Eight Florida A&M professors this summer were given a month's notice of termination and five days to pack up their belongings, turn in their keys and vacate their offices despite a union contract requiring one year's notice before termination.

Their union, the United Faculty of Florida/AFT, protested, and the terminations appeared to be rescinded—but only partially. The university sent letters to the faculty members stating they were back on payroll and would be notified when they could return to campus. But as of this week, they still had no office keys and no class assignments, even though classes resume Aug. 28.

"They're back on the payroll, but we're not convinced that the university has fully withdrawn that layoff notice," says Bill Tucker, chief negotiator and former president of the FAMU local.

Florida A&M justified the initial terminations as necessary to pass an upcoming accreditation review of the School of Business and Industry (SBI), where all the fired faculty members worked, implying they had insufficient credentials to meet requirements, says the union. An accreditation review for the entire university is also pending, and another 40 faculty members university-wide are threatened with termination for the same reason, reports UFF, although notices have been delayed in the uproar over the "SBI Eight."

Union officials are particularly angry about the university's lack of sensitivity in handling the firings; one fired professor who was out of town when the notifications were mailed learned through the local press that he was out of a job. Another, Booker Daniels, says that no supervisor, including the dean, ever met with the SBI group to discuss the terminations.

The notification letters blamed the terminations on "reallocation of funds" designed to "accelerate the possibility of the school being accredited." If credentials among the faculty are at issue, however, says Daniels, an MBA and retired IBM executive who has taught at the university for 14 years, faculty transcripts should be reviewed again and likely will show unrecognized work that would meet accreditation requirements.

"We don't know why they are going after us with this reckless abandonment of principles," says Barbara Thompson, president of the local UFF chapter at FAMU. "The [fired faculty] were publicly humiliated . . . because the university was saying that they were not qualified for their positions."

The controversy over the SBI terminations is not the only one plaguing FAMU. The Board of Trustees has requested a state investigation of why the college's interim president put FAMU'S inspector general on leave shortly after he began examining the financial records of the college's senior administrators. In addition, enrollment at the university has dropped significantly, and, as new questions are raised about FAMU's bookkeeping practices, state auditors have still not confirmed the university's budget weeks after the fiscal year began. [Virgina Myers Kelly]

July 25, 2006