April 12, 2010. FAU Faculty partaking in the Annual Assessment of Administrators should rest assured of their anonymity.
Dear Colleague,
It has been brought to my attention that some individuals are reluctant to fill out the online survey for this year’s Annual Assessment of Administrators because they fear that somehow their responses might be tracked and even revealed to administrators who are being evaluated. I can only hope you will rest assured that there is no way that UFF-FAU or American Federation of Teachers (one of UFF’s two national affiliates on whose web space the survey is parked) would in any way compromise your information with any third parties. This survey is intended only to aggregate information, as has always been done in the past when the survey was administered on paper.
I am particularly sensitive to such concerns given that my own research sometimes uses survey method. As such, I am also aware of the increasingly complex relationship between digitial technology and surveillance, and the attendant ethical obligations required of social scientists in this regard. In all honesty, I should briefly explain how the survey works and what privacy implications may be involved. The survey link below directs you to a password protected page on uff-fau.org. From this page there are links to AFT’s survey software site. The webmaster of uff-fau.org indeed has information on what Internet Service Providers are requesting “page views” on our site. However, these do not reveal the identity of individuals–only the city and country where the ISP is located. (For example, we have had many visitors from Russia and EU countries, perhaps because of the term “union” on our site.) AFT has little more information than this either, and since hundreds of union chapters use the organization’s survey software, I don’t imagine AFT staff would have the time or inclination to find out what members are filling out what surveys so that it could inform management. Further, it would make little sense for a union to tattle-tale on members to a particular administration about individual criticisms of their management style.
With that said, I do not know what information the FAU administration collects on employees’ online movements and behavior at the workplace and on University computers, but it has the technological architecture in place for fairly precise measurement of these things if and when it chooses. Indeed, a majority of managements in the US conduct some form of electronic employee surveillance via IT.
With the above in mind, if you are still concerned about your privacy, I hope you will consider forwarding this email to your personal email or copying the url and password below for the survey and completing it from your residence and/or personal computer. UFF-FAU will leave the survey open until Friday, April 16 at 11PM if you would still like to participate.
Password: (send email to president(at)uff-fau.org)
Sincerely,
James Tracy
UFF-FAU President