Tenured Jobs Saved - Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, 8 novembre 2010

All 21 tenured faculty members at Florida State University who had been told that their positions were being eliminated will get to keep their jobs.

That’s the result of an arbitrator’s ruling Friday — and the university’s response to it. The arbitrator found that the university’s decision to eliminate the jobs of 12 tenured professors violated provisions of Florida State’s contract with its faculty union, the United Faculty of Florida, an affiliate of both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. The university, while continuing to defend its actions, announced that it believed all the tenured faculty members whose jobs had been eliminated should be treated the same way, and so rescinded the layoff notices given to 21 tenured faculty members.

The arbitrator, Stanley H. Sergent, a Florida lawyer, did not back all of the union’s grievances, and largely found that the university was within its rights to eliminate various non-tenure-track positions. But in the cases of the tenured faculty members, Sergent detailed repeated, multiple violations of the rights of the tenured faculty members and described a decision-making process by the university that seemed to favor some professors over others, without regard to a collective bargaining agreement Florida State was bound to uphold.

That agreement had some provisions about tenured faculty members, but the provision that Sergent found in case after case to be violated was a measure requiring the university to consider the length of service of faculty members. The provision wasn’t written in a way to force that factor to be the single one to determine which jobs would be eliminated, but the university was required to consider years of service — a factor that would have worked in favor of the tenured faculty members, who had much more experience than some of those whose jobs were protected. But in many cases, the arbitrator found that the university completely ignored this requirement.

While the union and arbitrator did not contest the idea that Florida State faced deep budget cuts, the 83-page ruling repeatedly notes patterns of the university failing to meet obligations to which it had committed itself. University officials used the layoff process to "manipulate" decisions "to arbitrarily select who got laid off," at times due to "personal judgment and relationships," and not established criteria, Sergent writes.

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