United Faculty of Florida, Summer 2010

"Unaccredited institutions are not reviewed against a set of standards to determine the quality of their education and training," warns the U.S. Department of Education. "...earning a degree from an unaccredited institution may create problems for students." The U.S.D.E. recognizes accrediting agencies, including the specialized Commission on English Language Program Accreditation (CEA), whose scope is "...the accreditation of postsecondary, non-degree-granting English language programs and institutions in the United States." It was founded in 1999, recognized by the U.S.D.E. in 2003, and currently accredits about eighty programs in the new, growing, and somewhat wild and woolly world of English language instruction (for details on the sort of wildness and wooliness agencies like the CEA face, see the Biweekly article on such programs).

As all graduate admissions officers (and HR departments!) are aware, the world is full of programs and institutions handing out parchment like candy, and all kinds of new accreditation agencies are being organized to – *discourage fraud* seems such a harsh way of putting it, so let's follow the CEA and say that these agencies "promote excellence." Accrediting agencies newly recognized by the U.S.D.E. during the last ten years include the Teacher Education Accreditation Council, the Commission on Massage Therapy Accreditation, the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education, the Council on Naturopathic Medical Education, the Midwifery Education Accreditation Council, and the CEA.

One problem an accrediting agency can face is: what if an institution replaces an accredited program with a different program? How much of the accreditation would the new program inherit? Considering the shenanigans entertaining aficionados of weird news in higher education, a prudent accreditation agency may be justified in being cautious. CEA Director O'Donnell's reaction to USF replacing the ELI with INTO USF was blunt: "... the former English Language Institute was within the University and was totally controlled and governed and met all the standards through its division in the University" she told the USF Oracle (see the USF Oracle article), but "[n]ow that there’s the partnership with INTO, that is no longer true because the controlling factors are under INTO." (Talking with Inside Higher Ed, she stressed USF's failure to keep CEA informed. See the Inside Higher Ed article.)

Accreditation is not a new issue. In the July 1, 2009 Faculty Senate Executive Committee meeting, Wilcox assured the SEC that USF was not interested in a venture that would compromise the program's accreditation. And there was the example of Oregon State University, which had similarly lost its accreditation with CEA after joining with INTO. (Oregon State continues to run its...unaccredited...program nonetheless.)

Although most of the fuss was about whether it is USF or INTO that "owns" INTO USF, there is another problem. The CEA Standards for English Language Programs and Institutions lists several standards for faculty, including Faculty Standard 5: "Faculty members having working conditions appropriate for their responsibilities." Admittedly, UFF takes a broader view of "working conditions" than CEA, but we cannot help noticing that the USF Oracle reported that one of their anonymous sources told them that "...INTO faculty was told by administration to not speak of the situation." This suggests that the terms and conditions of employment – which to UFF includes academic freedom – are under stress at INTO USF. And this was exactly the sort of problem UFF and other skeptics were worried about. INTO's own aggressive and litigious history (see the Biweekly story on INTO) suggest that USF may have joined with a magnet for trouble.

Once again, any UFF member can seek assistance from the UFF by contacting the Grievance Chair, Mark Klisch.

In theory, USF's favorite map is the 2007 – 2012 Strategic Plan (see, e.g., downloadable documents, and strategies, and of course a presentation; also see the Biweekly's 11/16/2006 story and the Biweekly's 3/8/2007 story).

The State University System also requires that universities produce annual reports and "work plans" to "... outline the university’s top priorities, strategic directions, and specific actions and financial plans for achieving those priorities."

The USF Administration is working on a "work plan" to send to the Board, and UFF has received working drafts, which we have posted on-line.

• The working draft of the USF work plan.
• The working draft of the Polytechnic work plan.
• The working draft of the Sarasota-Manatee work plan.
• The working draft of the St. Petersburg work plan.
• The working draft of the Tampa work plan.

• They are clearly cribbed from the 2007 – 2012 Strategic Plan. That is not surprising, for the working plans are supposed to project into the future, and that future was already projected by the Strategic Plan.
• They are compendia of adjectives and benchmarks. Just as the Strategic Plan does not propose "specific actions and financial plans", neither do the working plans.
• There are no reports in the working plan about progress made against the benchmarks. Admittedly, the regulation didn't ask for them.

The USF Administration has long emphasized membership in a particular prestigious association as a goal. USF Administration's Vision Statement in the Strategic Plan reads: "The University of South Florida envisions itself as a premier research university with state, national, and global impact, and positioned for membership in the Association of American Universities (AAU)." But in the working plan, the Vision Statement for the entire USF system reads: "The University of South Florida System will empower and connect its institutions into a distinctive system nationally recognized for innovation in its teaching and research, for attracting outstanding and diverse scholars, staff and students, and for transforming its region and beyond." So much for the AAU? No: the Vision Statement of USF-Tampa reads: "The University of South Florida Tampa envisions itself as a pre-eminent research university with state, national and global impact, and positioned for membership in the Association of American Universities (AAU)."

As if to underline Tampa's position in the system, Goal 3 of USF-Tampa ("Building World-Class Academic Programs and Research Capacity") begins with: "Research is a hallmark of every college, department and program at USF Tampa. It is an expectation and a privilege of every faculty member, whether it is sponsored by an external funding or carried out with support of university resources." Taken literally, this sweeping statement could be a source of considerable misunderstanding or even mischief.

This brings us to the curmudgeonly question of what this exercise is for. Or rather, is this working plan going to be used for anything other than filling filing cabinets? If it is going to have any force, it's centrality to academic issues make it something that should require not only faculty input, but faculty vetting.

Impasse is a procedure in labor law when two sides have a small number of issues they cannot come to agreement on in the context of broader agreement on the contract. UFF and the Trustees have signed and ratified two Memoranda of Understanding in the past year that change the terms and conditions of employment, but that is separate from the complete Collective Bargaining Agreement. With regards to the total contract, only one article of 31 has been agreed to (on professional development leave and sabbaticals), and the Trustees declared impasse on two articles (Article 3 on UFF Privileges and Article 8 on Appointments of the current contract), a curious combination that ignores the rest of the contract.

The Trustees' previous proposals on Articles 3 and 8 also have a relatively small financial impact on the University. The chapter's bargaining team estimates that the current differences between the parties on all disputed issues in the two articles are less than a quarter of a million dollars, considerably less than the salaries of several university vice presidents and a small fraction of the total salaries of the President's Cabinet at USF altogether. Compared with the billion-dollar annual operating budget of the university, this is a rounding error.

There are also a few errors in an e-mail sent to many faculty Tuesday morning from the administration. According to the email from management, UFF is stopping the university from distributing one-time bonuses to faculty and others who have received Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching and other awards, and management also claims that UFF's bargaining team will not bargain summer salary caps. But actually the chapter's bargaining team offered to extend the summer cap and put a proposal on the table months ago to remove awards from the annual bargaining of salaries. These proposals are posted on the UFF bargaining page; in particular, see:

• UFF proposed protecting awards money last November (see item 23.5 on p. 3 of the November 15 UFF proposal), and by now proposals to protect awards money are rather similar; you can compare proposals by comparing the April 9 UFF language for 8.4F on p. 6 of the UFF proposal versus the April 9 BOT language for 8.4F on p. 4 of the BOT proposal.
• The real dispute over the summer cap was whether it should be short-term: see the April 16 UFF counterproposal.

"I'm bewildered at management's refusal to accept reasonable offers and the subsequent declaration of impasse," said Chapter president Sherman Dorn. "Instead of analyzing management's concrete interests, maybe we should have brought out the Ouija board to prepare for bargaining."

The chapter is consulting with UFF staff in Tallahassee over the next week for the next steps to take in this particular case. In theory:

• The UFF and the BOT agree on a Special Master, who will hear arguments for both sides and make recommendations for contractual language to present to the bargaining unit and the BOT for ratification.
• If both sides agree to the Special Master's recommendations, then that is the language that will be presented for ratification.
• If either side objects to the Special Master's recommendations, the dispute goes to the Legislative Body of the contract. Under law, that's the Board of Governors, recently the BOT has been claiming that authority, so the BOT would then hear the dispute between the UFF and the BOT and impose contractual language to present for ratification.
• If both the bargaining unit and the BOT ratify the language, that will be the contractual language; if not, the contract language dies at the end of the fiscal year under discussion in bargaining.

First, the legalities. As Smith observed, a teacher is not obligated to teach any sessions other than the regularly scheduled ones. It is the responsibility of the Administration to compose a schedule providing sufficient time to accommodate a syllabus of the appropriate number of credit hours, and to satisfy institutional (and student!) accreditation needs. It is the responsibility of the department or the teacher (as appropriate) to compose a realistic syllabus considering the time constraints. For more on the legalities, see the UFF blog posting.

Second, the realities. Students have schedules of their own, and scheduling additional sessions to make up for holidays or class time cancellations due to hurricanes, etc., can cause logistical problems and equity problems for teachers (how does one treat students fairly if some students can participate and others cannot?).

There are several things a teacher can do other than hold additional class sessions. One may assign some material as homework (and use Blackboard as a monitoring tool); one may encourage group formation as a technique for providing students with feedback on their work; one can even be heroic (although there is no contractual obligation to do this) and meet with groups of students at mutually acceptable times. But there is another thing a teacher can do...

Under the making lemonade out of lemons category, a reduced amount of class time may provide an opportunity to take a long, hard look at a syllabus that may have been left unrevised for years, or even worse, accumulated seaweed and barnacles. A reduced schedule may be a hint that perhaps one should decide what is important – and what is not. Of course, that sort of judgment call can only be made by a teacher with the capacity and authority to take a blue pencil to a syllabus. That's one reason why it is best to employ regular faculty for summer school. And it's a reminder that academic freedom includes the authority to judiciously wield a blue pencil when conditions warrant.

As noted in the Florida Education Association's Final Report (see p. 27 of the Final Report), the State University System's total operating budget will increase about 5 %.

But sixteen of the 44 allocations on the veto list (posted on line) were of line items for specific higher education institutions, including three from USF (funding for a part of USF Polytechnic New Campus, the new Pharmacy building at USF Polytechnic, and the Interdisciplinary Science building at USF Tampa). So higher education got a hit, and strangely enough, it was in buildings, which politicians usually like to keep moving during recessions because construction helps keep employment up. Crist did not explain these vetoes in his veto message (posted on line).

A budget is as much plan as commitment, and it was made with certain economic assumptions in mind (assumptions made before, say, the Greek debt crisis and the Gulf oil spill – either of which could represent problems for Florida's economy this coming year). The money will actually be delivered in quarterly installments, and at this point we can only cross our fingers and hope that the installments will come through.

Next year, the projected hole in the budget is six billion dollars – twice that of this year. And that means that during the fall election campaign, there will be a lot of backroom budgetary planning for the next legislative session. The Florida Education Association will be dropping by those backrooms to encourage continued funding for higher education – which is, after all, one of the most reliable engines for pulling economies out of recessions.

Foreign students are big business these days, and for Commonwealth and American universities, that means not only recruitment but also English language instruction. As noted in the 24 September 2009 issue of the Biweekly, USF decided to expand its foreign student presence by merging its English Language Institute (ELI) with a British company founded by an Australian realtor, INTO University Partnerships.

INTO is a relative newcomer in a new field, and its performance in Oregon State University did not inspire confidence: OSU had consequently lost its accreditation with the Commission on English Language Program Accreditation (the CEA, see their website). At the 1 July 2009 USF Senate Executive Committee meeting, Provost Ralph Wilcox stressed the importance of recruiting foreign students, but as paraphrased by the minutes (see the minutes), "USF is not interested in partnering with anyone who might threaten the on-going accreditation of ELI."

But this April, USF did indeed lose accreditation with the CEA, as reported in the Biweekly (see the article). Since then, the General Counsel's office has provided us with some relevant letters, and we can trace the sequence of events. First of all, the Policies and Procedures of the CEA (see their PDF file) has a whole section on "Procedures for change of control or ownership", which starts on page 41 of the PDF file.

• On March 29, USF sent a letter (see the letter) announcing the merger, stating that ELI was now the "Academic English program" of INTO USF, and concluding that "We would like to continue CEA accreditation of the Academic English program, which was the primary program of the former English Language Institute."
• On April 12, CEA sent USF a letter (see the letter) saying that it was not clear to what extent that this Academic English program was a continuation of the ELI, and at any rate, it was not clear that Academic English met CEA's standards. Then CEA noted that when an accredited institution makes a substantial change, it is supposed to submit a "Reporting Substantial Change" form, which was enclosed. At any rate, the CEA withdrew its accreditation.
• In late April, USF Provost Ralph Wilcox sent CEA a letter (see the letter) apologizing for the "apparent insufficiency" of the March 29 letter, stating that the Administration was "both surprised and disappointed" by USF's loss of accreditation, but that the Administration understood how the CEA could have "misinterpreted" the situation. The letter asserted that the university "has maintained continuity of ELI programmatic functions" and that INTO was providing non-academic contractual services. The letter asked for additional discussion to continue accreditation, and Associate Provost Kathleen Moore sent a follow-up formal appeal on May 24.
• On May 28, the CEA backed off from its declaration of an immediate end of accreditation. The letter grumped that substantive changes "must be reported to the CEA prior to the change taking place" (see the letter). A new "50/50 relationship" with an outside agency is a substantive change. But "...to provide due process to INTO USF", CEA withdraws its withdrawal of its accreditation. For now. HOWEVER, the muddle will be forwarded to the CEA Commission, and USF must submit, by July 15, documents substantiating the assertions of continuity between the ELI and INTO USF. The letter concludes with a warning: "...CEA retains the right to investigate and require additional documentation or an on-site visit...."

Phi Beta Kappa has a long history of interest in the liberal arts; after all, the Greek letters Phi Beta Kappa is an acronym for Philosophiae Biou Kubernetes – "love of wisdom is the helmsman of life". And its primary interest when selecting chapters must be undergraduate education, practically by definition.

While Phi Beta Kappa no longer insists on classical Greek, their standards are still based on the liberal arts. To be eligible for induction, baccalaureates must take at least ninety course hours in arts and sciences, in particular establishing sufficient mastery of foreign languages and mathematics (see their eligibility page).

In response to USF's latest application, Phi Beta Kappa wrote (see their letter) that in USF's favor:

• USF has a good number of Phi Beta Kappa members among our faculty, and
• USF has good students, and
• USF seems to be supporting the arts and sciences (perhaps more than previous times Phi Beta Kappa looked at USF).

• USF's graduation rate is low ("even for an urban comprehensive institution"), and
• USF's student/faculty ratio seemed high, and
• USF's "parameters for the library, foreign language requirement, and graduate school placement were difficult to discern."

But this raises the question: is a Phi Beta Kappa chapter important to USF? If excellence in undergraduate education is one of USF's goals, a Phi Beta Kappa chapter would seem to be a likely benchmark. On the other hand, undergraduate education requires resources, and if USF's board and administration are primarily interested in other priorities, then it is not surprising that USF has not gained a Phi Beta Kappa chapter.

On the other hand, the community seems to be under the impression that undergraduate education is a USF priority. Indeed, in the 2007 – 2012 Strategic Plan, seven of USF's eight designated peers have Phi Beta Kappa chapters (the list of peers is on the 6th page of a presentation document for the plan) and two of USF's three aspirational peers have Phi Beta Kappa chapters. There is, at least, a public commitment to the kind of excellence Phi Beta Kappa represents.

The question goes to the articulation between the values expressed by the USF Board and the Administration, and the details of their actions. And as this particular issue – undergraduate education – goes to the heart of the academic enterprise, it is certainly an issue that the shared governance system at USF should address openly and comprehensively.

The AAU (see their website) was founded in 1900 by fourteen universities – including Harvard and Yale – to be a "...forum for the development and implementation of institutional and national policies promoting strong programs of academic research and scholarship and undergraduate, graduate, and professional education."

In 2009, the AAU announced that its 62 members received 57 % of all federal funds for college and university research, employed 81 % of the members of the National Academies, and claimed 70 % of the Nobel prizes awarded to Americans. In 2006, AAU institutions awarded 16 % of the undergraduate degrees and 53 % of the doctorates while employing 69 % of the post-docs and enrolling 63 % of the National Merit/Achievement Scholars. Not bad for a group with 6 % of the undergraduate students nationwide.

And the AAU has 63 members now: Georgia Tech has just joined. The Chronicle of Higher Education commented, "...for many universities, particularly up-and-comers, the big draw is prestige. Trustees, lawmakers, and donors want to see signs of progress, and being on the shortlist with Yale and Berkeley looks good in a rankings-obsessed industry."

But what kind of shortlist with Yale and Berkeley?

The Chronicle reported that membership depends primarily on external funding and the number of National Academy members. The AAU's nine indicators (including their rather dated and slightly weird (the Pulitzer doesn't count?!) list of awards, memberships and fellowships) suggest a strong interest in high profile research and scholarship; there is a generic indicator for "undergraduate education" that gives little clue what the AAU looks at in this area, and the AAU's attitude may be changing:

• When Clark and Catholic universities left the AAU, "amicably" we are told, there was talk about how Clark and Catholic put greater emphasis on undergraduate education than the rest of the AAU members.
• Both Clark and Catholic have Phi Beta Kappa chapters, which shows a commitment to undergraduate education. 59 of the 61 U.S. members of the AAU have Phi Beta Kappa chapters, and tellingly, one of the exceptions is the recently inducted Georgia Institute of Technology (the other exception being Caltech).

USF is in a major metropolitan area in a transitional period, both astride the I-4 corridor and at a gateway to Latin America, both a major resource for a state that will need intellectual resources and a door of opportunity for a large population of students from less advantaged backgrounds. Florida taxpayers, parents, students, employers and employees, pay the bills, and the faculty, professionals, and staff do the work. We all should be asking: Where is USF going? Where do we want to go? Where do we want to be? On the cover of the Rolling Stone? If that is the best sense of identity that the Board of Trustees and the Administration can muster, we can only recommend that they seek input from faculty, professionals, staff, students, and the community at large.

For USF, what is the brass ring? After all, AAU membership is certainly some kind of ring. But so is a Phi Beta Kappa chapter (which USF just failed to get: see the June 17 Biweekly article). Which are iron and which are brass? Recent news events suggest what the brass ring might look like.

USF's identity and mission have been highlighted recently in its leadership and participation in studying the scale and effect of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill into the Gulf. Readers may recall that USF's Weatherbird II found a plume of oil six miles wide, that British Petroleum saw nothing, but that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed USF's reports. USF is at the forefront of the national effort to ascertain the scope of the disaster and to develop a response. USF's contribution has meant more to the community – and is more likely to be treasured by the community – than participation in any exclusive club, no matter how prestigious. (For up-to-date information on USF's efforts, see the Marine Science page on the oil spill).

This story is not a one-day-wonder: the oil is going to be with us for years, fouling the beaches, killing mangroves, making life hard for corals and fish. USF is going to be part of the long-term response. And USF is in a good position for that: for USF has faculty active in areas from marine environmental science and water to community involvement. USF is more than just six superbowls: USF will be developing science and technology to understand and deal with the oil and provide options, and we will be teaching the students to use that science and technology.

And of course, "we" are the faculty and professionals at USF. As Nobel Laureate Isadore Rabi observed, the faculty are not employees of the university – the faculty ARE the university.

We can compare the situation at USF with that of Florida State University. Despite unrestricted net assets of over $ 300 million, FSU reacted to the budget crisis last year by laying off 62 faculty and reorganizing major units. The Geological Sciences, Meteorology, and Oceanography departments were merged, and faculty laid off. Science magazine quoted FSU Arts & Sciences Dean Joseph Travis saying, " Sciences never pay for themselves ... There’s always a subsidy arrangement."

This was not just bad timing. FSU is in the state capitol, it serves a state with peculiar geology (Florida is a sponge made of limestone), problematic weather, and surrounded on three sides by ocean. The outcome of the decision to collapse the three departments was foreseeable: all the oil spill did was to make manifest the already predictable consequences of the cuts. (For more on FSU's cuts, see the January 7 Biweekly article.)

So it was logical for the USF Board and Administration to employ USF's unrestricted net assets to protect a priceless resource of the people and the state of Florida. And recent events show that the decisions made by the USF Board and Administration to protect the institution were correct. And in fact, these recent events suggest that it is service to the community – in scholarship and research, in teaching at all levels, and at community outreach – that is what the brass ring is all about.

USF has a cluster of web-pages within its Strategic Planning site, largely accessible via the Performance Metrics page.

The place to begin is probably the Performance Dashboard (click the link at the lower right hand side), which lists eight numbers, with the history over the past five years and the (green) goal. For example, the second number is the estimated Federal R & D expenditures for science and engineering. This is a slightly peculiar number, considering that science and engineering is only some of the university, and in particular it overlooks the river of money flowing into the Health Science Center. Anyway, expenditures rose from $ 143 million in 2004-2005 to $ 170 million in 2008-2009. This is a somewhat steady increase, especially considering the dip in NSF funding in 2005.

But the SAT was first, and from 2004-05 to 2008-09, the mean SAT for "First-Time-In-College" (FTIC) freshmen increased from 1108 to 1160. Presumably this refers to the combined scores for critical reading and mathematics (maximum = 1600), excluding the writing component introduced in 2006. Anyway, during the five years in question, the College Board says that the mean scores sank from 1026 in 2004 to 1016 in 2009. This suggests that either USF's applicants are getting higher scores or that USF is getting more selective.

This brings us to the maddening problem with such dashboards: what we get is the first glance. And sometimes we don't get critical information needed to put key data in context. Notice that drilling is impossible from the dashboard; if we want more, we have to look at the Planning and Performance Accountability Matrix. There are two tiers (links at the menu at the left), and let's look at the Secondary tier.

Recall the shallow increase in SATs mentioned on the dashboard. Now, item B.II.5 shows increase in GPAs for incoming FTIC freshmen. (And the percentage of Pell grant recipients has declined from nearly 30 % to 26 % -- recalling links between family income and academic performance.) And B.II.7 notes a substantial increase in National Merit, National Achievement, and National Hispanic Scholars.

The last item is difficult to analyze in the absence of the total number of incoming FTIC freshmen, a critical piece of contextual information that is, ahem, absent. So we go to the Office of Decision Support, to the InfoMart, and find that the undergraduate FTIC new student headcount for fall in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 were 3957, 3774, 3800, 3157, respectively. So the proportion of high performance new students has increased, and possibly the total number of new students is going down.

All this suggests that USF is indeed becoming more selective. On the other hand, USF is providing opportunities: notice that B.II.8b shows a shallow increase of first generation students.

And you can get a sense of what the administration values (notice that in the Primary tier of the Planning and Performance Accountability Matrix, item B.I.8 lists the number of National Academy members). You can even find a very sparse bit about finances. And it's on the web, waiting to be surfed.

At the last meeting on July 16, the UFF team presented a proposal on the remaining six articles left to be agreed to, and the BOT team terminated the meeting before reviewing UFF's entire proposal. In presenting that proposal, the UFF-USF bargaining team set the table to assure that neither side enjoys the impasse process if there is no agreement, on the principle that unilateral disarmament is unwise in collective bargaining. If there is no agreement, and the two sides head to a special magistrate hearing, the UFF-USF bargaining team will describe in more detail the course of bargaining over the past fifteen months. For the time being, the course of bargaining since January is outlined on the Bargaining page.

"It is in both sides' interest to reach an agreement if possible," said UFF Chief Negotiator Mark Klisch. "I remain hopeful."

One can get more precise prophesies from economic forecasters. The Institute for Economic Competitiveness at the University of Central Florida's July 2010 Florida Forecast predicts:

• The BP oil spill will discourage tourism, and "[e]mployment in the Leisure and Hospitality sector in Florida will not begin to grow until 2012." (In fact, a previous forecast predicted that the spill could put nearly two hundred thousand Floridians out of work and cost the state eleven billion dollars.)
• Housing starts will accelerate in 2011 and 2012 as construction recovers more rapidly than tourism.
• On the other hand, "[i]t will be 2014 before payrolls recover to their pre-recession levels." The forecast is actually more pessimistic, for during the previous decade, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, Florida unemployment rose from 3.8 % in January 2000 to 6.0 % in the depths of the 2001 – 2002 recession then slowly falling to 3.3 % in the spring of 2006. It was 11.4 % last month and the forecast predicts that "[i]t could be 2022 before unemployment falls below 5 % again."
• The forecasts sees the strongest growth during the next few years in professional & business services, trade & transportation & utilities, manufacturing, and...education & health.

For the coming academic year, we may face a reprise of 2008 – 2009. Recall (see the 12 February 2009 Biweekly article) that universities receive their allocations in four quarterly installments, and that during the 2008 – 2009 academic year, the state withheld 4 % of the installments when revenue failed to meet expectations. Last year, with all the "stimulus money" from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, there was enough money to get the state through the year. The stimulus money is dwindling, so the state may withhold money again.

Exactly how money would be withheld is unclear. The legislative leadership is thinking about a session in August, where the subject may come up. But with election in fall, there is some speculation that the mess will be postponed to next spring, when the cuts could be deeper.

That spring, the legislature will be budgeting for the 2011 – 2012 year. Even before the BP oil spill, there was discussion of a "six billion dollar hole" (twice the size of the hole the legislature faced last spring – when it was able to fill the hole with stimulus money). The State of Florida Legislative Budget Reduction Instructions for the Fiscal Year 2011 – 2012 warns that: "Maintaining a balanced budget could require as much as a 15 percent reduction in recurring appropriations through Fiscal Year 2011-2012." That's 15 % on top of previous cuts.

The situation is very serious. And the United Faculty of Florida is one of several organizations preparing for action.

Fortunately, there are already a number of organizations among the constituents of the USF community. In 2009, three of them – the Faculty Senate, the Student Government, and the United Faculty of Florida – invited institutional finance expert Leroy Dubeck to review USF's Financial Statement and describe USF's budget. This led to the public discussion of USF's unrestricted net assets and how they could be applied during hard times to protect the university. In the end, the Board of Trustees and the Administration used some of the assets to protect the university, and no faculty were sent away from USF.

According to the 2009 – 2010 Financial Statement, USF's unrestricted net assets were $ 289 million at the end of the 2008 – 2009 fiscal year. The resources are there.

One important lesson from that year was that we should pay attention to the budget. But with stormy weather ahead, it may be best for constituents and friends of USF to work together on not only surviving, but surfing the troubles of the next few years. That includes maintaining state support.

Many Florida leaders are saying that education in general and universities in particular are engines of growth (especially during downturns), and Florida boosters are saying that education (especially higher education) will be critical for Florida's future in a globalized Twenty-first century. That serves as background for the USF community to convey a message to the legislature. And the USF community would be much more effective conveying a message if the USF community worked together in communicating that message.

In politics, timing is everything. The elections are this fall, and budgetary plans will be drawn up during the next few months. This fall, the Florida Education Association will be asking Florida voter's to pay close attention to a very important election – especially with two critical referenda (Amendments 5 and 6) to restrict gerrymandering on the ballot – but then in spring the fight will be on to save the universities from the budgetary ax. Any employee in the bargaining unit who would like to help USF in Tallahassee can contact the UFF-USF Political Action Chair, Bob Welker.

Sherman Dorn
USF Chapter President
United Faculty of Florida
Join UFF

(In fact, UFF presented summer cap proposals addressing union concerns on March 5, April 9 (two offers), April 16, June 25, and July 2 (three offers). All can be seen on the Bargaining Page.)

Dorn added, "Since 2008, it has been public that we're concerned inflation on the cap would eventually reduce summer salaries to adjunct wages, and the Trustees' chief negotiator said July 16 that the Trustees would not address those concerns with this contract."

Dorn summed up the situation: "All this makes no sense if you look at bargaining in practical terms and look to compromise. It makes great sense if management decided that they had to have exactly what they wanted, total surrender, to get rid of something that was polluting their vision for the university."

"The Trustees' bargaining became worse after I became chief negotiator in January," says Mark Klisch, a licensed psychologist at the student Counseling Center. "Their impasse proposal to change current language – that's the language in the previous contract everyone agreed to – would fix low promotion raises for instructors at six percent instead of the nine percent that librarians and tenure-track faculty receive."

The two bargaining teams will present their cases at an Impasse Hearing on August 26 and August 27 at a time and place TBA by a Biweekly Extra. (The hearing is public, and ALL are welcome to observe in whole or in part.) The UFF position is posted Bargaining Page; the BOT has not yet informed the special magistrate or UFF what their position will be on Articles 9, 13, and 23.

In June, the BOT declared impasse over two of the thirty articles then being bargained. Chapter President Sherman Dorn said, "We were advised that when the impasse process starts, it addresses all unresolved issues. Our most urgent priority became narrowing down the unresolved issues so the two sides didn't look like utter fools in public. And that would let us see what would be necessary to reach agreement on the toughest issues and how to protect our ability to bargain, not disarming unilaterally."

The agreements reached June 25 and July 2 shows evidence of the first priority, (see the Bargaining Page). This was a speed-dating version of the way bargaining usually proceeds as a sequence of proposals that grow increasingly alike.

"I expect we've been described in private as unreasonable," Dorn said. "That we're defending anachronisms that interfere with managing a modern university. That compromise would be compromise with pollution. They have to understand that bargaining is about practicality, not purity.

"If we go all the way through the impasse process, both sides will be hurting. Or we could come to a reasonable agreement."

The two sides bargain "wages, hours, and terms and conditions of employment." Typically, the two sides exchange proposals, like the sequence of proposals enumerated on the Bargaining Page. When one side presents a proposal, its chief negotiator can list the various merits of the proposal, and members on the other side can ask questions, talk about the various deficiencies, and accept the offer or make a counterproposal (usually after private meetings called caucuses, or sometimes at a later session). Because of the way things are set up, it is tricky to discuss issues outside the framework of a given proposal, so bargaining often proceeds as a sequence of proposals that grow increasingly alike. If there is a complete agreement, both sides Tentatively Agree on various articles until finally the entire contract is signed and ready to present to the (employees of the) Bargaining Unit, and to the Board of Trustees, for ratification.

This is not a rational forum where the Truth (or best argument) determines the outcome; it is a structured legal process to allow unions and public agencies to work out differences and protect interests.

Take a look at the Bargaining Page: at most meetings, both sides presented proposals and talked about them. But on June 1, the Board of Trustees declared "impasse", and since then they've presented only one proposal. And that proposal – for salaries – was one that the BOT probably needed on the table during impasse, for legal reasons. In other words, since declaring "impasse", the BOT's level of participation in bargaining has declined.

So what is "impasse"?

In the course of bargaining, one side may send a Letter of Impasse stating that there is a "dispute" and requesting help. According to Florida Statute 447.403, for an independent public entity like USF, help consists of a Special Magistrate, who is to hear the case. In preparation for the hearing, the two sides share lists of issues to present to the Special Magistrate.

At the Impasse Hearing, the Special Magistrate determines the areas of dispute and the facts. Subsequently, the Special Magistrate composes a recommendation "with the objective of achieving a prompt, peaceful, and just settlement of disputes," according to Florida Statute 447.405. After the hearing, the two sides have to decide whether or not to accept the recommendations. If both sides accept the recommendations, then they are incorporated into the contract language to be presented to the Bargaining Unit and to the Board of Trustees for ratification.

The tricky part is if one side does not accept the recommendations. According to FS 447.403, the dispute is then presented to the "legislative body" to impose a resolution to the dispute, to be presented to the Bargaining Unit and the BOT for ratification. If this imposed resolution is not ratified by both sides, it becomes a sort of interim contract for the remainder of whatever fiscal year is in question.

According to FS 447.203(10), the "legislative body" of USF is the Board of Governors. But the Board of Governors delegated its collective bargaining authority to the boards of trustees, and USF Board of Trustees has delegated its authority as the legislative body to its Labor Committee (see the 8 April 2010 Biweekly for the story of the staff union impasse legislative-body hearing).

This might suggest to the sufficiently cynical reader that all the Board of Trustees has to do is to declare impasse, reject the recommendations of the Special Magistrate, and impose whatever they like. But life is not like that. Even assuming that all the footwork in the previous paragraph is legal, there remain some rules about bargaining that have to be navigated. And this particular situation is a bit tricky.

The impasse grew out of several sections of the contract where the Board of Trustees seeks to change the current language (i.e., the language of the 2008 – 2009 contract, much of which has been around for many, many years). Of the articles listed in the Letter of Impasse, the BOT seeks to change language in order to reduce promotional pay raises to instructors, to make summer pay caps permanent, and to charge UFF for release time. So the BOT declared impasse over current language (and BTW, the UFF estimates that these changes entail about 0.008 % of the university's budget). In addition, the BOT has pressed for a major rewrite of Article 13 on layoffs, which would dilute tenure and would not, in UFF's opinion, be in the interests of the faculty or of the university.

UFF's leverage resides in the fact that the current Collective Bargaining Agreement grants large swaths of discretion to the Board of Trustees and its management in areas in which the union could insist on nailing down, including workload, supplements for various added duties and responsibilities, starting salaries, minimum salaries, and rules for counteroffers. If a union does not waive its right to bargain such "mandatory subjects of bargaining," the Board of Trustees cannot take those issues to impasse and try to impose discretion that the union has the right to bargain.

In trying to come to an agreement this summer, the UFF has also preserved its ability to bargain those issues as the impasse process moved forward, and its position as stated at the table and documented in its statement of impasse issues is that it is not currently waiving the right to bargain these subjects. If there is an agreement without an imposition by the legislative body, both sides could of course agree to continue the waivers that each side historically has been willing to grant as a practical matter of reaching agreement.

And it is possible to reach agreement without getting to the legislative body hearing. The UFF chapter in Gainesville had been bargaining with the University of Florida Board of Trustees since 2005 when, after four years (!), UFF declared impasse. Bargaining continued for several more months, in the shadow of impasse, a prospect that may have played a part in the two sides Tentatively Agreeing to a contract.

The evidentiary hearing before the Special Magistrate for the UFF-USF impasse is scheduled for August 26, 27, times and places TBA in a Biweekly Extra; per Florida state law, the hearing is open to the public, and UFF invites all interested members of the USF community to attend. Meanwhile, UFF is willing and able to continue bargaining during impasse, and we are hopeful that the issues can be resolved without more fuss.