Dear Colleague,
Last Thursday [August 27] President Machen announced his plan to hire a hundred more new faculty next year, using some $10M of stimulus funds. By the time these temporary funds run out, he told the Faculty Senate, they would be replaced by money coming from the differential tuition recently approved by the state legislature.
The news of this plan comes on the heels of the announcement that eleven of our present colleagues have been laid off. Curiously, for months President Machen had rejected out of hand the suggestion that stimulus money — the same money now to be used for the planned hires — be used to prevent lay-offs. As recently as May the President told us that it would be “imprudent” to do so, because stimulus funds would run out in two years. UFF pointed out then what the President stresses now: that by the time the stimulus money runs out, it will be replaced by money from differential tuition. Still, the administration continued to claim that the lay-offs were “unavoidable” and has gone ahead with making them. We should ask President Machen why spending a million or so to save faculty from being laid off would have been imprudent, but spending ten times that amount to hire new faculty is not. We should ask him why, if the layoffs were caused by “adverse financial circumstances” –- as the pink slips our colleagues have received say — they were not rescinded as soon as it became clear that UF would have the resources to hire a substantial number of new faculty.
It seems clear now that the lay-offs were not, and are not even now, unavoidable but the result of an administrative decision that the faculty to be hired would be more valuable to UF than those to be fired. “Past hard choices create future opportunities,” said President Machen to the Faculty Senate, adding, “This is a choice on our part.” We believe that such choices should never be made without extensive open discussion with the faculty, discussion that we all know — the administration’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding — did not take place. Instead, President Machen has offered us contradictory justifications for a policy that will cause lasting damage to our university. There is still time to re-consider: we call on him to reverse it by settling for ninety new faculty next year and saving the jobs of the eleven who, in spite of their excellent records, are slated to be lost to UF.
John Biro
UFF-UF President