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Dear colleagues,
Your UFF-FSU Bargaining Team and the representatives of FSU’s Board of Trustees (BOT) met on June 3 for the latest round of negotiations. The administration has not yet responded to our initial article drafts on Salary (Article 23), Leaves (Article 17), or Artificial Intelligence Use (Article 32), so the breadth of negotiations was quite limited. What we did discuss ranged from weird to galling.
Weird: as I mentioned last week, the BOT team opened Article 10 (Evaluations) to provide a review every five years for in-unit administrators (e.g., department chairs) who are members of the faculty, but have been prohibited by the BOG and the BOT from going through post-tenure review (PTR)… and therefore are not eligible for the associated raises that we negotiated. We had initially tried to make provisions for chairs, and we still believe that this lacuna ought to be filled. We gave the BOT team everything they had requested. Additionally, we asked for a) an anonymized survey of faculty members in the chair’s department to be included in the review; and b) a decision deadline of June 15 for both in-unit administrator review and for PTR, so that faculty members would know they’re in good standing with the university before having to start their work on the next semester. Then, the BOT team withdrew their proposal; instead, they now want to include it only as a temporary (two-year) memorandum of agreement (MOA). They claim that they want to run it provisionally and see how things go and, ultimately, maybe change it.
Since we negotiate the contract every year, we don’t see any danger in simply including it and making amendments as necessary. They disagree. And they also keep saying “no” to our request to include a survey of faculty working in the department. We are concerned that chairs will only feel answerable to the dean if they are only evaluated by the dean, provost, and a three-person faculty committee (that the BOT proposed) comprised of people who are not necessarily in the same unit.
Galling: In addition to removing in-unit administrator review from Article 10, the BOT also removed “UFF activities” from the list of recognized university service. Though the article recognizes “participation in the governance processes of the institution” as service, the BOT is attempting to exclude what we do as part of that governance process. This recognition of union service has been in the collective bargaining agreement for at least twenty-four years, when we first contractually agreed to it. We are fortunate at FSU that we have two outlets for shared governance: the Faculty Senate (which handles matters of educational policy) and UFF (which covers the terms and conditions of our employment). For decades, FSU has recognized our work as important university service. Removing that designation is not only insulting but reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of university service. They claim that they cannot evaluate our UFF service and that people shouldn’t have to participate in UFF service to get good evaluations. They do not understand (or they choose not to understand) that most types of service are not evaluated the way scholarship and teaching are; participating in service is critical for the functioning of our university and of our academic disciplines, but the ways we do so are varied.
We invite you to get involved with UFF and, critically, to join our ranks. If we do not have at least 60% membership density in early July, we will lose our right to bargain and the ways the university evaluates us, the salary we receive, the workloads they assign, and so much more will be solely at their discretion. Please join now! And if you’re a member (thank you!), there is no better time to take an active role.
In solidarity and on behalf of your UFF-FSU Collective Bargaining Team,
Michael Buchler
Professor of Music Theory
Florida State University College of Music
Co-Chief Negotiator, United Faculty of Florida–FSU Chapter