The University of South Florida is probably the single greatest human resource in the Tampa Bay area. But Florida is a young place, populated by many immigrants (young and old) with few roots and little sense of history. When looking at the dispute between the USF Administration and Sami Al-Arian, it is important to remember that this is taking place in Florida, and that it is very much influenced by Florida's culture and Florida's academic politics.

• About Florida herself. To understand Florida, the place to start is Marjory Stoneman Douglas's classic book The Everglades: River of Grass. It is mostly about southern Florida, but it captures most of the state in its epic history beginning in the last ice age and, in the last revision, reaching 1987.
• The States of Florida. Florida is really two states.
  • The old State of Florida is the agricultural state that lies along the northern border (with Georgia and Alabama) and extends down into the central forest. This is the land of The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, of the `Florida Cracker' pioneers who settled the northern state in the early Nineteenth century (according to legend, the name came from their whips --- and indeed, there are Florida Cracker breeds of cattle and horses). The state capitol, Tallahassee, is the home of two of the three old universities; the third old university (the University of Gainesville) is also up north. This is the place where, until four decades ago, most of the political power was concentrated.
  • The new Florida is the glitzy array of palaces that arose around the southern coasts, Miami and Fort Lauderdale in the east, Tampa Bay in the west, and most recently, around Orlando in the middle. The new Florida is a state of Cuban cigars (especially Tampa), organized crime (especially Miami), tourism (especially, ever since the arrival of Disney World, Orlando), retirees (especially Miami and St. Petersburg), and ever since the arrival of the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, high technology. Even the old cattle and citrus and strawberries are being supplemented by ornamental plants and fish farms. The political power of the old Florida was broken two decades ago with the fall of the old `pork chop gang,' but the new Florida has yet to master the art of running a state. This is the Florida satirized by the likes of Dave Barry, Carl Hiassen and Tim Dorsey.
  For more on Florida, see the website of the Florida Internet History Center.

• In 1853, the East Florida Seminary opens in Ocala, and in 1884, the Florida Agricultural College opens in Lake City. The two are finally fused as the University of the State of Florida (now the University of Florida) in Gainesville in 1905.
• In 1857, the West Florida Seminary opens in Tallahassee, and is reorganized as Florida State College (now Florida State University) in 1904. The two seminaries were created by the Florida Legislature to teach ``art of teaching. . . in the mechanic arts, in husbandry and agricultural chemistry" and also "arts which ennoble man and make him truly independent.''
• In 1887, the Legislature creates a Normal School for black students in Tallahassee. This will become Florida Agricultural and Mechanics University.

• In response to complaints about Florida's ``weak governor'' system of executive government, in which the cabinet was elected and was essentially independent of the governor, a Revision # 8 reforming the cabinet was passed. Article 4 was changed, eliminating the ``Commissioner of Education'' as an elected official. Section 9.2 was changed so that the State Board of Education was no longer the Governor and elected members of the cabinet (in what had been Florida's ``weak governor'' system of governance): instead, a new 7-member body corporate (whose members were given staggered terms) would select the Commissioner of Education. See the Oct. 23, 1998 St. Petersburg Times analysis Revision would eliminate three Cabinet positions.
• In response to complaints about inadequate support for education, a Revision # 6 modified Article 9 so that it: Declares the education of children to be a fundamental value of the people of Florida; establishes adequate provision for education as a paramount duty of the state; expands constitutional mandate requiring the state to make adequate provision for a uniform system of free public schools by also requiring the state to make adequate provision for an efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system; this also passed. See the Oct. 13, 1998 St. Petersburg Times analysis Item on Nov. 3 ballot could move education up priority list.

• On Nov. 20, 1998, the Board of Regents approved a three-tier reorganization of the State University System, with UF, FSU, and USF in the top; this reorganization irritated advocates of those universities that wound up on the second or third tiers. (Incidentally, USF was delighted to be in the top tier, since it had long been treated, especially when it came to research and library funding, as a poor third to the much better connected UF and FSU. Indeed, by some measures, USF's funding was among the lowest in the system.)
• Senate President John Thrasher wanted a new medical school for Florida State University (which the Board of Regents did not approve), and Florida International University and Florida A & M University each wanted a new law school (which wound up in Orlando, theoretically under FAMU jurisdiction). These were merely the more extravagant examples of spoils fights between the Board of Regents and the Legislature during that year.

• Because the Regents had served staggered terms, the Governor could only replace a few at a time. But the reorganization permitted the Governor to appoint the Board of Education and the Boards of Trustees all at once. The Boards of Trustees were ethnically but not politically or culturally diverse, and few seemed to have much to do with education.
• Almost immediately, academic freedom became an issue, as the State leadership defended academic freedom in theory but not in practice.

• One very ominous event centered on a production of the play Corpus Christi by Terrence McNally, about a Christ-like gay young man in Texas. Originally scheduled to play in the Manhattan Theatre Club, in New York, it was cancelled amidst protests and death threats, inspiring counter-protests and a May 28, 1998 New York Times editorial, after which the Club decided to show it after all amidst tight security in Fall. The reviewers were not enthusiastic: ``more pontifical than personal'' --- AP, 10/13/1998; ``The play has a tricky and ultimately clumsy design'' -- Record, 10/14/1998; ``a beautifully staged, disarmingly performed, often witty, sometimes merely jokey, but ultimately earnest and predictable play'' -- NewsDay, 10/14/1998; ``Nice Young Man and Disciples Appeal for Tolerance'' -- New York Times, 10/14/1998; ``like so many didactic religious tracts, of whatever persuasion, it really is rather dull'' -- New York Post, 10/14/1998; ``the only thing McNally has to apologize for is a lame second act'' -- Boston Herald, 10/14/1998; you get the idea.
  Florida Atlantic University put up $ 600 towards producing the play on campus in March, 2001. Florida Education Commissioner Charlie Crist (who had been nick-named ``Chain-Gang'' Charlie for his efforts to institute ersatz chain gangs during his tenure in the Florida Legislature) wrote a letter to the editor comparing the production of the play to the Taliban's destruction of the two colossal Buddhas of Bamiyan. Crist went on to criticize FAU for citing academic freedom in defending the performance, and concluded by suggesting that the Legislature might retaliate against universities that made such productions. This letter led to a thread which concluded with Bush Lecturing University Leaders on July 25 that ``We should have diverse views on our campus, and they should be protected.'' But then-UFF President Rosie Joels noted that Bush's support of academic freedom was both rather recent and rather abstract, and that it was contradicted during a session with the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which was running a workshop for the new Trustees.

The University of South Florida is one of the twenty largest public universities (counting students) in the USA, spanning campuses in Tampa, Saint Petersburg, Manatee/Sarasota, and Lakeland. It is a major center of research, scholarship, and the arts, and is particularly noted for the College of Marine Science, the Moffitt Cancer & Research Center, and the Graphicstudio Institute for Research in Art. USF was the personal project of then State Senator Sam Gibbons, who pushed it through the legislature and across Governor LeRoy Collins' desk. Despite all this, USF has the distinction of being the Florida university that only the people want: to the elite, it was originally in the shadow of the nearby University of Tampa, and later, as it developed a statewide reputation, in the twin shadows of Florida State University, and the University of Florida. So it has always been unusually starved for funding, even for a Florida university, and there are periodic attempts by power brokers to dismantle, dismember, or transmogrify it.
Here is a brief chronology for USF:

• In 1955, Governor Leroy Collins signed House Bill 1007 authorizing the State Board of Education to establish a State University in Hillsborough County; in 1956, the Board of Control decided to build the university on Henderson Air Field, north of Tampa; in 1959, the Board of Control approved `Truth and Wisdom' as the new university's motto, along with green and gold as its colors.
• USF, decreed by the Board of Control as the first fully air-conditioned university in Florida (much to the irritation of UF and FSU students) opened its doors in 1960, saw the formation of the Student Government in 1961, graduated its first students in 1963, and was accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in 1965.
• Also in 1965, USF opened its Bayboro campus in St. Petersburg, now the second largest campus in the system.
• In 1966, the student newspaper The Oracle was launched.
• In 1968, the Graphicstudio is founded in the College of Fine Arts.
• USF offered the nation's first program in gerontology in 1967, was admitted to the NCAA in 1968, and hosted the first UNESCO conference held in the USA in 1973.
• In 1974, the small liberal arts college New College, was brought under USF's umbrella: in 1993, Money Magazine called New College the ``Best Buy in Higher Education.'' Also, USF began to offer courses in Fort Myers.
• USF's first doctoral program was in astronomy, launched jointly with the University of Florida in 1975, and several doctoral programs later, the Graduate School was created in 1980; and the SunDome basketball stadium (home court of the USF Bulls) opened in 1980.
• The Center for Writers established in 1977 (the first Florida Suncoast Writer's Conference was held in 1972).
• In 1982 two of USF's strengths were recognized when the state granted USF Florida's 2nd and 3rd Eminent Scholars endowed chairs, in marine science and cancer research.
• In 1986, construction began on a Polk (County) Community College / USF Center in Lakeland; this would become a major exercise in distance learning.
• The United States Geological Survey opens shop on the USF Bayboro campus at St. Petersburg in 1988: expanding from its old facility in Woods Hole Massachusetts, the Bayboro center will gradually expand into one of the leading oceanographic laboratories in the nation.
• USF co-hosts the Vice-Presidential debate between Messrs. Al Gore and Jack Kemp at St. Petersburg in 1996.
• The first USF President, John Allen, had opposed creating a football team at USF; but football arrived nonetheless in 1997.
• Meanwhile, also in 1997, the USF Fort Myers campus is spun off into an independent Florida Gulf Coast University; as an ``experiment,'' new faculty hired by FGCU will be on ``multi-year contracts'' rather than tenure.
• In 2002, New College becomes independent again.

• There are two kinds of adjuncts.
  One is a teacher with some special expertise or distinction, who is invited to teach for a few semesters. These adjunct positions are well-paid, and it is generally regarded as an honor to hold one.
  The other kind is a temporary position, in which a teacher not on the regular staff is assigned individual classes, and paid to teach those classes on a piecework basis.
• The attraction of piecework adjuncts is that they are cheap. The calculation works as follows. In the State of Florida, a full-time work load for a professor is (by law) 12 classroom hours per week (usually, 4 courses each meeting for 3 hours a week). (Considering out-of-class grading, preparation, course design, etc., this load is equivalent to a total of 35 - 50 hours of work per week, depending on the courses.) (Of course, many professors do not teach 4 courses at a time: for example, a professor may teach half time (i.e., 6 hours in class a week) and do research half-time (i.e., for 15 - 25 or even more hours a week). At a university on the semester system, a professor might teach 4 courses a semester, or 8 courses a year. If the professor was getting, say, $ 40,000 a year, he would be getting $ 5,000 per course (not counting benefits). But if the university paid $ 2,000 for an adjunct to teach that same course (and save money on the benefits, too), the university would save $ 3,000 (and then some) for each course taught by a piecework adjunct.
• The use of piecework adjuncts became increasingly controversial during the 1990s (see, e.g, the 12/16/1992 Chronicle of Higher Education article Budget Woes Bring Tough Job Market in Academe: But nearly half the colleges in one survey say they're actually expanding their faculties. Piecework adjuncts became especially popular for lower division (and remedial) classes that had huge sections: Mathematics and English were especially hard hit. But no area was immune. As adjuncts have no reason to have long-term commitments to institutions that have no commitments to them, they tend not to be as useful as faculty in long-term responsibilities; in addition, piecework adjuncts to a lot less research. For these reasons, most research institutions try to minimize the use of piecework adjuncts.
• The May, 1996 Report ... in re USF/WISE Relationship and Related Matters would find it relevant that ``adjuncts compose nearly 40 % of the faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences'' (p. 78) --- nearly all of them piecework adjuncts. Arts and Sciences tend to be unusually hard hit: suppose we look at USF as a whole (i.e., Arts & Science, Business, Education, Engineering, and Fine Arts, etc., but excluding Medicine, which has lots of expertise adjuncts). In 1998, as a result of a UFF initiative to study the adjunct situation, UFF obtained from USF information about the use of adjuncts, measured in ``Full-Time Equivalent'' (FTE) (e.g., 1/2 of a position for someone working half-time) and in ``Student Credit Hours'' (SCH) (e.g., ten students signing up for a 3-hour course generate 30 SCHs) (SCHs tend to drive funding). At USF, we found:
  • 52 % of the FTEs were tenured & tenure-track; 9 % were adjuncts; 25 % were graduate student teaching assistants; the rest were ``other regular staff.''
  • 51 % of the SCHs were generated by tenured & tenure-track faculty; 21 % were generated by adjuncts; 14 % were generated by teaching assistants, and the rest by other regular staff.
  (Many of the ``other regular staff'' are non-tenurable instructors: these positions are within the faculty bargaining unit, but they are controversial because of the lack of tenure makes them more vulnerable to administrative pressures to lower standards in teaching, to lower expectations in salaries, etc.)

• The most notorious involved the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, created at the insistence of State Senator Charley Johns in 1956, in reaction to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. While the original purpose of the FLIC was to dismantle the Florida NAACP and hunt for Communists (mostly in FSU and FAMU), the FLIC soon started pursuing homosexuals at UF and elsewhere. In 1962, after USF instructor Thomas Wenner criticized the John Birch Society in class, there was a flurry of press noises leading to the arrival of the FLIC at a hotel room off campus. Soon afterwards, Wenner (who had joined a movement to ban liberal speakers from campus) was suspended, and retired Vanderbilt Professor Denna Frank Fleming, whose appointment at USF was on the verge of approval, was not appointed following agitation from Wenner's group. Then USF Assistant Professor of English Sheldon Grebstein was suspended (and later censured by USF President John Allen) for using an allegedly tasteless essay by Norman Podhoretz in class - and Grebstein left USF for Harpur College in New York. This last act angered faculty and academic groups across the state, leading to a prolonged ruckus culminating in the American Association of University Professors censuring USF in 1964 for its treatment of Fleming. Meanwhile, the FLIC published its report on homosexuality, which was widely condemned by moralists as obscene (and snapped up by New York book stores). USF got off the AAUP's censured list in 1968. For more on this odd tale, see the UF video Behind Closed Doors, and James Schnur's Cold Warriors in the Hot Sunshine: USF and the Johns Committee.

• In 1966, Robert Stevenson started teaching in the American Ideas Department, and in 1969 he helped organize a demonstration on April 26 against Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, the Commencement Speaker at nearby Saint Leo College (as it was known then). The Tampa Tribune and the Board of Regents were upset. Stevenson was untenured, and USF President John Allen sent him a letter of dismissal. There was a huge ruckus, in which Stevenson was supported by students, staff, colleagues, his department, his dean, the NEA, the AAUP, and, most decisively, by the court. Stevenson was reinstated, awarded $ 7,500 in damages (a lot of money in 1970), and granted two year's leave. See Kathleen Ochshorn's article ``Cautionary tale of past USF censure'' in the May 5, 2002 St. Petersburg Times, accessible on-campus via lexis-nexis.

• In September, 1999, in a class on controversial art taught by Dianne Elmeer, a photograph by Teaching Assistant Derek Washington entitled `N----- Lover' was shown to a class that had been warned in advance that offensive material would be shown that day. The photograph was of Washington, who is black, making love to a white woman; the photograph is taken from behind Washington, and and only his back and buttocks, and her arms and legs, are visible. A female student sued for sexual harrassment, and in July, 2001, the university settled for $ 25,000. The settlement was construed by faculty as a setback for academic freedom, especially as Washington had briefly been suspended; the Administration presented it as a resolution to an irritating problem. See the July 4, 2001 story by the St. Petersburg Times, on Art or porn? USF opts not to fight, and the July 13, 2001 story by the St. Petersburg Times that USF reassures faculty after settlement. See also the July 16, 2001 article in the Oracle that Sexual harassment suit still pending.

• In early 2000, Mary Brennan, a non-tenured hourly employee of the Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute (FMHI), decided to run for the State House in Fall, 2000, for a seat she once held, a seat then held by Republican Leslie Waters. On Mar. 21, Ms Brennan was told by FMHI Dean David Shem that she would be fired; Shem made the phone call after a conversation with then President-select Judy Genshaft, who was in Tallahassee and had heard concerns from ``several people'' about Brennan running for the seat while being on the USF payroll. On Mar. 25, the St. Petersburg Times reported that USF president denies a role in candidate's firing, and that Shem said that he had decided to dismiss Ms Brennan before Genshaft called. FMHI has long been a target by the Legislature, and the entire episode provided the St. Petersburg Times an opportunity to complain in a March 27 editorial about the how ``Lawmakers not content to mismanage their own affairs are sticking their noses more deeply into the university system ...''

• The Charter USF President John Allen had started a University Senate (with Senators appointed by Allen) when USF was founded; faculty representatives formed an informal Faculty Caucus by the late 1960s. In 1972, members of the Caucus, and other faculty, prevailed on USF President Cecil Mackey to create a Faculty Senate, with Senators elected by faculty to represent individual colleges. Most of the governance was developed during the 1970s, along with its tradition of independence and concern for faculty issues. The current governance and concerns of the Faculty Senate can be reviewed on its USF Faculty Senate Archives.

• While there had been an American Association of University Professors chapter for the area during the Johns Committee, work to organize a faculty union in the Florida State University System began only in 1971 - 72. The United Faculty of Florida won the first certification election to represent SUS faculty in 1976, and has won subsequent elections as well. UFF has been affiliated with both the National Education Association and the American Teachers Federation, and is now affiliated to both, via the merged Florida Education Association. The primary purpose UFF is to negotiate and enforce the contracts that represented faculty have with their respective administrations. UFF currently represents Florida State University faculty, many Florida Community College faculty (in both public and private institutions), and Graduate Assistants at UF and USF. For more information, see the United Faculty of Florida website.

• The USF Student Government was formed in 1961 to serve and protect all students. In addition, the Graduate Assistants Union (GAU) was formed in 1979, and arrived at USF in 1987 to represent teaching assistants in USF and UF in collective bargaining: the GAU is an affiliate of UFF.
• The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor - Congress of Industrial Organizations, represents regular staff (University Support Personnel System) employees in collective bargaining. Campus police and medical center nurses have their own unions.