The United Faculty of Florida is a union that represents over 25,000 members in higher education.
The group filed a joint lawsuit with the Florida State University and University of Florida chapters in federal court on Wednesday.
The complaint is against the Florida Board of Governors, and the Board of Trustees at UF and FSU, and includes 41 defendants.
UFF president Teresa Hodge said the case, in part, addresses a section of a 2023 law, SB 266, that changes how professors go through the grievance process at their respective universities.
“This arbitration ban, as it were, or as I like to call it, a lack of due process for independent arbitration by a neutral third party, which has been our right, is now being infringed upon,” she said.
In the past, the third party was brought in to hear both the university’s and faculty’s points of view in the grievance process and decide how to resolve it and proceed forward.
But as it stands under the law now, if a professor has a grievance, a decision on the matter can be made by the university president without any other input.
Hodge said that conflicts with procedures defined in the union’s collective bargaining agreements with the universities. She said the UFF understands if an agreement expires, then both parties have the right to renegotiate terms.
“But they’re not doing that,” Hodge said. “They’re implementing the law, beyond the scope of what we feel they’re legally plausible to do.”
SB 266 also changes the post-tenure review process for professors in the state.
“(It’s) being micromanaged and mitigated in a way that has never been done before,” Hodge said.
ACLU of Florida Executive Director Bacardi Jackson said within the new system, professional contracts can only be renewed by a board appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“Preceding this, it’s important to put all of this in context and to see the connection of the dots,” she said. “We also saw our universities surveying as to the political parties of professors. I mean, what in the world does that have to do with being a qualified educator on a campus?”
Jackson said there has been a “death by 1,000 cuts” of academic freedom in Florida, and one of those is that professors must please the government and its appointees to continue teaching in higher education.
This is UFF’s second challenge to SB 266, according to a press release. Its first suit “seeks to prevent New College and its politically appointed leadership from enforcing the ban because it violates Florida’s state constitutional right to collectively bargain and unlawfully reneges on valid contractual promises made by the state when it signed collective bargaining agreements.”
The impacts of the law are felt “far and wide,” according to Hodge.
“We’ve had faculty resign, leave the state. We’ve had faculty take jobs in other parts of the country where they don’t have the kind of oversight we have in Florida,” she said. “And we did experience a mass exodus at one point.”
“We don’t want that drain, we don’t want the drain of the experts. We have wonderful professors, wonderful researchers, and wonderful grad assistants in this state,” she added.
Hodge said this lawsuit is fighting for UFF members to maintain academic freedom in their classrooms and keep the faculty’s voice present in their respective schools.
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