4/6/2012 update: And this morning after wasting a bit of our county DA’s time Randy Geller folded and gave up the contracts and invoices for the two firms UO has hired to advise them on the union organizing effort, here.
One is with Stephen Hirschfeld of the SF firm Curiale Hirschfeld Kraemer, signed Feb 1, one invoice so far for $7,834.71. The other is with Sharon Rudnick of Harrang Long Gary and Rudnick, signed Feb 2, no billing yet. (No mention of chinese wall for Frohnmayer). These files are heavily redacted, and in white rather than black, making the extent of redactions less obvious. Tricky, and considered bad practice by those in the public records business.
By sitting on these contracts until after the 4/4 petition response deadline Geller made it impossible for faculty to consider this information when deciding how to respond to the ERB petitions. To me it doesn’t really seem worth giving the union attorneys that sort of ammunition.
A commenter notes that the UA union attorney is Michael Tedesco, of Lake Oswego.
4/4/2012: 2 weeks ago I asked UO for
… copies of any UO contracts and invoices for legal advice or consulting assistant related to the attempt to create a UO faculty union from 7/1/2010 to the present.
I made a similar request 2 years ago, and got this. Randy Geller is sitting on the new contracts, so I followed Oregon public records law and petitioned Lane County DA Alex Gardner for an order requiring him to surrender them peaceably. The trail so far, starting with my petition yesterday:
Dear District Attorney Gardner:
Two weeks ago I made a public records request to the University of Oregon’s public records officer Lisa Thornton, asking for
… copies of any UO contracts and invoices for legal advice or consulting assistant related to the attempt to create a UO faculty union from 7/1/2010 to the present. I am making a similar request to OUS.
I ask for a fee waiver on the grounds of public interest, which is large.
I asked for these documents because a group of UO faculty has submitted a unionization petition to the state Employment Relations Board, and many people at UO are curious who is advising the UO administration about this effort. Several petitions from faculty are underway, and as I explained in my request the deadline for these is April 4:
I would appreciate it if you could expedite this request, as the matter is currently before the state ERB, and they are only accepting objections to the process and unit definitions until April 4.
My understanding is that these documents are in the possession of the UO General Counsel, Randy Geller, and that his office is the holdup in releasing them.
I do not think this delay is reasonable under Oregon’s public records law. Therefore I am petitioning your office to order UO to release the documents without delay.
signed, X
And the response from the DA’s office, today:
Dear Ms. Thornton,
The District Attorney received the below appeal on a denial of a public records request made to you by X. The District Attorney only has seven days from receipt of the appeal to issue an opinion.
Please provide me the basis of the denial by Friday, April 6th at 2:00 p.m. It may be necessary for me to inspect the records prior to issuing an opinion if the records exist.
If the request has not been denied, please advise when the records will be available for copy or inspection.
Sincerely,
Patricia W. Perlow
Chief Deputy
Lane County District Attorney’s Office
I wonder what kind of union busting activities $7,800 buys. Do you think Geller signed up for the “Maintaining Union Free Status” workshops that this firm offers? Or did they just advise him on how to mess with the Excelsior list and how to create delays at the ERB?
Gee, thanks a lot UOMatters. Now UA’s lawyers know who will be arguing against them, and will have more time to look at their arguments in other cases. Will you be revealing who exactly the lawyer team for the union is? I thought not. So much for “neutrality.”
Michael Tedesco is the UA attorney. The administration already knows this fact.
Nice. Can we see the UO attorney paperwork too then? How much are they spending their lawyer? And where is the money coming from? Future dues??
As for UOMatters, I wonder if you ever think twice about your obsessive-compulsive, paranoid abhorrence of official secrecy and personal hatred of Randy Geller. It’s not at all clear to me how many of us believe Geller’s refusal to produce legal receipts “made it impossible for faculty to consider this information when deciding how to respond to the ERB petitions”. Really??? You think all the people signing one or the other petition was chiefly motivated, or would have been at all influenced by this? The university has every right, under Oregon law, to contest the union filing with the ERB. They therefore have every right to hire lawyers to do so? In fact, the ERB rules prevent anybody but the employer from filing objections. So this anti-union TTF, and perhaps many others who signed a petition of some sort, is frankly grateful that the university filed an objection and hired the appropriate legal representation to do so. I would rather they were acting on sound professional advice from people with expertise in labor law than just Geller.
At this stage, it is all a game for lawyers, theirs, ours, the courts. And what lawyers do is delay, file objections, and bill their clients. What the hell is shocking anybody?
Well said – except that I think you meant to say “union attorney paperwork” in the first line.
I think people should be able to find out what their government is up to. That’s a basic civil right, and generally important to good government in the long run. That’s why we have laws requiring government agencies to provide documents to the public. Oregon’s law is a pretty typical example. When people like Melinda Grier, Dave Frohnmayer, and Randy Geller try to use their power to try and subvert those laws, I act rationally and try to make that expensive for them. And you’re right, I get pretty angry too.
That’s your right, UO Matters, but that doesn’t mean that you are acting in the best interests of us as an academic institution. Don’t believe me? Pretend for a minute that we are at Harvard or Rice or… Their faculty have no right to dig up anything on their admins, and they don’t seem to be suffering too badly. Your narrow view of our academic institution as just another government agency aligns very well with that of our Governor’s, but not the view of this TTF.
Follow up to my 02:44 comment: I wonder if UOMatters is stuck “Fighting the last war.” When Moseley and Frohnmayer ran the roost, we needed someone to dig up the bodies. Lariviere cleaned house, so I frankly don’t see the need as nearly as pressing. The discussion board on this site is much more enlightening than the content these days.
Yes, the secrecy at Harvard was very convenient for Larry Summers, who was able to shield Andrei Shleifer and his wife from investigation and keep collecting hedge fund consulting payments on the side, for quite a while. And of course Penn State has a special exemption from the PA sunshine laws.
But sorry to be snarky. The truth is that neither of us nor our administrators really know what’s in UO’s best interests. And even if they did, it’s not clear they would pursue it, especially if it conflicted with what was best for them personally. Same with us.
This is true in most institutions. Transparency may not always solve these problems, but on average it seems to work much better than the alternative.
Anon 2:21 here–I agree with UO matters about keeping tabs on government, transparency and all that. But there is some question of what’s appropriate, and when? Do you ask for all lunch receipts? Do you ask for the records in my tenure case (which I might have liked to see at some point)? I don’t thinking putting these documents out helps really or hiinders anything? But one does wonder about any sense of rational perspective. And even-handedness: in this case, there are two sets of lawyers, two contending parties, and a lot of faculty caught in the middle with differing views. Maybe this isn’t the time to obsessive out every aspect of ONE of those sides…
For the record, I have never made a public records request for lunch receipts. OK, I did once, for Pernsteiner. And boy did that produce some interesting results!
https://uomatters.com/2011/02/treetops-scandal.html
I’m no economist, but if you plotted academic excellence vs. transparency you aren’t going to get a large positive R-value. What I care much more about is administrators doing their jobs well (look for example at the overhead fiasco). Transparency can help in determining that to some point, but focussing on transparency to the detriment of the strategy of attracting good talent and giving them the resources to do their jobs is a net negative.
Dog to all
Oh lighten up on UOmatters – it doesn’t matter if you disagree or agree with tactics
of UOMatters or their approach or their toxic slime quotient. This is the only forum
in UOland where commentators can discuss things in a candid manner. Yeah there are rants, etc, and all of this is to be expected. But none of you commentators (including me) had the stones that UOMatters had to initiate all of this in the first place.
My only complaint is purely technical. UOMatters needs new tools to better organize
the comments. I am sure that The UOmatters is aware of this.
I have a dream that one day UOMatters and the Admin will figuratively lower their weapons and come to some kind of understanding on transparency. Here’s a radical utopian thought: both sides agree to reveal information (only) when it serves the end of educating people on how a university works and how one ought to work. What amazes me about universities everywhere is how little of their massive collective brainpower they devote to studying themselves. And yet UOMatters is already conducting what amounts to an open seminar on the giant stomach-churning governance revolution we’ve been living through since RL’s firing. If we could quit fighting each other and take a step back, we’d realize that there are whole state- and nationwide dimensions of that revolution that we’re not even thinking about.
Maybe setting aside the goal of transparency for its own sake would finally shame the Admin into realizing that you can’t manage an intellectual community without engaging in some kind of intellectual dialogue with that community. My honest fear is that the people who run the place are simply not smart enough to do that — not as smart as the people they manage. The hundreds of people who read this blog, whether they support the Admin or not, whether they support UOMatters or not, do so because they’re unwilling to leave all the decisions up to those who are alas ultimately, incontestably, in charge. The same could be said, too, of the hundreds of people who signed union cards.
Sounds great. Maybe this is the job that Bob Berdahl and Lorraine Davis had in mind when they signed the faculty’s old friend John Moseley up for a new 6 month stint as “Special Assistant to the Provost”? But we’ll know for sure when Geller responds to our public records request for his contract and job description.
Stipulated: power corrupts. Question: which of the following oversight mechanisms is most likely to identify and root out instances of executive-level cronyism and abuse at a large public research university?
(a) a vigorous president
(b) an independent board
(c) a union CBA
(d) a shared-governance transparency committee
(e) a Senate motion requiring performance reviews
(f) a freelance public gadfly
(g) volcanic moral indignation
Check all that apply. Don’t copy your neighbor’s paper. Everyone should at least answer (g).
I agree with Chicken. I appreciate the issues UOMatters has brought to our attention but we should keep our goals in mind, otherwise we’ll simply eat ourselves alive. As an example, there has been a lot of focus on Bean’s salary and sabbatical on this blog, but the fact is I don’t really care what Bean’s salary is as long as he’s doing a good job. Unfortunately I don’t know anything about that (the administrators I do know seem to be very good) and this blog just posts negative innuendo in that regard. Does any good come out of this? I don’t think so.
But we should keep our goals in mind – and in my mind that is to work WITH the administration to KEEP the UO the unexpectedly excellent university that it is.