideologically motivated micromanagement. One consequence of surreal behavior may be a growing cynicism among students about leadership, including university leadership.

One thing we know for certain is that COVID-19 is indifferent to Tallahassee's political priorities, and there is no reason to believe that the virus will relent in order to suit the politicians. In fact, amidst politically motivated pandemic management, it took twelve weeks for the American death toll to rise from 200,000 to 300,000, and five to go from 300,000 to 400,000. This acceleration led Dr. Fauci to warn we face a "Dark Winter." A University of Washington model forecasted that if mask mandates were eased, the number dead could exceed 700,000 by April - about the number of American deaths during the entire 1918 pandemic.

Meanwhile, one study suggested that reopened colleges were superspreaders while cases in the vicinity of colleges that went remote declined. (The situation for K-12 schools is more complicated. A lot may depend on what is going on around the school, for it appears that when the positivity rate is low, face-to-face teaching can be done safely; of course, the positivity rate here is not low.)

Such realities led USF Professor Stephen Neely and Florida Cybersecurity Center staff director Ron Sanders to write that Depoliticizing COVID-19 may be Biden's most important task. And not just President Biden's.

As the Budget Turns

As mentioned in the 13 January 2021 Extra and Tampa Bay Times, the USF Board of Trustees has approved a Strategic Budget Realignment Plan that entails $ 36.7 million in cuts - for now. The Administration has also appointed a Strategic Planning Advisory Task Force to help develop the plan.

Meanwhile, UFF has received a report on USF's financial position (see below).

During the fourteen-minute meeting, the only discussion came from Faculty Representative Tim Boaz, who sought confirmation that USF would follow the usual policy of revisiting the budget plan just before the end of the fiscal year (i.e. in June); President Steve Currall confirmed and added that USF should have a strategic plan in place by then.

So during this semester, this task force, the Administration, and stakeholders will be following the flowchart posted with the meeting agenda. The university community is invited to share their views and concerns with the task force via a survey and a comment form.

USF's Financial Position

Although USF, like much of the country, has suffered financial losses because of the pandemic, when the USF Administration proposed a list of college-level cuts last fall, part of the rationale was that outside of the pandemic, USF's long-term financial position had been undermined by the Legislature's failure to provide USF the resources necessary for developing and maintaining its pre-eminent status - and by the Administration's attempts to deal with the problem by shifting money around.

The pandemic supplied urgency to the process - and it is interesting that the cuts were proposed in response to a state Board of Governors mandate to propose cuts in response to the pandemic. But cuts in programs and faculty as a response to the pandemic would be evocative of Dear Abby's description of suicide as a permanent solution to a temporary problem. (Of course, quite a few institutions have done just that - and down the road, they may well regret it.) But the USF Administration made it clear that this was a Strategic Realignment.

Part of the realignment was motivated by the pursuit of excellence, although (as previous issues of the Biweekly have observed) the Administration was perhaps over-reliant on the American Association of University's somewhat money-oriented notions of excellence.

But part of the realignment was motivated by a desire to solidify USF's financial position, which is why the United Faculty of Florida sought an outside expert in academic finances to look at USF's finances. UFF hired Social Science Research, Evaluation and Measurement (SSREM), which has conducted higher education financial audit analyses for more than a decade, examining the finances of colleges and universities coast to coast.

SSREM reports that as of a year ago, USF was in a sound financial position. Reviewing reports such as the most recent financial audit of USF by the Florida Auditor General (for the 2018 - 2019 fiscal year, reported in December 2019 and posted last year, which should at least give us an idea of USF's long-term position), SSREM concludes that, "The University’s statements of revenues, expenses and changes in net position demonstrate solid growth in total operating revenues" despite an increase in operating expenses, and that the increase in appropriations and return from investments "bode well for the future of the University." However, the pandemic has upended much. There was federal relief from the CARES Act, and SSREM wrote that "it is important to find out why the University" spent only three-fifths of those funds as of last November. For more, see the report.


LOGISTICS

Chapter Meeting tomorrow Friday, January 29, 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 and send in 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.