Field of Broken Dreams – Part I
Those
of us with Idealist temperaments (ENFP here) often tend to think out loud in
working through our problems. We need to verbalize our thoughts, to put them
into some form of expression, and, for us extraverted types, to interact with
others, On New Year’s Eve, I sat down to work through the crisis I am facing in
my career. It comes at the end of a long year of disappointments, reflection,
talks with trusted others and hours of research and reading. This is a work in
progress. But I share with you where I am this day. And I am grateful for your indulgence in this process and any feedback you would afford me.
An
Endurance Test on a Good Day
“Choose a job you love, and you will never
have to work a day in your life.” Confucius
Over the past year, I have devoted the majority of my
waking life energies to a job I once loved. Today I increasingly see my job as
it has devolved over the past several years as an endurance test on a good day.
On bad days, I experience it as a psychic black hole draining more and more of
my very soul into an abyss. And then there are the rare days when I have a
lively lunch discussion with a fine student or colleague or when students suddenly
emerge from their zombie states without notice, coming to life in class. On those
rare days I remember how much joy teaching used to bring me.
In the past 12 months, I have taught nine college courses
at the university. Four of them were taught completely online including two summer
courses. One was taught at the honors college. Four were sections of
introductory humanities courses by which students meet general education
requirements. Of the nine courses, all but one required four intensive research
or writing assignments.
In these nine classes I taught 236 students, an average
of 26 students per class. Subtracting the 19 students from the single course with
no required writing, that comes out to 856 research and/or writing assignments minimum
graded over the past year.
In no semester did I teach the same course twice thus
relieving me of additional planning (and keeping up with the different material
and assignments in each class). In Spring semester, I had three different
plannings for three different courses, in Fall semester I had four. Over the past
year I have taught in two of the four disciplines which the department offers,
Humanities and Philosophy. Most years I teach in Religious Studies as well.
In addition to my classroom duties, both virtual and
actual, I served as the pre-law advisor for the College of Arts and Humanities
and offered students considering a career in law offering 43 sessions of at
least one half hour over the spring semester. In the fall, I became the advisor
for the Humanities program. I average about 1.5 advising sessions of one half
hour or more during my days on campus. My advising sessions regularly exceed my designated office hours but they also allow me one class release per year.
I currently serve as faculty advisor for two campus
organizations and agreed to sponsor a third organization devoted to
international justice issues which formed this fall. I became the student at the
three day winter faculty development conference on campus between fall and
spring semesters last Christmas. And I continue to operate an assessment program (of highly
questionable pedagogical utility) of the humanities introductory courses, a
program dictated by state bureaucrats under the rubric of “accountability.”
Over the past 12 months I have written 65 letters of
recommendations for students for everything from jobs to law schools to
seminaries. Two out of three actually said thank you.
Just before Christmas I discovered two of my students had
plagiarized big chunks of an easy, open-book and note final exam. One appeared
to have been a case of thoughtless neglect and, upon confrontation, was
profusely apologetic. The zero on the exam brought that student’s grade down to
a C for the term. The other student engaged in a blatant copy and paste of web
materials with no attribution which constituted half of the final exam. The
student then failed to make the appointment to talk with me about the incident
after agreeing to do so. That student will be attending the academic integrity
course as a condition of graduation.
No
Good Deed Goes Unpunished
Little wonder I have spent a good part of this Christmas
break in bed. In all honesty, I feel tired just reading this work history. But
when I consider the monetary compensation I will receive for this effort
expended and the declining moral rewards this job has come to embody, it
becomes decidedly painful.
I need to preface the following data with the recognition
that much of what I am going to discuss here is already public record.
Governor Rick Scott, one of the glazed over Teapot ideologues swept into office
in the 2010 elections, has conducted a campaign against public employees,
particularly in education, since his inauguration in 2011. This is the same
private enterprise crusader who was more than happy to defraud the Medicare program
of millions of dollars until forced to repay the overbilling under threat of
criminal prosecution. While his crusade to destroy the social sciences and
humanities has been injurious to the field of higher education where I work, it
was the posting of our salaries under the rubric of overpaid public employees
that added the insult to the many injuries inflicted by this myopic zealot. Seems
the guv thinks folks like me are being overcompensated.
So most of what I’m about to tell you is already online
at http://www.ucfsalaries.com/. If
you feel compelled to go to that site you can marvel over the generous
administrative salaries (minus any data for the athletics staff which somehow failed
to be included) and the slave labor wages for most everyone else that make those generous administrative salaries possible. You’ll find my base salary listed at 2639 (out of 6282 total
employees listed). For all of the services I list above and, no doubt, some I
simply am too tired to remember, I am guaranteed a grand total of $43,759 per
year base salary. That ranks me just below the tech who works in the computer
services division responsible for the PIN numbers on campus computer accounts.
I rank just ahead of a senior superintendent of payroll for housekeeping
services on campus.
What these mere numbers don’t tell you is the rest of the
story. My guess is that the employee in charge of PINs on campus and the
employee responsible for payroll in housekeeping were not required to hold graduate
degrees as a condition of employment, much less three. They have also likely not
had to repay the graduate student loans that made those degrees possible. (I
graduated in 2000 with $60,000 outstanding principle and will make my last
payment next year thanks to some generous help from my Dad). This is hardly to
devalue the work these folks do without which the university could probably not
function, just to try to place it in some kind of perspective.
Indeed, I am hardly the most miserly compensated
instructor in our own department. That dubious honor goes to my next door
neighbor in the department who brings a Ph.D., several years of teaching
experience and several publications to his full-time teaching and duties as
assessment coordinator for a whopping sum of $30,000 a year. Not surprisingly, he has recently found a new job with
a starting salary nearly twice that amount at a private college in Alabama. We
are uncertain if the university will allow us to refill his position.
To put this into perspective, beginning teachers here in
Orange County with just a bachelor’s degree and no experience make $36,000
annually. And they have no graduate education loans to repay. My base salary of
$43,759 is about what I could expect from the local public schools with one of my graduate degrees and no experience. My current UCF salary is based upon nearly
10 years of full-time service at UCF alone, (I have 25 years of experience
teaching at six different colleges altogether) the last eight of which have included
small raises each year based upon outstanding annual evaluations by my chair.
In years past, I have been able to supplement my base income
by teaching up to two summer courses which have provided up to ¼ of my base
salary, a provision which only came into being three years ago through the insistence
of the faculty union of which I am a member. Such a provision is certainly fair
in that the base salary is based upon a 9 month contract thus a full summer’s
work amounts to the remaining ¼ of the year.
When I have had two summer classes (and thus taught all
summer), my university salary has been as high as the $55,050 I earned this
past year, my highest income ever from the university. But from that total is
deducted involuntary “contributions” such as the $1627 I was required to pay
into my own retirement fund last year, the $600 deducted to pay for my health
insurance and the $323.31 I must pay to park at my place of employment.
Except for the parking rip-off which I have endured since
beginning at UCF along with everyone else, the other two deductions from gross
income are little more than pay cuts imposed by the state legislature over the
past two sessions. This would be the
same legislature that has cut funding at our university 49% over the past six
years even as enrollment has increased 30% over the same period.
But,
wait! There’s more…..
It is frequently at the point where one might imagine
things could not get much worse that they do. Just before Christmas we were
informed that the regional campus budgets which had funded our summer teaching
have been cut from 14 sections offered to 5. Undoubtedly that means that those
of us who have depended upon summer teaching to even begin to approximate salaries
commensurate with our qualifications and the work we do are going to lose at
least half if not all of that salary supplement.
I had hoped to make up for some of that loss this year by
being the Humanities instructor in a team taught program focused on the culture
of Brasil, the last two weeks of which would have been taught on-site in Sao
Paulo this summer. The program is largely funded by an international satellite
communications company which wants to test new equipment in the field so the
university’s share of the cost was negligible.
The catch was that the two UCF instructors (Psychology
would provide the other) would have to have their salaries paid by the
university (in my case, about $5500 for Summer A). Two days before Christmas I
was informed that the university would not pay our salaries, this in
retribution for the union’s grievance of the university’s failure to pay a
number of salaries of faculty in study abroad programs over the past several
years. Somehow actually paying faculty for their instructional services in overseas settings is seen
as unreasonable by our university.
What may not be apparent here immediately is the long
range impacts such decisions can have on individual employees. As my
dissatisfaction with my work at UCF had grown over the past year, I had begun
to look at the possibilities of early retirement. The state retirement system
bases final pensions on the top five years of an employee’s salary.
Should I continue in state employment until I am 62, my
monthly payment from the FRS would be a modest $1500/month ($18,000/year). Of
course, that calculation is based upon ongoing salaries at the current level
with a presumption of a 2% annual increase. If I lose my summer employment, my
salary will plunge back down to my base salary level. And my five years base
will shrink as a result. Retirement services at the university informed me
today that if I no longer include my summer salaries, my monthly benefits will
decrease to $1388/month.
In short, I will actually lose money by remaining at the university in my current status.
I have attempted to supplement my income from the
university through a number of outside activities. The Florida Humanities Council has
paid me to produce several public scholarship events around the state as well
as ongoing involvement with the Prime Time Literacy program with low income
families in Orange County. I also attempted to compensate for my second denial
of the Teaching Incentive Program award at UCF (on some very arbitrary and
political grounds) by teaching as an adjunct at my previous place of
employment, Valencia College. That brought in an additional $1800 for the fall
semester but no guarantee of ongoing adjunct opportunities. My class this semester at Valencia did not make.
Truth be told, I engage in these outside activities as more
for the joy they provide me as for the modest income I gain there. It’s such a nice change to
work in situations where your efforts are appreciated, where you are respected
as a professional and as a human being. Sadly, none of these things are consistently a
part of my experience of UCF anymore. But even with all of these part-time gigs
plus my full-time work at UCF, I have yet to hit the $60,000 I made my last
year of practicing law in 1990. And as things stand, that record will probably
go unshattered before I retire.
(Continued)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The
Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
If
the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be
it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most
things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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