Ratification voting is underway.  If you are in the faculty bargaining unit and did not vote already, please do so on your way out today.

Aside from ratification, I would like to talk about reading assignments today.  I will try to be brief and give you more time for your reading.

One document I urge you to read is the summary of what we are voting about.  This summarizes everything we were able to resolve during roughly the past year of bargaining.  There were many other things that we discussed, some very important to the Senate.  Our bargaining co-chairs, Dr. Scott Hannahs of the Mag Lab and Dr. Irene Padavic of Sociology, prepared an excellent summary of the past year’s negotiations, including many of the issues that we are continuing to negotiate.  It is only two pages, and it is excellent reading on some critical issues.  Both documents are available at our web site and will pop up if you search there for “ratification.”

One key issue is the reclassification of specialized (non-tenure track) faculty.  As recognized in the 2006 Faculty Senate report on specialized faculty, this issue necessarily ties into FSU’s commitment to tenure.  Sec. 8.3 of our contract states “Commitment to developing and maintaining a tenured faculty.  The Board agrees that it is in the best interests of the University, the faculty, and the students to maximize the ratio of tenured and tenure-accruing E&G appointments to the number of non-tenure-accruing E&G appointments among those appointments including significant teaching responsibilities.  As Drs. Padavic and Hannahs report, however, “The chief … sticking point is the BOT team’s disinterest in any contract language that would follow through on the commitment of the FSU Constitution, the Faculty Senate, and the Collective Bargaining Agreement to preserve a tenured faculty.”

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