6/12/2014 update: Coleen Flaherty of Insidehighered.com has a write up on this too, here. UO is getting quite a reputation in the national higher ed press, a story last year on Gottfredson’s efforts to subvert academic freedom is here.
6/10/2014 update: UO administration rejects Professor Freyd’s survey of campus sexual violence
Josephine Woolington has the story in the RG, here. VPSA Robin Holmes, who made the decision, is the person who sat on the 2011 recommendations for student conduct code revisions for three years. The UO Senate finally took charge, and wrote and passed the revisions on May 28. Gottfredson has not yet signed them, and the administration’s web site for the current policy still lists former student conduct director Carl Yeh as their point person. (Archived here.) Yeh left UO in August 2013, and Holmes didn’t replace him until this March.
Freyd is asking for $30-$40K to cover the survey costs. (You can donate via the UO Foundation’s website here. Make sure you put “Research on Trauma and Oppression, Jennifer Freyd” in the “additional gift instructions” box, or your money will probably go to Duck Athletics.) The UC system recently hired consultants to conduct a more general campus climate survey, at a reported cost of $661K, albeit for a larger sample.
The strange “external review committee” that Gottfredson, Holmes, and Mullens just appointed to review their own dilatory response to the conduct code and basketball rape allegations – three months after Gottfredson first learned of them – will now decide how to conduct their own survey. Talk about a conflict of interest! The story also quotes Holmes’s $83K “strategic communicator” Rita Radostitz, but don’t expect much in the way of frank talk from her:
The UO Senate does not trust the administration on this issue, and the Senate Task Force membership will be announced shortly. Presumably they will take charge of this matter as well.
6/6/2014 update: Gottfredson’s self-appointed “external review panel” includes old insider
Gottfredson, Mullens, and Holmes have now announced the names of the people they are appointing to the “External Review Panel” to investigate their own actions or lack of actions regarding the March 8-9 rape allegations and sexual violence prevention. Full list here.
The panel will include Bob Berdahl. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2005, in his previous job as UC-Berkeley President, Berdahl got into some trouble over his lucrative sinecure payments, but managed to avoid prosecution: