UFMDC Retiree Chapter

A few pictures from our last Retiree Luncheon which was held a few weeks ago. It was great seeing old friends and colleagues. A great time was had by all.

More on the continuing attack on higher education my Governor DeSantis and his republican cronies.

DEI spending banned, sociology scrapped in Florida Florida’s State Board of Education imposed new prohibitions on DEI spending at state colleges, following a similar decision for state universities.

The retiree luncheon we had on September 26th was well attended. It was great reconnecting with colleagues. We also got a legislative report from our lobbyist and retiree member, Ana Ciereszko. Being in Florida, the news wasn't great but it was informative. Hopefully the news about the next legislative session will be better.

This was a front page article in the Miami Herald of 8/23/2023.

A semester inside the ‘siege’: New College professor is trapped in the takeover

Professor Amy Reid sat in her home office, tucked between towers of books, when her phone started buzzing.

It was winter break. Classes at New College wouldn’t start for weeks.

But that Friday in early January, Reid had a full day of online meetings with students who wanted advice about classes and internships.

Her phone pinged again while she was counseling a senior. And again. Different dings for texts, emails, voicemails.

She silenced the alerts.

Reid has taught French and gender studies at New College of Florida for 28 years — her whole career and almost half of her life. She came to the small state school on Sarasota Bay because it lets students explore their own interests. Because its faculty and students are smart, curious and quirky.

Between Zoom sessions, Reid scrolled through messages. She saw articles about a “takeover” and a “siege.” She learned that the governor had just appointed six new members to the school’s board of trustees — and planned to turn Florida’s progressive honors college into a conservative institution. She read a tweet from one of the new leaders who proclaimed, “We are now over the walls and ready to transform higher education from within.”

Could this be real? colleagues texted Reid.

To her, the news sounded ominous, absurd. She couldn’t make sense of what it meant for her or her students, that these outsiders had crashed their tiny haven and vowed to turn it inside out.

That night, Reid emailed a few fellow professors asking, “What can I do?”

The Tampa Bay Times spent six months with Reid to chronicle the changes at New College through the eyes of one of its longest-tenured teachers.

As the spring semester began, reporters flocked to the small campus, hauling cameras and cables, thrusting microphones at students, filming documentaries for foreign audiences.

School administrators weren’t saying much. Reid, 58, subscribed to local newspapers and set up Google alerts.

Like many Floridians, she had been concerned about Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to prohibit talking to young students about gender identity, sexual orientation or critical race theory. But Reid didn’t anticipate that the governor’s education overhaul would extend to Florida’s public colleges.

Now, she cringed as she listened to clips of the governor criticizing New College for pushing “zombie studies” that don’t get graduates jobs, for lagging revenue and enrollment, for being too focused on social justice.

That didn’t sound like the New College she knew.

‘BAREFOOT U’

She had first heard of the place when she was in graduate school at Yale, studying French literature.

Four of her classmates — the smartest, most original thinkers she knew — had come from New College.

They told her about “Barefoot U,” which opened in 1960. They described towering palms and banyans dripping with Spanish moss. Faculty had the freedom to cross disciplines — after all, students could design their own majors. Tuition was low, but standards were high. There were no fraternities or competitive sports. It was a place, they said, where people felt comfortable being themselves.

Reid still remembers her first visit in 1995, seeing the historic buildings, tasting the thick, briny air.

Her first job as a professor turned out to be her only one. She got married and divorced while at New College. Her three kids went to daycare only a short walk from her office. She helped build the school’s gender-studies program, earned tenure, translated eight books. Between classes, she shared picnics with her kids beneath the pines.

She recognizes most of the 700 students’ faces, knows many of their names. She asks if they’re homesick or hungry, seems to know who needs space and who needs a hug. She loves surprising them with scones.

Reid didn’t see her New College in what the governor’s press secretary described as a place “completely captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning.”

She read that Florida Republicans were aiming to “recapture higher education,” trying to save students from “getting brainwashed by liberals.”

The school had long ranked high among public liberal-arts schools. It was true that many graduates didn’t get jobs right away — because many went on to law school, to earn Ph.D.s and Fulbright scholarships.

Counting on the protection of tenure, Reid gave interviews to NBC, MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal. “We are not feeding students any ideological line,” she told The Washington Post. “We’re asking questions that invite students to engage in true, critical inquiry.”

Hate mail flooded her inbox, strangers taunting: “Commie loser,” “liberal clown.”

Someone wrote Reid, “Find another job.”

‘CANARY IN THE COAL MINE’

On the last day of the month, the new trustees came to campus for their first board meeting. Reid stood outside the student center, watching protesters make speeches.

By the time she headed toward the board meeting that afternoon, a line wrapped around the parking lot.

But security guards turned Reid away — along with hundreds of others — ushering them toward an overflow room to watch a livestream.

Instead, she walked to her quiet campus office and raged alone.

The new school trustees included conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who some say created the conflict over critical race theory; Jason “Eddie” Speir, who founded a Christian sports school in Bradenton; and Matthew Spalding, a dean at Michigan’s private, conservative Hillsdale College — which the governor’s appointees vowed to use as a model for New College.

“Our all-star board will demonstrate that the public universities, which have been corrupted by woke nihilism, can be recaptured, restructured and reformed,” Rufo had written.

Reid, meanwhile, warned colleagues that New College was a “canary in the coal mine,” a playbook for dismantling higher education around the state, a pawn in DeSantis’ presidential run.

Now, she watched as the board ousted the school’s president.

If they could do so much damage in just the first meeting, she wondered with dread, what was next?

Reid noticed, for the first time, that many of her students were distracted. They hadn’t done the reading. They were asking questions that she couldn’t answer.

The board had disbanded the school’s diversity office. Then the interim president, former Republican education commissioner and Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran, began clearing house. Soon, Reid watched gender-neutral signs on bathrooms disappear.

In class, students told her about pouring energy into protests and petitions. Many told her they felt helpless, hopeless.

Reid invited them to come to a little lounge near her office.

There, as they sprawled on colorful couches, she poured tea and cocoa, served homemade chocolate chip cookies, peeled open Oreos for the vegans.

She called it: “T is for Tuesday” — tea and truth.

A dozen students showed up that first week, many she had never had in class. More came the next time.

Was the school really getting a baseball team? they wondered. Why make them have a mascot? Would gender studies classes disappear?

“I’ll work to hold this place together at least long enough for you to graduate,” Reid promised her seniors.

When administrators told students and faculty to remove the pronouns from their email signatures, Reid refused.

When they announced they had hired a baseball coach, she felt sorry for the future players. New College doesn’t even have a ball field.

When a colleague told her that a Bible verse had appeared on cups at the campus coffee shop, she had to see for herself. There it was, in red, with the name of the Bible chapter spelled wrong: “Phillipians” 4:13. Reid looked up the words. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

Then, a colleague she knew distantly, a computer-science professor named Aaron Hillegass, was all over the news.

He had called the governor a fascist and tweeted his resignation, which went viral: “If I were more patriotic, I would burn the college’s buildings to the ground.”

Reid admired his courage and the attention it drew. But she couldn’t afford to quit.

Hillegass had worked in the tech industry, sold his company in his 40s, made enough to retire. New board members, mostly fellow white men, valued his field and reputation. He had only been a professor for a few months.

Reid’s career was New College. Her college-age kids still needed her to pay for health insurance, phone bills and tuition. She calculated that she couldn’t afford to retire for at least seven years.

On a spring Thursday, in a room filled with sunlight, Reid and six students slid their desks into a circle to discuss the Haitian novel “A Knife in the Sky.”

Students opened up about the dread that they felt seeing their school’s culture eroding. Some planned to defect by transferring, studying abroad or graduating early. Reid mourned their loss, was furious they felt forced out.

“How we manage the things that happen is important,” she went on. “That’s why we talk about survivors instead of victims.”

Toward the end of April, at another trustees’ meeting, President Corcoran denied tenure to five professors. The crowd chanted, “Shame on you!”

The faculty member of the board, a professor who Reid had thought “played too nice” over the last few months, resigned in protest.

All semester, she had watched co-workers pack their shelves, say goodbye, walk away.

More than 30 professors — about a third of the faculty — were not coming back.

Reid had planned to take research leave in the fall. Then yet another colleague, whom she had worked with for more than two decades, decided to leave. Since her department couldn’t fill the opening, Reid would have to teach French language — or students wouldn’t be able to take it.

For the first time, Reid thought: If that faculty representative had had enough, if so many of her colleagues were bailing, why was she still here?

Like her students, Reid hadn’t set out to become an advocate. It seemed to be a messy, difficult, painful responsibility.

But a few days later, Reid’s co-workers surprised her with a proposition: Be our faculty chairperson?

It would mean sitting alongside the new trustees as part of the board.

She laughed. Then spent four days trying to find a way out.

She couldn’t deny that she felt a duty to the school and students. And, in some ways, to herself.

“If I just walk away,” she thought, “who will stand up for this place?”

And if New College no longer existed, who was she?

Finally, reluctantly, she agreed.

‘SMALL VICTORIES’

For graduation speaker, the new administration chose a former adviser to former President Donald Trump. Scott Atlas, an outspoken opponent of pandemic lockdowns, would address students beneath a white tent on the water. Instead of wearing costumes — tutus, superhero capes and tie-dyed shirts, as they had for years — graduates were given caps and gowns.

As the new faculty representative, Reid would have to don her Yale blue robe and serve as grand marshal. She dreaded the keynote, imagining the students squirming.

She knew many were boycotting, planning their own alternative ceremony for the night before. They had raised $129,000, invited a civil-rights lawyer to give their keynote, convinced the Sarasota Art Museum to let them set up chairs.

On a Thursday evening just before sunset, in the museum’s outdoor courtyard, Reid saw students wearing pope hats and rhinestone tiaras, dressed as characters from comic books and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” wearing butterfly wings and shirts that said, “Ban the fascists, not the books!” and simply, “Woke!”

Some donned black armbands. Others tied on rainbow flags.

For the first time in months, five miles from campus, this felt like New College.

Reid walked through the crowd smiling, seeing colleagues who had quit or been fired, students who were leaving early, the ousted president who had come to wish everyone well.

Former faculty representative Matt Lepinski had thanked Reid for jumping into his role after he walked out and said she was the right person for that job. When asked if he had any advice for her, he paused, looked at the ground, and shook his head.

“Joy is an act of resistance,” the student emcee told the crowd. “We deserve to feel that joy.”

About 100 graduates walked across the makeshift stage, where Reid was sitting. She stood to shake some of their hands, hugged others. When a guy carried a girl in a mermaid tail past the podium, she laughed.

“This is what we needed,” she said later. “What I needed, to remind me why I’m still here.”

Somehow, this class of 2023 had managed to graduate in a way that celebrated what their school stood for.

To Reid, it was bittersweet: the end of an era.

At her first board meeting, Reid sat at the end of a U-shaped table in a large conference room, listening to minutes being read, budgets being outlined.

The numbers didn’t add up, she pointed out. “I know I’m just a French professor,” she said. “But I have some questions …”

At the next session, she asked for a subcommittee to tackle the proposed “core curriculum” — a first for the free-spirited school. The board shouldn’t get to choose those classes alone, she said. Faculty needed to have input.

Trustees called her petty, voted her down. But they eventually scheduled a meeting. “I’m learning to accept small victories,” Reid said.

She still doesn’t know what she will be allowed to teach in the fall.

She believes other trustees won’t listen to her, that she and the student representative will be the minority on every vote. “But I’m not just speaking to them,” she said. “Hopefully, someone will hear me.”

She fears new mandates, more restrictions on what faculty can teach and talk about. She worries about the new students who have been recruited, who have lower grade-point averages and standardized test scores. How might professors have to adjust?

And so many students are not coming back. Reid doesn’t have a count, but has heard of dozens. She knows the exodus isn’t over.

Administrators painted over the coffee-shop murals. They reassigned dorm rooms that seniors had been promised to newly recruited athletes. They eliminated the African studies learning community and shuttered the beloved Pride dorm.

The student who was supposed to be the resident adviser there told Reid that classmates had been diving into dumpsters, trying to salvage posters and books — and that he, too, had decided to transfer.

“All this time, I’ve been fighting for the students,” Reid said recently. She paused, shook her head, wiped her eyes. “But if they successfully chase away everyone we are trying to save this place for, I don’t know what we’re still fighting for.”

A couple of days before the next board meeting, Reid heard rumors that trustees were trying to kill the gender-studies program.

No one had told Reid, who had helped start the concentration in her first year on campus.

But when Rufo brought it up at the end of the meeting, she stood to read a statement about how important the program is, how many students take those classes.

Rufo laughed.

Legally, Reid told the board, the college couldn’t end a concentration for students who already had enrolled. So the school couldn’t completely eliminate gender studies. At least not now.

She knew the program had a fragile future. But at least she had bought another semester.

That night, Reid wrote to students, whoever might return:

“Despite the departures of a number of inspiring faculty this summer – others of us are on campus and are committed to supporting you on your educational journey.

“There will be a number of Gender Studies courses offered this fall.

“… I look forward to welcoming each of you back to campus in a couple of weeks.

“Honor & Respect!”

This is unbelievable. Just when you think you reached the bottom you find out that more digging has occurred. This coupled with DeSantis' attack on public employee unions is indicative of where higher ed (and in reality all of education) in Florida is going.

DeSantis ally with no higher-ed experience says he’s getting a state college’s top job State Rep. Fred Hawkins, who as a county commissioner was suspended from office by Gov. Ron DeSantis, is the only finalist in the search for a president of South Florida State College.

This is a copy of an E Flash that Liz Ramsay, President of UFMDC, sent to all faculty.

UNDER ATTACK: Florida’s Public Higher Education Institutions

Florida government officials have taken a series of actions against the state’s public colleges and universities. Here is a brief timeline:

Spring 2021

HB233 Intellectual Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity

· Allows students to secretly record classroom lectures for the purpose of filing a complaint or lawsuit.
· Prohibits institutions from “shielding” students or faculty from “ideas and opinions that they may find uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive.” This prevents colleges from restricting racist or hateful speech on campus.
· Created an Intellectual Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity survey to be sent to all students, staff, and administrators asking them to label their viewpoint as “conservative” or “liberal.”

Fall 2021

University of Florida attempted to stop professors from serving as expert witnesses in a voting rights case.

Spring 2022

HB 7 Stop W.O.K.E. Act

Restricts Florida educators and students from discussing and learning about issues related to race and gender. A federal judge has since granted an injunction in a case brought by professors and students to block implementation of the law.

Spring 2022

HB7044 Postsecondary Education

· Requires colleges to change accreditors every cycle, a costly and time-consuming endeavor with no perceivable benefit. It is widely suspected that this action was taken in retaliation against Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), the accreditor that sided with faculty and students in opposition to questionable procedures in recent college and university presidential hiring searches.
· Requires colleges to create a publicly accessible database of syllabi for general education core courses. Syllabi must be posted at least 45 days prior to the first day of class.
· Initiates a 5-year post tenure review process for state university professors. This does not apply to state colleges like Miami Dade College.
SB520 Presidential Searches

· Exempts college and university presidential searches from transparency requirements under the “Sunshine Law.”

January 2023

· Florida’s Department of Education and Board of Governors required reports from all state higher education institutions on activities related to DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and CRT (Critical Race Theory). The demand did not include a definition of the terms DEI or CRT.
· Gov. DeSantis appointed six new members to Florida’s New College Board of Trustees. Among the appointees is Christopher Rufo.
· The presidents of Florida’s 28 public colleges issued a joint statement on DEI and CRT.
· Florida’s Department of Education rejected an elective AP course on African American studies.
· Gov. DeSantis unveiled his “Teachers Bill of Rights,” a plan that proposes salary increases for public school teachers at the same time it prohibits educators at all levels from paying union dues through payroll deduction.

While Miami Dade College does not seem to be the intended target of this wave of government overreach, our profession is undeniably under attack.

The Governor's announcement this week of long overdue well-deserved pay raises for schoolteachers contains a union busting poison pill that seeks to sweep away collective bargaining for educators across the state.

Embedded in the plan to increase salaries of K-12 teachers is a threat to remove the right to pay union dues through payroll deduction and a provision to decertify unions with less than 60% membership rate. When implemented together, these proposals seek to shrink and then eliminate educators' unions.

We cannot let that happen. UFMDC is working with allies like FEA (Florida Educators Association) and AFT (American Federation of Teachers) to push back against these attacks using all available legal strategies and community organizing. We are prepared to protect public education and collective bargaining rights in the upcoming legislative session and beyond.

What can you do right now to protect your rights?

Make sure you can receive email from [email protected]. Add United Faculty of Miami Dade College to the contacts in your personal email account (e.g., .com or .com) with the email address ([email protected]) and check your personal email on a regular basis.

Stay informed! Recognize the attempts to chill free speech on campus for what they are. Continue to teach with integrity and know that your union has your back. As long as we have our union, UFMDC professors have the protection of a strong contract and a powerful collective voice.

Another article about the future of tenure from the Miami Herald.

Conservatives take aim at tenure for university professors over views - Miami Herald Max McCoy, the lone journalism professor at Emporia State University, talks about his dismissal in front of the school’s administration building on Wednesday in Emporia, Kan.

More on the attack on Tenure in Florida.

Tenure review for professors could be tied to Florida's law that restricts race-related instruction A controversial law designed to restrict the way certain race-related topics can be taught in Florida classrooms could soon factor into a new tenure-review process for university professors. It's a proposal that higher-education officials will consider next week.

Click on the following URL to get the latest information on the Statewide higher ed political climate survey results, compliments of Ana Ciereszko.

https://floridapolitics.com/archives/564112-new-surveys-of-florida-colleges-universities-fail-to-support-concerns-over-anti-conservative-sentiment/

The following URL was posted by a fellow AFT retiree chapter president. It is a long read about Medicare Advantage Plans but definitely worth the time.
https://www.rawstory.com/medicare-advantage/?fbclid=IwAR1YnW8z_FYCDqWZMrXPBvvgmbgKoT4MkpA4I_oWiT12rh32IkIA4cK9ufg

It's time to stop the Medicare 'Advantage' scam before Medicare is dead Congress must pass a law to stop the deceptive advertising of Medicare Advantage plans. Only Medicare should be able to call itself Medicare.Unless you’ve been out of the country for the past few years, you’ve seen the ads on TV featuring Joe Namath, Jimmy Walker, or William Shatner hawking so-c...

Below is today's Miami Herald editorial. Higher Ed in Florida is under attack.

I got back last week from Washington DC where I attended the AFT Retiree PPC meeting. I was one of about 25 retiree chapter leaders from across the United States who attended. I was representing, by far, the smallest group there. Many of the leaders were from huge locals including New York City Teachers Union, Chicago Teachers, State of New York Teachers Union, and Texas Teachers Union. I was one of only two representing Higher Education (the other being Chicago Community Colleges). I guess that we are still “The Mouse That Roared”.

AFT had several presentations including organizing techniques, maintaining activitism with retired members, and a discussion of the next election cycle. One thing that was discussed throughout the meeting was DeSantis and the future of Florida. You can only imagine what ensued during those discussions. It was great seeing some old friends and making new ones. Next on the schedule is the National AFT Convention in Boston where you, the UFMDC retirees, will be represented by our Retiree Chapter President, Mark Richard.