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.”
In view of this issue’s importance to the faculty, I encourage all Senators to “read up.” Please familiarize yourselves with the issues as they will be “in play” in the days ahead. Your reading assignment includes:
- The Ratification Summary listing TAs and MOAs on which we are presently voting
- The Co-Chairs’ February, 2012 Collective Bargaining Update
- The November 2006 “Report of the Faculty Senate Sub-Committee on Non-Tenure Track Faculty”
- The Working Document on Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Reclassifications (joint report)
- Section 8.3 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the UFF and Trustees
- The Constitution of The Florida State University, including Sec. VI.B.7
There will be a test.
Questions? Thank you for your time.
Don’t forget to vote!
Appendix: Selected Excerpts and References on Specialized (Non-Tenure Track) Faculty
Excerpt from the Report of the Faculty Senate Sub-committee on Non-Tenure-Track Faculty, Revised Nov. 27, 2006. Available via search at FSU or UFF-FSU web sites (with emphases added):
http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~baker/sgme/nttfreport110906.pdf (Revised Nov. 11, 2006)
https://uff-fsu.org/art/FinalReportNTTFCommittee112706.pdf
The following principles have guided the work of the ad hoc sub-committee:
1. The University should stay true to the FSU Constitution‘s vision of a tenured faculty and seek to maximize the ratio of tenured and tenure-accruing faculty to NTT faculty, recognizing the different needs and traditions of different Colleges, notably professional colleges such as Medicine;
2. The important contributions of NTT faculty to the work of Florida State University must be recognized;
3. The rights (continuing contracts, opportunities for promotion and merit-based salary increases, participation in University governance, etc.) and responsibilities of NTT faculty need to be explicitly defined;
4. The work of NTT faculty must be significantly different from that of tenure-track faculty (TTF) and the use of NTT faculty lines in academic units should be limited to assignments that cannot be performed by TTF;
5. The classification codes and working titles for NTTF positions must present a consistent system, communicate to the broad academic community (at FSU and elsewhere) that the NTTF member is in a faculty role, and identify the predominant duties of the individual; and
6. The recommendations of the committee should lay out a clear model for an implementation plan, but not attempt to specify every detail.
Excerpt from the 2010-13 Collective Bargaining Agreement for the FSU General Faculty Bargaining Unit (emphasis added):
8.3 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. The University Administration shall provide information to the UFF on the number of credit hours taught in the University, broken down by the position class code of the instructor.
Working Document on Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Reclassifications (joint report):
https://uff-fsu.org/cbac/NTTF-Reclassification-Draft20110322.pdf
The Constitution of The Florida State University
http://www.dof.fsu.edu/content/download/21170/136769/…/FSUConstitution.pdf