Welcome to 2026-26 from your new Co-President!

Welcome to the 2026-2027 academic year, and for our new colleagues, welcome to UF!

My name is Michelle Nolan and it is an honor to serve along with Meera Sitharam as one of UFF-UF’s two Co-Presidents. I have met many of you over the past few years while doing hundreds of office visits with the UFF-UF Membership Team, and I look forward to continuing our conversations in my new role.

This academic year, we continue to build a movement. Last spring, the Florida state legislature passed the most brutal anti-union law in the state’s recent history. That law made it much harder for us to fight for better working conditions and keep our collective bargaining rights.

But, in response to this law, a historic number of faculty have stepped up. Hundreds of you have taken the critical step to become dues-paying members, raising our membership percentage by more than 5% in a few short months. And dozens more have volunteered to become organizers, talk to their colleagues, and carry out other tasks essential to our union’s survival. As a result, we are stronger, both quantitatively and qualitatively, than we were one year ago.

This year, we will face two critical tasks. First, we must prepare for and win our most difficult recertification election yet. And second, we must continue to build toward the critical 60% dues-paying membership threshold that will allow us to escape the annual recertification process.

Both tasks are challenging but not impossible. For months, we have been building the infrastructure necessary to survive a recertification election under Florida’s new legal regime. And, as we continue to build towards the required 60% dues-paying membership threshold, I am happy to share that many of our sibling unions at other institutions have already succeeded, including UFF-FSU, UFF-FAMU, UFF-FIU, UFF-FGCU, UFF-UNF, UFF-UWF, and eleven UFF chapters at state colleges.

For all of these chapters, the key to their success was the same: everyday faculty members took ownership of their union and contributed to protecting it. With your help, we can do it too. If we organize department by department, we will emerge stronger than ever. We will strengthen our collective voice and ensure our union has the power to expand faculty rights, defend academic freedom, improve our worklives, and build a thriving university.

Our union is us: faculty members stepping up to protect one another. You also have a role in making this future a reality, no matter how big or small. So let us know how you want to get involved. And let’s get to work!

Solidarity,

Michelle Nolan