Uncommon Sense

The Newsletter of the United Faculty of Florida, USF Chapter

(an FEA [AFT & NEA] affiliate)

Volume 11, Number 3 Winter, 2004

The Voice of the University Professional

Hard Thoughts About

Cold Cash

One of the most difficult sections to bargain is salary. The administration wants the discretion to grant raises as it sees fit. The union, which remembers many past abuses of discretion, wants a rational and transparent process for allocating raises. Since faculty tell the union that they want raises based on merit, the union pushes for the merit system, where department committees evaluate professors annually, and those evaluations (together with chairs’ evaluations) generate the annual raises.

There may be sanity, transparency, and fairness in the merit system, but no pizzazz. Administrative discretion, on the other hand, is like the lottery. You never know if you, YES YOU, may be at long last recognized and get that long-awaited raise. Like the lottery, it offers the romance of sudden (if long-deserved) riches. And it is sold like the lottery: with brief-lived or one-shot programs called Excellence or some such, sometimes even offering raises greater than the promotional raises.

But if you will permit a curmudgeonly word from the union, discretionary raise programs have lottery-like problems.

The obvious problem is that all the hooplah conceals how small the total amount of money is. Like the lottery, which was supposed to supplement education funding and wound up concealing the decline in total education funding, discretionary raise programs generate a lot of noise that conceals the fact that the total amount of money going into raises is small, and the odds of even very good faculty getting anything is also small.

For example, a widely-publicized program that offers, say, one million dollars in one hundred chunks of $ 10,000 each will provide a mean raise of only 0.5 % for the unit as a whole – and there are far more than a hundred under-recognized people on campus, who would get nothing at all. As a sign of the pathology, consider one of the few applications of discretionary raises that the union doesn’t beef about: counteroffers. It is becoming conventional wisdom around here that the only reliable way to get that long-overdue raise is to get another university to make an offer – and thus inspire a counteroffer.

In addition, all this effort – applying for one of these discretionary raises, or fishing for an offer – consumes time and energy that should go into teaching, research, and service. We already go through the annual evaluations. Even worse, while the departmental committees – having years of practice – know how to do the annual evaluations; the short-lived discretionary program committees do not. Each program generates its own scandals, grievances, wailings, and gnashing of teeth.

And scanning the awardees of the President-ial Excellence Awards, one cannot help noticing that the awardees tended to be people who were found meritorious by the departmental commit-tees, anyway. In fact, the official rationale for these awards was that the merit raises of the past decade or two had been insufficient. But the union has been pushing to fix this problem of “compression and inversion” for years. The only difference was that the Presidential Excellence awards barely addressed the problem and made a great deal of noise while doing so.

Yes, We’re Bargaining!

Last year, the Board of Trustees recognized the United Faculty of Florida as the union representing the faculty (translation: the Board agreed to negotiate contracts with the union). But the Board refused to recognize the previous contract as the status quo. This complicated things as one usually negotiates either from the status quo or ... from zero.

It turned out that the Board didn’t want to negotiate a new contract from zero: they just wanted to get rid of some stuff in the old contract. After a prolonged – and ultimately public – confrontation over grievances, bargaining is now underway.

The Board is represented by a team of lawyers and administrators, led by Universi-ty Advancement General Counsel Noreen Segrest. The union is represented by a team of faculty, led by Accounting Professor Bob Welker. They are going through the 32 arti-cles of the contract, article by article, nego-tiating new language (on top of, or chang-ing, the old) for an article, and when new language for that article is agreed on, both leaders initial a “tentative agreement” on that article, and move on to the next article.

Eventually, a new contract is negotiated. The new contract has to be approved by the Board and ratified by the Faculty (in an election) before it comes into effect. Then it’s time to start negotiating the next contract.

In Memoriam:

Mitch Silverman

Mitchell Silverman, founder of the USF Department of Criminology and past president of the USF Chapter of the UFF, died last December after a long illness.

In addition to his research in juvenile delinquency, the neurobiology of violence, and ethics, Professor Silverman had served USF as the Criminology Department’s Graduate Director and as Chair.

He is survived by his wife, two sons, and daughter-in-law. Memorial contributions may be made to the American Cancer Society or the American Association of Kidney Patients.