Capital Outlook Viewpoint

Ammons is advocate for faculty

After years of back-and-forth with the adminnistration, the Florida A&M University faculty have found an ally and advocate in President James H. Ammons.

When the FAMU Board of Trustees last year named the former FAMU provost and then-chancellor at North Carolina Central University as FAMU president, Bill Tucker, longtime president of the FAMU chapter of the United Faculty of Florida union, publicly expressed his organization’s approval of the selection.

Two weeks ago during a BOT meeting, Faculty Senate President Maurice Holder, another veteran of faculty-administration wars, commended Ammons for holding regular forums with the faculty and keeping that body in the loop.

From Ammons’ perspective, according the faculty, their due honor and respect is a no-brainer. They are the “lifeblood of the university,” he told the Capital Outlook last week.

“When you really think about the university,” he said, “it’s the faculty. You can have all kinds of administrators, football teams, great bands ... but if the students aren’t prepared to go out and become leaders, if they aren’t sought after by Wall Street companies, by graduate and professional schools, then you don’t have a university,” he said.

“For me it’s not that difficult to know where the action is on campus,” he added.

The president expresses concern, however, that this strength of the university could be threatened and there is little he can do about it.

“The thing that bothers me right now is this fiscal situation we’re in and can’t do something for the faculty,” he said. “They’ve hung in there and they stayed focused. With all of this ... stuff ... around, you still had the Wall Street companies coming, you still had students being accepted to Harvard’s medical school and dental school, and students leaving here and going out with multiple offers. It was still happening,” he said.

“That’s the remarkable thing about these last five or six years: With all these things happening, the faculty remained true to their commitment to the students.”

That knowledge of the extraordinary work and worth of the faculty with no way to reward them causes personal pain for Ammons. And it should.

With gas costing more than $4 per gallon and the price of groceries skyrocketing, no raise is like a pay cut.

And faculty members, no matter how committed and dedicated, have to drive and eat, too.

Thanks to Gov. Charlie Crist and his Republican-dominated Legislature, their tax cuts and consequent budget cuts leave money managers like Ammons very little, if any, flexibility when it comes to awarding even minimal raises.

“Our salaries are way, way out of line,” Ammons said. “Another year of not receiving increases just puts us farther behind.”

And that could hurt even more down the road.

“Pretty soon,” Ammons says, “the faculty members who get tired of this are going somewhere else, and it would be a tremendous loss for FAMU.”

But it’s a bit early to go there, and the faculty shouldn’t give up yet. Ammons hasn’t. He’s still trying to figure out some way to come up with some money.

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