Here is a PDF of the August 31, 2017, issue of Table Talk: TableTalkaug2017FINAL. 

The full text of the issue is also reprinted below so that articles may be located using our website’s search engine.

News at a Glance

•  Lead Story: UF Begins Survey on 2018-2019 Calendar Choices
•  Negotiations Update: Summer Progress Leads into September Talks
•  Hot Topics: Public Employee Relations Board Hears UF Case;
UF Recruiting FT Faculty to Serve on Executive Board
•  Full-Time Faculty Issues: Changing Evaluation Time-Lines
•  Part-Time Faculty Issues: Expanding Paid Office Hours
•  Political Action Report: Seeking Student Interns; Writing Letters
•  President’s Message: Teaching Tolerance and Resisting Hate

UF Begins Survey on 2018-2019 Calendar Choices

United Faculty leaders met with a management group including all three college vice presidents last Friday to discuss plans for the 2018/2019 academic calendar, and now the UF is seeking faculty input on a couple of options that emerged from that meeting.

As faculty will recall, we elected to move to 16-week semesters starting in 2018/2019 for a variety of reasons, including data that showed advantages for students and new opportunities for enrollment growth. In addition to starting fall classes later in the summer, one key growth idea has been the creation of a four-week winter intersession. All three colleges believe there is significant potential in offering winter classes, and from a labor standpoint, the advantages are obvious. A viable winter session means more jobs for part-time faculty and more overload options for full-time faculty, and of course, growth is a key source of revenue that can lead to higher salaries.

In order to allow Student Services adequate time to do everything we need them to do (processing grades, checking prerequisites, dealing with matriculation issues and financial aid, etc.), however, and because Christmas and New Year’s are fixed winter holidays that we can’t move, we actually need about seven weeks between fall and spring semesters in order to offer a four-week winter intersession. So the basic plan calls for fall 2018 to run from Monday, August 27 to Sunday, December 16. Winter Intersession (probably small in the first year) will start Monday, January 7, 2019 and end on Saturday, February 2.  And the spring semester in 2019 will begin on Monday, February 11.

For faculty who do not teach during the new winter intersession (and for students who don’t take winter classes), this means a seven-week winter break.

The question we ask in our survey concerns the ending date for the spring semester and also spring break. Option one would end the semester on Friday, June 7. Option two would end on Friday, May 31, but in order to save the week at the end (and finish in May), we would eliminate spring break.
No matter what we decide, we will be able to make future adjustments. The UF negotiates the calendar every year, so no choice we make for 2018/2019 will necessarily be permanent. But rather than adopting an incremental approach and delaying the winter intersession, we have agreed that we should make this particular move right out of the gate, as it were, in year one, erring on the side of growth and jobs even though it does magnify a bit the changes already underway for 2018/2019.

So we are only asking one question in our on-line survey: keeping in mind that the spring 2019 semester will start February 11 (after a seven-week break), should we keep spring break and end June 7 or cut spring break and end May 31? (We’ll invite faculty to add written comments as well.) Faculty should receive a link to the survey this week via campus email, and we will begin reviewing answers on Wednesday, September 6. If you have questions or concerns, please email Donna Wapner at dwapner@sbcglobal.net or Jeffrey Michels at ufjeffmichels@gmail.com.

Negotiations Update

Summer Progress Leads to September Bargaining

The UF and District Compensation Committee met several times over the summer and reviewed not only the District budget but also compensation comparisons looking at salaries and benefits throughout Northern California. We should have a complete summary of that work ready for the next edition of Table Talk. In the meantime, negotiations for 2017/2018 are set to resume September 8, with a second full day scheduled for September 15, and the UF team is hoping that may be enough to reach a Tentative Agreement. Our current contract expired on June 30, 2017, but all articles and protections remain in force while we are negotiating this fall, and the UF and District have agreed to a side letter affirming this, just so that there will be no anxiety or misunderstanding connected to the expired contract. We expect that any agreement we reach this fall will include a new three-year contract extending to June of 2020, with each side able to reopen articles for negotiations every year, as we have done in the past.

We will share more details related to collective bargaining soon. Last May’s issue of Table Talk (still available on the UF website at www.uf4cd.org) included a complete roundup of all issues on the table, and except for some progress crunching numbers this summer that have led us to feel optimistic heading into September talks, not much has changed since then.

 

Public Employee Relations Board Hears UF Case

This past Monday, the Public Employee Relations Board (PERB) began hearing two linked “Unfair Labor Practice” complaints filed by the UF last year. Both complaints concern the District’s unwillingness to provide the UF with details related to complaints alleging misconduct on the part of faculty members. The UF believes we have a legal right to review complaints before district investigators question our members, so that we can adequately advise and represent faculty at those meetings. The District has refused to provide details of complaints, so we are taking our case to PERB and an administrative law judge. Similar complaints have been filed recently by several other Bay Area districts (and in the case of Foothill/De Anza, PERB ruled in favor of the Faculty Association, but because their district did not appeal, the case did not set precedent). PERB should rule on the UF case later this year.

Full-Time Faculty Issues

Changing Evaluation Time-Lines

Most full-time, tenure-track faculty are hired in the fall, so most tenured full-timers wind up in a six-semester evaluation cycle that has them evaluated every sixth fall. Our contract states that each “regular faculty member shall be evaluated every sixth semester” (X1.3.8.1); but the six-semester rule is also a legal requirement in the Education Code. Unfortunately, this often means that departments are overloaded in fall semesters, especially if they have more than one probationary faculty member (where two evaluators are needed) as well as part-time faculty evaluations. Many departments have been asking the UF recently if they can delay evaluations of full-time tenured faculty until the spring semester, to change the time line going forward and add some workload balance between fall and spring semesters. This is an idea we are going to explore this semester with District management. It might be more in keeping with Ed. Code to move up evaluations and allow departments to evaluate tenured faculty a semester early in order to move some members to a sixth-spring evaluation cycle. But either way, we support allowing some flexibility to spread out the work. Look for more on this soon.

Part-Time Faculty Issues

Expanding Paid Office Hours

Most full-time, tenure-track faculty are hired in the fall, so most tenured full-timers wind up in a six-semester evaluation cycle that has them evaluated every sixth fall. Our contract states that each “regular faculty member shall be evaluated every sixth semester” (X1.3.8.1); but the six-semester rule is also a legal requirement in the Education Code. Unfortunately, this often means that departments are overloaded in fall semesters, especially if they have more than one probationary faculty member (where two evaluators are needed) as well as part-time faculty evaluations. Many departments have been asking the UF recently if they can delay evaluations of full-time tenured faculty until the spring semester, to change the time line going forward and add some workload balance between fall and spring semesters. This is an idea we are going to explore this semester with District management. It might be more in keeping with Ed. Code to move up evaluations and allow departments to evaluate tenured faculty a semester early in order to move some members to a sixth-spring evaluation cycle. But either way, we support allowing some flexibility to spread out the work. Look for more on this soon.

Part-Time Faculty Issues

Expanding Paid Office Hours

One great way for part-timers to be compensated for working with students outside of class is our innovative Equity Hour Program. Each college runs its program differently, but each includes paid professional development and one more paid hour per week working with students (in addition to regular office hours). For more info, email Doug at douglas.unitedfaculty@gmail.com.

Political Action Report

The UF Seeks (Paid) Student Interns

Our UF PAC Internship Program employs six students every semester for all sorts of political activities: meeting with legislators and district trustees; informational tabling on our campuses; voter registration; grassroots organizing; working with other student groups; and lots of interesting opportunities for training and even travel. Our interns earn some extra money while learning to advocate for their own issues and priorities. We do not set their agenda or ask them to promote faculty goals, because we believe that students advocating for themselves strengthens faculty advocacy as well. And many of our interns have built on their experiences in our program to continue in social work and politics. One intern, Gary Walker-Roberts, has even become a District Trustee!

If you have students who might be interested in a position with the UF, just have them send an email to our Intern Coordinator, Aminta Mickles at amickles@contracosta.edu.

UF Writing Letters as AB 1651 Heads for the Senate Floor

AB 1651 (Reyes), which passed this year in the CA Assembly with broad bipartisan support, is a bill sponsored by the California Community College Independents (CCCI) and the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges (FACCC) to strengthen due-process rights for faculty accused of misconduct. The bill was approved by the CA Senate’s Higher Education Committee, and will head to the floor for a vote of the full Senate sometime in the next week or two. If it passes, the last stop will be the Governor’s desk for his signature or veto.

The issue is quite similar to the one the UF has advanced through our unfair-labor-practice complaint with the Public Employee Relations Board (PERB), which had its formal hearing this past Monday. In our PERB case, we allege an existing legal right for the union to have access to complaint details in order to fulfill our legal obligation of fair representation. We can’t represent our members, we argue, if we don’t understand the charges against them. AB 1651 would amend existing law to clarify that each faculty member has the right to be informed about any formal complaint before the District can interview the member or place the member on administrative leave. The bill allows for many exceptions to protect students and faculty if there is any reasonable reason to withhold information during an investigation. But the Community College League, representing boards of trustees and chief administrators, has continued to oppose the bill (despite the author having accepted several amendments proposed by the League).

In anticipation of the coming Senate vote, UF leaders have joined faculty organizations around the state in writing letters to our state senators letting them know that faculty strongly support the bill. (AB 1651 is being supported not only by CCCI and FACCC but also by the California Federation of Teachers [CFT] and the California Teachers’ Association [CTA], the California Part-Time Faculty Association [CPFA], University Professional and Technical Employees [UPTE], the United Brotherhood of Teamsters, and many others.) FACCC has added a link for faculty to express support for AB 1651 on their website, using their “point-and-click” advocacy tool, and CPFA has put a support link with talking points on the front page of their website. In short, faculty associations across CA are doing everything they can to encourage faculty to email or call their senators this week to support AB 1651.

For more information about AB 1651 or any other bill of interest to faculty, or if you would like to get more involved with our PAC activities, please email Jeff Michels at ufjeffmichels@gmail.com.

President’s Message

Teaching Tolerance and Resisting Hate

One of the great challenges in representing any constituency is that members don’t always agree. Our United Faculty, for example, represents about 1500 professors (full-time and part-time), and I’m guessing that all of them would agree on almost nothing, including this statement. This fact informs the current challenge to “agency fee” that we expect to see reach the United States Supreme Court this year. Collective bargaining agents like ours have long argued successfully that since we negotiate for all employees in our group (in our case, faculty), all employees should be required to support the bargaining agent financially, even if they don’t want to be official “members” of the union. This means that non-members can be required to pay an “agency fee” equal to regular member dues, even if they choose not to join. But some who are opposed to unions argue that asking employees to pay an “agency fee” violates their first-amendment right to free speech. Since union leaders may speak publicly with financial support from their organizations, forcing anyone to support that organization essentially requires them to support speech they may actually oppose, or so the argument goes.

Of course, unions like ours separate political speech from collective bargaining and other speech related to wages and working conditions. We support political activities with “PAC contributions” that only members make. But even so, and even though our UF leadership unambiguously supports fair-share agency fees, it is undeniable that no matter what we say or do, some of our members are likely to disagree from time to time. And this is challenging and sometimes frustrating because we strive to speak for everyone and represent all our members equally.

That said, and knowing there are no perfect words to sum up how all our faculty are feeling, I want to clarify the following on behalf of the UF:
We believe that the community-college mission is one of diversity and inclusion; education and critical thinking are the antidote to bigotry. We passionately support free speech, but just as passionately, we oppose hate-speech. We oppose ignorance and prejudice (which are linked), and we are professors precisely because we know that learning means exploring multiple perspectives and bringing new ideas to the test of oneself, sometimes in challenging ways. We believe that intellectual exploration and growth are good for individuals and for society, that learning is an end unto itself, and that public education is a civil right. College professors dispel myths and teach tolerance every day in the way we approach our subjects and students and in the ways we challenge our students to approach their studies and one another. We reject any boundary that would debar anyone from this sort of creative and intellectual journey: financial boundaries, social boundaries, national, ethnic or linguistic boundaries. Our job as faculty is to help our students break down walls and cross boundaries. This is why public colleges and schools are the edifices that most deserve public investment.