Press "Enter" to skip to content

Doug Blandy switches sides on union

9/25/2014 update:The faculty union had lunch today with the new faculty hires. They were in the middle of their orientation, which ends tonight with a BBQ in the Alumni Center. I remember Frohnmayer used to invite the new faculty to McMorran house – not sure when that tradition ended. Anyway, from what I could tell most of the new faculty signed cards, and they reported that the administrators who had talked to them – Barbara Altman, Ken Doxsee, and Doug Blandy – were uniformly positive about the union’s influence on UO. Blandy even sat there at the table as the union reps collected cards from the new hires. Quite the switch from last year:

10/17/2013: Plenty of water in Gottfredson’s well – for Jim Bean

At the faculty union bargaining session on 9/6/2013, the UO administration’s chief negotiator and famed tobacco company lawyer Sharon Rudnick presented President Gottfredson’s final offer on faculty salaries, saying

“The well is dry. Hear me please. The well is dry. This is an incredibly rich offer.”

UO’s VPAA Doug Blandy sat there, nodding his head. Two weeks later the union bargaining team accepted it.

Why was the well so dry? In part because, just a week before, Blandy had signed off on this contract with former interim Provost Jim Bean, guaranteeing Bean about $1M in salary and benefits over the next three years. Dave Hubin’s public records office sat on this request for a month, until after the faculty had ratified the CBA. How’s that for good faith bargaining?

That’s on top of Bean’s odd 2010 sabbatical, and what we paid him after the Senate forced him out in February.

Bean’s new job is Associate Dean for “Experiential Learning” at the LCB. A newly created position. Sounds like a great idea – undergrad internships and so on. You might think there’d have been a job posting and an open, Affirmative Action compliant search for an important, well paid job like this – especially given UO’s troubled history with these administrative golden parachute appointments. I’ve got a public records request in. We’ll see how much Dave Hubin tries to charge for the documents.

4 Comments

  1. McKinley Morganfield 10/17/2013

    Bean must have fracked the well.

  2. Anonymous 10/17/2013

    That’s enough to by every faculty member 3 goats. How piggish.

  3. Anonymous 10/17/2013

    Why did Phil Romero get sent back to the classroom, but not Bean?

    • UO Matters 10/18/2013

      Just before he left Bob Berdahl tied Gottfredson’s hands by giving Bean a two year contract as Provost.

      Gottfredson could have made Bean serve this last year of it teaching at his provost’s pay. In fact he told the Senate that Bean would “return to the faculty” July 1:

      https://uomatters.com/2013/04/bean-to-return-to-faculty-search.html

      But apparently he didn’t mean it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *