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KATU accuses UO of hiding rape allegations to protect Duck basketball’s APR

Last updated on 09/09/2014

Update: Troy Brynelson and Alex Cremer make it criminally plain, in the ODE:

The University of Oregon purposely delayed the expulsion of three basketball players in order to preserve its academic standing with the NCAA and financial incentives for members of the athletic department, according to an exhaustive investigative piece from KATU News.

Update: A long, substantive report tonight by reporters Dusty Lane and Joe Douglass, with many explosive allegations, including a well documented claim that UO delayed reporting the rape allegations to UO students in order to game the NCAA’s APR rules, and prevent penalties against Altman’s basketball program. Sick stuff.

So far, Interim President Coltrane is sticking with Gottfredson’s decisions to

  • not release the documents showing how UO responded,
  • shut down the Senate’s watchdog Intercollegiate Athletics Committee
  • appoint the remarkably complacent Tim Gleason as the replacement for FAR Jim O’Fallon – the man responsible for keeping track of UO’s NCAA “Academic Progress Rating”.

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9/8/2014: KATU reports on UO’s legal liability for alleged rapes – more tonight

Here’s last night’s story, including interviews with Cheyney Ryan (Law) and Interim President Coltrane. The report closes with the note that KATU will have more hitherto undisclosed info tonight about UO’s pattern of failing to appropriately respond to sexual assault reports.

Any bets on how Coltrane will split the cost of dealing with all this between the academic and athletic sides of the budget? Presumably the academic budget has been stuck with bill for the $10K honoraria and expenses of Gottfredson’s review panel, but that’s likely to be the least part of it.

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16 Comments

  1. Cheyney Ryan 09/08/2014

    For the record, I am not a member of our distinguished law faculty, but teach in the law school’s conflict resolution program, where I have been since leaving the philosophy department. The rest of the time I teach international humanitarian law at Oxford University.

  2. Andy Stahl 09/08/2014

    Unlike acting president Coltrane, I have read the Georgia Title IX basketball case. Professor Ryan is correct; the facts of the case are compellingly similar to the sexual harassment inflicted upon a UO student by students employed as a part of Coach Altman’s basketball team.

    The 6-figure settlement reached between the University of Georgia and its victim has little deterrent effect in today’s big-time world of professional college sports. Holding UO administrators and coaches accountable will require that heads must roll, as they did at Georgia.

    To date, UO has failed to show it has the legal acumen, the ethical cojones, or the financial independence from big-time athletic donor(s) to do just do it.

  3. mousey 09/08/2014

    “So far, Interim President Coltrane is …” the latest dupe. That is, aside from those who really thought an independent board was actually going to make an honest difference by creating real change.

  4. Anonymous 09/08/2014

    The most likely explanation for Coltrane’s refusal to release the documents showing how UO responded is that Coltrane himself, in his role as Provost, was deeply implicated in all of the administrative decisions to game the APR regulations even as the shit was about to hit the fan. It’s time for Coltrane to come clean on what he knew when.

  5. Anonymous 09/08/2014

    Coltrane’s speech to the UO Board is Thursday morning, so he has about 60 hours to decide if he really wants to stick with MG’s game plan.

    • Anonymous 09/08/2014

      And then there was Bronet.

      • uomatters Post author | 09/09/2014

        Interim Provost Bronet will make a fine interim president.

        • External Reader 09/18/2014

          Predictable, remember this one?

          Provost Scott Coltrane would make a fine Interim President. And from what I hear, he would have much more support from the faculty and Deans as UO President than Gottfredson has ever had. 05/07/2014

          Bill Harbaugh’s longstanding fixation with University of Oregon governance is an obsessional exercise arising from his many grievances with past administrations (whether real or contrived) and his odd predisposition. In a rare moment of candor last October, Bill disclosed his UOM purpose, that is, undermine the University of Oregon and lambaste its administrators in order to create a Union, and now, to perpetually strengthen that Union’s position at the bargaining table. As the implications of his admission reverberated, that particular UOM post promptly disappeared, but collective bargaining season shall soon descend on the campus yet again. For Bill, collective bargaining never ends and this blog is a tool. As he hammers the University community with his daily onslaught of selective misinformation, he dresses up his true motive with seemingly laudatory calls for open records, transparency, shared governance, democracy, free speech, academic freedom, ending athletic subsidies, reducing administrative bloat, and endless investigations of countless other conspiracies. Under the guise of journalism that protects his first amendment right to publish satirical muckraking, he raises targeted questions to actively promote faculty distrust and to erode intellectual integrity. He has ushered in an era of chronic suspicion that reduces any striving for academic excellence at the University of Oregon into permanent faculty estrangement, with members urged to solely rely on a union to grovel for bread crumbs in order to survive. To adapt Hobbes:

          In such condition, there is no place for academic excellence; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of terminal irrelevance; and the life of faculty, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

          Bill’s solution: Union. If academic life is reduced to nothing more than labor-management negotiations, then we are doomed. Early career STEM faculty take heed, despite genuine UO efforts to maintain AAU membership and strengthen its academic mission, just notice the prevailing campus reaction to cluster hires and seek employment elsewhere.

          • observer 09/18/2014

            Good lord … how long did it take you to write this “external” manifesto? It’s so dramatic. And twisted. You clearly think you know it all, so no reason to pick it apart with facts. Carry on.

  6. Nobody 09/08/2014

    Don’t we have a police force at the school to investigate these sort of crimes and to take charge and protect us all? Wait. That would be the Eugene police department. Never mind. So just what is all that money being given to the UofO police getting us? Right. A bowl of dicks list. My bad. The school needs to come out and let everyone know what is going on with their response to this. People will tolerate stupidity and doing the wrong thing so long as you acknowledge the mistake. The administration clearly thinks that the faculty and staff are to be treated like mushrooms instead of fellow school employees.

  7. very sad 09/09/2014

    Watching an administrator say to the camera that the UO did not know of the prior abuse report reminds me of watching Colin Powell tell American that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. You can see it in the face (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microexpression).

    I’m sad; I expected better.

    The only way out is to tell the truth now and stop covering up. The truth will out either way.

  8. Hippo 09/09/2014

    “I’m disappointed”

  9. Anonymous 09/09/2014

    Say it ain’t so, Scott!

  10. Anonymous 09/09/2014

    Any doubts about Scott’s willingness to lie to cover the Duck’s ass have been resolved. Didn’t take long either. I wonder if he’ll also lie to us about the budget? Shared governance?

  11. Anonymous 09/09/2014

    Andrew Miltenberg is a New York-based attorney who has, over the past two years, represented two dozen students who have been expelled or suspended from school after being accused of sexual assault. His job is to see things through the eyes of the accused in these cases – and even from that perspective, he thinks University of Oregon waited too long to take action.

    Miltenberg said schools almost always immediately restrict an accused student’s access to things like the dining hall, the library and other dorms – and that response times are measured in hours, not weeks or months.

    “That’s unusual, and again I’m looking at it from the perspective of the accused’s rights and even looking at it through that lens that long of a time is incredibly unusual,” he said.

    When a lawyer who specializes in defending accused student rapists says that didn’t do enough, you probably didn’t do enough.

  12. Anon 09/09/2014

    Until I read this KATU report, I was willing to accept that the administration’s behavior was due to incompetence rather than malice (a la Hanlon’s razor). But now that motive has been established, I must believe that this was all intentional.

    How long will it take for a judge to decide that those emails should be released in full?

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