Register Guard editors confused about UO’s inflection point and sports

9/23/2015: This latest RG editorial is a response to Jack Stripling’s story in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about UO, “An Academic Reputation at Risk“. That is still gated if you are off campus, but I put up a few extracts here.

The RG’s editors are confused about the meaning of “inflection point” (Hint: Check the 2nd derivative, not the first). More significantly they seem blissfully unaware of the years of research results, including two NCAA sponsored white papers, that cannot find evidence for the claim that athletic success is a cost-effective way for a university to increase enrollment. Here’s what the RG says:

The rise of athletics coincided with the decline in public financial support, and came just as the UO needed to market itself outside the state’s boundaries. In that respect it was a godsend, giving the UO a foot in the door with prospective students everywhere.

Aren’t journalists supposed to follow the money? This argument has made millions for the athletics directors, coaches, and the compliant presidents whose PR flacks keep repeating it.

The online comments are pretty good though, as is the basic story about how declines in state funding forced UO’s leaders to go after out-of-state undergraduates. That kept them and UO’s faculty employed, but led to a relative decline in research resources and focus, and our national reputation.

And if you ignore the math error and the cheap shot at the faculty who’ve stuck with Oregon’s flagship university through all this, it’s hard to argue with their conclusion, here:

The [Chronicle] article goes on to suggest that the UO has reached an inflection point: Either the trade-offs of quality vs. quantity will be locked in, or something will happen to initiate a virtuous cycle, with first-rate academic programs attracting first-rate faculty to create first-rate academic programs.

Launching such a cycle would depend on leadership and money. That’s why so much is riding on Michael Schill, who in July became the UO’s fifth president in six years, and on the university’s $2 billion fundraising campaign. Other factors will also be at play, but leadership and self-generated resources are the two that are most subject to the university’s control.

The “flawed reputation” in the Chronicle’s headline is disheartening but undeniable. The task now is to confront it boldly, and bend the UO’s trajectory in an upward direction.

9/13/2015: Register Guard editorial on UO President Mike Schill

“Schill’s academic focus: New UO president hopes to replicate athletic success in labs and classrooms” 

In the RG here:

… And he was candid in his own assessment: “The athletic enterprise is among the very best in the nation,” Schill said. “You can’t say that about the academics.”

Schill understands that the imbalance is a cause of frustration and resentment on campus, but he sees promise in it. Top-flight athletic programs prove that the UO can excel, given the resources. Academic programs can aspire to similar success if they can be provided with enough financial support. …

Then there’s this statement:

“A high-profile athletics program helps attract students who otherwise would never have heard of the UO, he added.”

Actually, it attracts and repels. The evidence on the net effect is mixed. Here’s one recent paper:

Abstract:  College football has become big business for universities with the increase in television contracts and exposure. Concurrently, as a recent Harris Interactive poll indicates, college football has the same level of popularity as Major League Baseball. With this increase in popularity, questions arise about the effects on applications, enrollment, and the quality of the students at a university. In this paper, we use a panel data set of university funding, applications, enrollment and the quality of students at the university measured by percentile on entrance exams from 2002 to 2009 to examine the effects of various levels of success including: BCS national championships, conference championships and AP top 25 rankings. Our results indicate, individually, that national championships and AP top 25 rankings can lower the quantity and quality of applicants and enrollees, however, conference championships can positively impact the quantity and quality of applicants and enrollees. Yet, when the success measures are combined, tests reveal that overall success negatively affects the quantity and quality of applicants and enrollees.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that parents of good students don’t necessarily want to pay to send them to a football-factory party school. This NYT story based on research by UO economists explains one obvious reason.

9/2/2015: Register Guard editors interview UO President Mike Schill

Presumably the editorial will come out in a few days. Their 2013 editorial on Mike Gottfredson and the UO board is here:

Gov. John Kitzhaber’s nominations to the University of Oregon’s governing board provide a glimpse of what institutional autonomy can mean. The board will have authority over such matters as issuing bonds and hiring a president — but its real value will lie in its ability to provide leadership and support. President Michael Gottfredson, who has kept a low profile since arriving at the UO a year ago, will soon be guided and empowered by the new board.

Collectively, the nominees are a dynamo. Among them are top-tier business people such as Peter Bragdon of Columbia Sportswear and Ross Kari, chief financial officer of Freddie Mac. Major donors to the UO were nominated, including Allyn Ford of Roseburg Forest Products and Chuck Lillis of Lone Tree Partners. Several have strong connections to Eugene, including Ginerva Ralph of the Shedd Institute and the members chosen to represent students, faculty and staff. For star power, there’s Ann Curry of NBC.

These people won’t be content to be figureheads. They will expect the UO to perform as the state’s leading institution of learning and research, and as a primary engine for Oregon’s civic, cultural and economic development. All of them have achieved their various types of success through careful investments of their money, time and energy. Now they’re investing a part of their lives in the UO, demonstrating a commitment to the university and a faith in its potential.

A university president can benefit greatly by being able to turn to such a board for counsel. The board will also provide a layer of political insulation, protecting the president against pressure from the Legislature, the governor’s office and the state’s education bureaucracy. The board can provide vision for the UO, reinforce the president’s vision for the university, or both. And if a president proves lacking in either vision of his own or the ability to execute the vision of others, the board can replace him. …

“Lacking in vision and the ability to execute” is a pretty good description of Mike Gottfredson. And the RG editors were prescient about his future – eleven months and an athletic scandal later Chuck Lillis bought him off with $940K. Not how you’d like to see our students’ tuition money spent, but well worth it for UO – especially after the board followed up by hiring Mike Schill, who has the potential to be a turnaround president for UO.

And I say that despite hating the closed search process and agreeing with the Oregonian’s take on the need for an investigation into how UO and Gottfredson handled the basketball rape allegations, below. UO needs to move on, but that’s not going to happen while the truth is hidden.

8/31/2015: Oregonian editors compare UO President Mike Schill with Ken Starr

Here’s how this editorial page thing works. When you’re a public figure with something interesting you want to say your PR flack (or “Duck Advocate” as UO’s Tobin Klinger prefers to think of himself, link to RG letter here) calls around to newspapers and tries to get you a meeting with the editorial board. You spend an hour or two answering tough questions on the record, and they print your answers and their opinion of them on the editorial page. It’s not as easily gamed as most press coverage, and therefore caries more weight. For example, in 2010 Richard Lariviere got the Wall Street Journal editors to write about his “New Partnership” proposal. The WSJ editorial page is serious mojo – and their editors rolled over for Lariviere’s scheme too:

Saving Public Universities, Starting With My Own:

The solution is an endowment funded by public and private contributions. Here’s how to do it.

Of course the New Partnership and Lariviere’s desire for publicity enraged Governor Kitzhaber to the point that he ordered George Pernsteiner – the Chancellor of the OUS Board – to fire Lariviere ASAP. Maybe that history explains why new UO President Mike Schill is reluctant to speak plainly to the Oregonian’s editorial board. He knows his boss Chuck Lillis, the chair of UO’s now independent board, might read it and get angry.

In any case, here’s the Oregonian’s editorial about their meeting with President Schill. Not a good sign when the editorial that’s supposed to be about you starts by comparing you unfavorably with Ken Starr:

At Baylor University, President Ken Starr has called for an independent attorney to investigate the institution’s handling of allegations that a football player sexually assaulted another student.

At the University of Oregon, however, you won’t find the same level of curiosity from new president, Michael Schill. Although Schill has taken steps to resolve the fallout from a student’s alleged gang rape by three UO basketball players in March 2014, his message is to stop rehashing what went wrong and, instead, focus on moving forward.

… For his part, Schill said he has no desire to “relitigate” the case and was clear that he was unaware of the details of how things happened. Yet in an email to the UO community earlier this month, he declared that “I do not believe any of our coaches, administrators, or other university personnel acted wrongfully, nor do I believe that any one of them failed to live up to the high moral standards that we value and that they embody in their work every day.”

Well that is a bit of a contradiction.

And then there’s Duck basketball coach Dana Altman, former Eagle Scout, now raking in the bonus cash from his “student-athletes”:

And then there’s UO men’s basketball coach Dana Altman, who has acknowledged that he did not probe deeply into Austin’s disciplinary history. That despite knowing the highly sought-after player had been suspended for the entire season due to a disciplinary issue. That strange lack of curiosity suggests that Altman really did not want to know the answer.

No shit. Or, as Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” The Oregonian finishes with this reminder:

That should be a message to Schill. The university isn’t the first to deal with student-on-student assaults. It’s not the only school that has badly mishandled an incident. But keeping ignorant is the worst possible way for an institution that understands the value of education to move forward.

I do have to reiterate, in defense of Mike Schill’s strategy, that it may well keep Chuck Lillis from firing him. And, of course, we should remember that Baylor President Ken Starr’s obsession with sex investigations is, perhaps, a bit obsessive: