UUP and OUT

At the college hockey games in my town, when an opposing player is sent from the game to the penalty box, the 10,000 people in the arena wave goodbye and shout, “Ssssee, Ya!”

A colleague sent along an interesting email. On February 10, 2008, at the Delegate Assembly of the United University Professions (UUP) in Albany, New York, Acting President, Fred Floss, was unexpectedly unseated by Phillip H. Smith by a vote of 185-155. Smith will serve as president of UUP, a union that represents about 8,000 part-time faculty throughout New York, until May 2009.

Whether new UUP president Phillip Smith will be more sympathetic to the plight of the union’s part-time faculty members remains to be seen. Part-time faculty activists within UUP are, however, optimistic. I wrote in an earlier post about the UUP’s recent proposed contract, negotiated under Fred Floss’s leadership. Negotiators proposed a 13 percent raise for both part-time and full-time faculty represented. This is, of course, a sharp stick in the eye to the part-timers, because in dollars the raise for full-time faculty is close to 10 times more money than the raise negotiated for the union’s part-time faculty members.

We’ll all certainly be reading more about this in The Chronicle of Higher Education and InsideHigherEd.com.

Oh, and to Fred Floss….”Ssssee, Ya!”