Nearly 600 FSU faculty members participated in the Spring, 2020 UFF-FSU Faculty Poll in late February and early March. They offered opinions on salaries, bargaining priorities, legislative issues, professional climate, administrator performance, the UFF-FSU Chapter, and various other matters. Many offered comments. Reports summarizing results, with or without comments are available.
Notably before the coronavirus pandemic loomed large on most Americans’ radar; a “pollster’s nightmare.” A diverse and generally representative sample of FSU faculty views as of March 1, but no doubt a poll today would reveal new faculty concerns.
Highlights:
- Salary preferences shifted toward cost-of-living increases, now 87%, with both merit and market equity raises prioritized by 50-some percent. Similar results in a forced-choice question, but both cost-of-living and market equity increases gained popularity while merit increases lost support.
- Non-salary priorities: Healthcare, a phased retirement option that includes healthcare coverage, and retirement benefits were top priorities (for 60%-plus).
- General satisfaction with FSU’s direction and assessments of faculty morale were both down noticeably (7-10 percentage points). Faculty are less satisfied and perceive lower morale among their colleagues.
- Percent of faculty agreeing that online teaching should be on a voluntary basis rose 5 percentage points, and the share agreeing that incentives should be used to induce online teaching rose about the same amount.
- Slight drop (3 percentage points) in faculty satisfaction with use of web applications such as FEAS and Academic Analytics for tracking faculty performance.
- Administrator evaluations: Slight drops (2-3 points) for most. President Thrasher still gets the best ratings, followed by department chairs and then deans.
- UFF-FSU Chapter rating also dropped 2 points.
- A drop in professional climate ratings for colleges (5 points).
- A relatively large drop in perceptions that faculty efforts are rewarded (8 points).
