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Dear Colleagues,
The June 24 bargaining session between your UFF team and the Board of Trustees was, to say the least, alarming. After seven weeks of bargaining, the BOT team finally responded to our proposals for salary (Art. 23), leaves (Art. 17), and AI Use (Art. 32). For next year’s salary increases, they offered us a grand total of… nothing! No across-the-board raise (= performance merit), no departmental merit, no deans’ merit, and no market-equity raises. They did propose continuing previous years’ raises for promotion, sustained performance for specialized faculty (SPI), and Post-Tenure Review (PTR)—important raises, but ones that only affect a small percentage of faculty in a given year. If you didn’t get promoted, didn’t go through PTR, or aren’t eligible for SPI, tough luck! (If the administration has their way.)
The current inflation (CPI) rate is 4.2%. This means that faculty effectively lose 4.2% by continuing to teach at FSU. The BOT said that they just didn’t receive enough money from the legislature, but they were extremely loose with the details. The government allocated $14,000,000 for recurring funds (funds that can be used for raises) and they told us that $4M of that has already been encumbered. So what of the other $10M? And what would raises cost FSU? How much did FSU spend on raises last year and how many faculty members received a raise?
We will seek answers to those questions through public records requests (thank you, Florida Sunshine Laws!), but it would be helpful to let the administration know what getting no raise means to you. You can send your message by filling out this very brief two-question form. We will dramatically read your anonymous messages at the bargaining table. But it would be even more effective to show up in person at next week’s bargaining session: July 1 from 2:00–5:00 at the Training Center across from the stadium. We stream sessions, but they do not see how many people are on Zoom. We have already submitted a counter-proposal on salaries, and hope to see their response at the July 1 session. Let’s make them look even more of us in the eye and tell us that they don’t have the resources to provide faculty raises.
In other news, the BOT completely declined our proposal to expand parental leave into a broader family leave and they crossed out most of what we asked for in our new article on AI. You can also see our latest draft of an MOA that would provide Chairs with periodic review and raises (not unlike PTR). Have a look and let us know what you think. Even more importantly, feel free to write to members of our upper administration (President McCullough, Provost Clark, VP Clark, VP Taylor, VP Gibbs…) and let them know that faculty salaries matter, that inflation is making basic things unaffordable, that having the time to take care of our loved ones matters, and that protecting our intellectual property and creating a robust policy on AI usage matters.
Our administrators are clearly sending us a signal of what we can expect with no union. Many faculty are seeing the writing on the wall and joining, but we still need more people to join before July 3 or we will lose our collective ability to fight for raises that reward excellent scholarship, teaching, and service; faculty will lose our ability to fight for better benefits; and there will be no way for us to protect our intellectual property from a university that has repeatedly tried to claim ownership of its faculty’s scholarship and teaching materials.
I know you’ve heard this repeatedly and we don’t want to sound alarmist, but—truly—you should be alarmed! And please talk to your colleagues about joining. We really are on the precipice, and we need you more now than ever.
In solidarity,
Michael Buchler, on behalf of your UFF-FSU faculty collective bargaining team.
Professor of Music Theory
Florida State University College of Music