An update from President Charles E. Young
On
Sept. 15, 2003, I received a letter from Professors Trickey and
Zieger written to me on the subject of academic governance and
unionization. I responded to them personally on Sept. 17 and was
not aware until later that they had distributed their letter widely
to UF faculty. I have excerpted a few paragraphs of my response
that I thought would be of interest to you.
“Dear Professors Trickey and Zieger,
“… I appreciated your comments. I found them thoughtful and fair. I have no argument with many of your points. I just do not find them persuasive. ”
“With regard to your comments about promotion and sabbatical privileges, I can't speak about ancient history but I know something about current affairs. Two of the problems inhibiting the qualitative growth of UF, which I identified and spoke about at faculty meetings early on in my tenure here, were the lack of a promotional process for full professors and inadequate sabbaticals. We now have an SPP program for regularized professorial promotions based on performance, and in every year we have provided more in the way of faculty salary increases than the funds appropriated by the legislature would have covered. We have doubled the number of available sabbaticals and the Strategic Plan calls for their further expansion. That Plan also calls for many more improvements in the compensation and working conditions for faculty. The highest priority item in our budget request is for funds to dramatically increase the level of faculty salaries to bring them to par with those of our peer universities. None of this was done under pressure of the UFF or with its help and assistance.
“I will try to deal with the remaining points I want to make a little more succinctly than the preceding. I did not claim a cause and effect between non-union status and AAU membership. I guess I might be accused of saying that 62 of the 65 (I'm not now sure of the exact numbers) of the best universities in America don't have unions. Most do have strong faculty governance mechanisms. I plead guilty to that allegation.
“I did not say that faculty needed to choose between faculty governance and a faculty union. If the faculty chooses to be represented in bargaining by the UFF I will (or would have if I am no longer here) continue to fight for a well worked-out Senate/administration governance system. I believe, however, that it will never be as effective as it would have been had it not co-existed with a collective bargaining system.
“I am not anti-union. I believe that in most of the non-faculty employment relationships at UF both employees and the university are reasonably well-served by collective bargaining mechanisms. I believe, however, that the faculty are different, that, in many respects, they are not "employees," but "co-determiners" and should not be represented by a collective bargaining agent. Faculty salaries [at UF] have certainly not done as well as those at Universities I know well without union contracts: and I do not find tenure and academic freedom faring any better, at best, than in those same non-union institutions.”
While there are other claims made for past Union action which I believe are unwarranted, they are more subjective and it would become a matter of “I think, they think…” to respond to them. As usual, your reactions to these and other matters covered in this Presidential Update series would be appreciated.
Sincerely,
Charles E. Young
President