Official Update from USFFA
June 3, 2020 Update
Message from the Executive Board
As most of you know, the outcome of the vote last weekend was very clear: Nearly 85 percent of our members voted, and 91 percent of them approved the proposal. That sent a strong message to the administration that our union is active and united in solidarity with all of the members.
As we noted in the results announcement, which you can read here,“We do not celebrate this result … USFFA members spent valuable time fighting for our colleagues’ jobs, during a pandemic when our university needs all hands on deck to plan for an uncertain future.”
Now comes another difficult period. Over the next month, our negotiating team will be meeting with our members to get input on the direction of our talks, and with administration to work out an agreement for preserving USF as a just, fair, and top-quality Jesuit institution of higher learning.
The first step is to find out exactly where we are.
Our forensic accountant is studying the university’s finances and will be reporting back to us shortly. We are asking the administration for more data, and we hope that they will respond in a spirit of transparency and good faith.
Over the next week, our financial analysts on the negotiating team will be meeting with administration officials to go over the numbers. Only when we are confident that we understand every aspect of the budget crisis – and have examined everywhere that cuts could be made outside of instructional staff pay – will we start discussing the next steps.
We will, of course, share all of the information with our members as soon as we can.
We are looking forward to bargaining in good faith with the administration.
A message from probationary faculty
Dear colleagues,
There are many ways to say Thank You, and many things to thank you for. But for now, thank you for listening closely to our fears – especially those articulated by the probationary caucus – and thank you for the generosity of spirit that fueled your response to the administration, one that is sincere and can be felt on the pulse. Thank you, in the second instance, for telling administrators in all the letters you wrote that you were willing to compromise financially in order to save the livelihoods of both probationary faculty and librarians and the larger university community. And lastly, thank you for your generosity in accepting potential cuts to your salary. We hope that this sacrifice will save the livelihoods of probationary faculty and librarians, and our gratitude for your willingness exhibits your solidarity with us in a way that few other things could. When the pandemic ends and we return to our offices, we will not forget your support. You have shown us that we are united.
Sincerely,
Your probationary colleagues
Distinguished Research Award
Congratulations to the recipient of this year’s Distinguished Research Award: Dr. Dean Rader, Professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Over the last three years, Dean Rader has been prolific, authoring, co-authoring, and co-editing six different books, several essays, reviews, translations, and many original poems. However, it was the quality and scope of the work that impressed the committee most. More important, the committee was impressed with the ways Dean Rader works to embody the values of justice and inclusion, mirroring the greater values of the University of San Francisco.
Within a variety of genres -- poetry, reviews, anthology projects and scholarly essays -- the exceptional work of Dean Rader stretches over the areas of Indigenous Studies, visual and popular culture, and contemporary poetry. In Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry(2017) the poems center around the themes of aesthetics, identity, and America. The book was a finalist for both the Oklahoma Book Prize and the Northern California Book Award. The innovative Suture (collaborative poems),Simone Muench + Dean Rader (2017) is a collection of collaborative sonnets. Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. Eds. Brian Clements, Alexandra Teague, and Dean Rader (2017) is an acclaimed poetry and prose collection in response to America’s gun violence epidemic. Dean’s work on the book Sutureled to the further exploration of collaborative writing. They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Collaborative Writing, Eds. Simone Muench & Dean Rader (2018) is a wide-ranging anthology exploring collaborative fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. The book Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. Eds, Dean Rader and CMarie Fuhrman. (2019) Seeks to reframe how indigenous poetry is seen by including essays on craft with indigenous aesthetics as well as themes.
Beyond these books, Dean Rader’s writing and poems has been included in many notable journals. His work has won awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Pushcart Prizes, Narrative Magazine, the MacDowell Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. We congratulate Dean on his accomplishments and look forward to reading more of his excellent work in the future.
The Distinguished Research Committee reviewed the work of several excellent candidates. In each we were impressed and each is deserving of recognition. We thank them for their outstanding work. The Distinguished Research Committee is Matthew Collins, Johnathan Cromwell, Kelly L'Engle, Farima Pour-Khorshid, Vahab Pournaghshband, Allison Thorson.
Faculty Rapid Response Team
The faculty Rapid Response Team (RRT) acts as a faculty sounding board for the Covid-19 “Working Groups” constituted by the USF administration. It was established by the USFFA Policy Board, and members approved by the Nominating Committee in late May 2020 for work through the end of Summer 2020. Its nine members reflect the USFFA academic divisions and Gleeson library.
Members:
Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Co-chair, CAS/Politics, ejfriedman@usfca.edu
Jennifer Parlamis, Co-chair, SOM, jparlamis@usfca.edu
Hana Mori Böttger, CAS/Engineering, hana.bottger@usfca.edu
Sarah Capitelli, SOE, sacapitelli@usfca.edu
Evelyn Ho, CAS/Communication Studies, eyho@usfca.edu
Susan Katz, SOE, katz@usfca.edu
Juli Maxworthy, SONHP, jcmaxworthy@usfca.edu
Scott Nunes, CAS/Biology, nunes@usfca.edu
Randall Souther, Library, southerr@usfca.edu