Life, said John Lennon, is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans. We at USF were reminided of this recently, with the Legislature mandating that we consolidate and our longstanding president leaving. But when life happens, it may be an opportune moment to take stock and think about where one is going. That may include re-examining unexamined or even unstated assumptions. One of these is about the nature of our work.
The USF Chapter of the United Faculty of Florida will meet tomorrow Friday at noon at CDB Restaurant at 5104 E. Fowler Ave., just east of USF Tampa. There will be pizza (and salad). On the agenda: meeting locations this summer. Come and check us out.
This summer, we will meet on May 24, June 7 & 21, and July 12 & 26 at noon at locations announced on the calendar on the UFF USF Website. Come and check us out.
Download, fill in, and mail the membership form. 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. Come and join the movement.
If you have been the victim of a violation of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, 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 online contact form. For more information, see our web-page on grievances; see also the article below.
Visit the United Faculty of Florida at USF Facebook page. 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, or contact the Communications Committee. The Committee will invite every UFF member that asks to join. So check us out. UFF members are welcome to join, and non-members are welcome to look.
At the last meeting of the USF Tampa Faculty Senate, new tenure and promotion guidelines for the consolidated university were presented by the Tenure & Promotion Workgroup, and USF Tampa representative Greg Teague warned that evaluating faculty scholarship based on past performance at USF may be like comparing the speeds of two sprinters, one who had been running on a track and the other on sand. Time and material resources for scholarship vary from campus to campus, so the record thus far may not be a reliable predictor of how faculty would perform in different circumstances.
This is not just an equity issue: job conditions (including resources, but also how employees are treated) can affect productivity and performance. For example, the cybersecurity awareness company KnowBe4 was founded in 2010, and last year was ranked by Inc. magazine as 96th in their list of the top 5,000 fastest growing companies in the United States with $ 64.5 million in revenue and 3,726 % growth. By some coincidence, KnowBe4 was the Best Large Company to Work For in this year's Tampa Bay Times Tampa Bay's Top 100 workplaces. (There were 1,514 nominees this year; nominees can be public, private, non-profit, or governmental.) KnowBe4's founding chief executive told the Times that "I work harder on corporate culture now than I did in the beginning," including communication about what is going on in the company. "The main thing is you want to keep your workplace culture as fun and fast as you can," and "You want to use the least amount of red tape as you can."
Working conditions can affect academics as well. Here is an example, but first, a little context. In academia, the Matthew Effect is exhibited in how more prominent faculty are able to get their papers published more readily, which are then more frequently cited, and are thus more frequently invited to give talks. A similar-looking phenomenon was recently described in Science Advances (see Inside Higher Ed for a synopsis): in a survey of computer scientists, they found that prestigious departments tended to hire graduates of prestigious departments. Matthew Effect, no doubt.
But wait. They compared faculty productivity (measured by publications, of course) versus prestige of the school those faculty had graduated from to faculty productivity versus prestige of the institution that they were at now. It seems that "...the prestige of faculty's current work environment, not their training environment, drives their future scientific productivity, while current and past locations drive prominence. Furthermore, the characteristics of a work environment are more predictive of faculty productivity and impact than mechanisms representing preferential selection or retention of more-productive scholars by more-prestigious departments."
This does not sound like the Matthew Effect. Perhaps the "more prestigious" institutions have figured out how - or have made the resolution to - make their work environment more amenable to faculty scholarship. If this is the case, we might ask what environmental factors would be more conducive to faculty scholarship. It might also suggest that a policy of hyper-recruitment while sloughing off current faculty might be counter-productive: if faculty are not doing well in the current environment, it might be the environment that is the problem, and hence replacing those faculty is unlikely to improve matters.
This brings us to things that go wrong in the work environment.
One advantage of being represented by a union is having a contract that enumerates rights and privileges. And one of the major duties of a union is enforcing that contract. That means if the contract is violated, there is a legal recourse.
Our contract is the Collective Bargaining Agreement, which the United Faculty of Florida (representing you) and the USF Administration (representing the USF Board of Trustees) bargained and signed. This contract governs academic freedom, assignments, evaluations, conflicts of interest and outside activities, salaries, tenure and job security, promotions, sabbaticals and professional leave, etc., etc., etc. The contract takes precedence over USF regulations and the faculty handbook (which are composed unilaterally by the USF Administration under the direction of the USF Board of Trustees).
But sometimes the contract is violated. An assignment or an evaluation can be capricious, the tenure or promotion procedure can be violated, participation in governance can be curtailed, the possibilities are endless. The contract provides for a grievance process for dealing with contract violations: a grievance is a complaint that the contract has been violated. Notice that a grievance concerns a contract violation: injustice and incompetence are not, in themselves, grievable. In addition, the contract requires that a grievance be filed within thirty days of the time when the grievant knew or should have known of the contract violation.
The contractual grievance process is available to all UFF USF employees, and is noticeably cheaper than litigation, which can cost thousands of dollars (and involves labor law, a subject that many lawyers are not particularly familiar with). And one of the benefits of UFF membership is the right to union representation in a grievance. UFF is not a charity, and will only represent employees who were members at the time of the contract violation. If you are a UFF member and would like advice or representation, contact the Grievance Committee.
The Grievance Committee consists of faculty volunteers who help colleagues in trouble. The Grievance Committee use some helping hands (for some reason, consolidation has generated an unusual number of grievances) and will run a training session next month. The session is open to all UFF members; if you are interested in helping your colleagues, if you would like to become familiar with the contract and the grievance process, if you are having difficulties in your job, if you are just plain curious, you are welcome. Thursday, June 13, at 9:30 am, at Perkins Restaurant on 5002 E. Fowler Avenue, just east of USF Tampa. We will provide breakfast.
Chapter Meeting tomorrow Friday, May 24, at noon, at CDB Restaurant, 5104 E. Fowler Ave., Temple Terrace.
We will have lunch at the meeting. All UFF members are invited to attend. Non-members are also invited to come and check us out. 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.
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