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Posts tagged as “UO Trustees”

BOT posts description of their ideal UO president – no higher ed experience required

The full document is here. My take on it is very positive guarded. It emphasizes the need to stay in AAU, gets specific, emphasizes scholarship and even mentions transparency. On the other hand, as a commenter notes, it opens the door to hiring a president with no academic qualifications or experience:…

Interview with new BOT student member Helena Schlegel

1/7/2015 update: Rumor has it that graduating law student Sam Dotters-Katz tried to keep his position on the board for another year, but a long talk with Randy Geller convinced him it was better to go quietly. UO student government then submitted several names to Governor Kitzhaber, and nominee Helena Schlegel was confirmed by the Oregon Senate just before the December board meeting. Alexandra Wallachy has an interview with her in the Emerald, here:

How have you learned to improve transparency and student outreach?

I would like to see more communication between students, faculty and administration when it comes to our governing body, as I feel that often students are not informed, and thus not aware when important decisions are being made at Board of Trusteees meetings.

Personally, I would like to initiate some of these conversations. Initially, I want to ensure students are aware of the Winter Board of trustees meeting, so they can provide a student perspective and/or opinion on the matters being discussed.

4/28/2014: Dotters-Katz to be replaced as student representative to UO Board of Trustees

Senate repudiates Triplett and Park proposal, directs TAIF to investigate potential retaliation against faculty

12/14/2014: Video of the Senate meeting is now available:

12/10/2014 PM update:

Alexandra Wallachly from the Emerald has posted a report on the meeting, here.

On the Board meeting Thursday: I think it’s important to show up at the Board meeting Thursday at 8AM in the Alumni Center. While the board has backed off on the latest power grab, there’s plenty of potential for surprises, those making public comments deserve some supporters, and it’s important that the Board sees that the faculty take what’s been happening very seriously. And I hear someone will be passing out “Save our Senate” buttons.

On the Senate meeting today: I got there at the very end. I’d love it if someone would send me some notes or post them. People tell me it was standing room only, and filled with dismay and outrage over what’s going on with our administration.

The Senate passed an amended version of the motion below, opposing the Triplett/Park power grab. The fact that they did this even after Coltrane announced the Board would withdraw the motion at his suggestion shows how deep the mistrust of Johnson Hall has become. Coltrane and Bronet need to take charge of that snake-pit, decisively and soon.

The Senate then apparently wrote and approved a second motion, directing the Academic Integrity Task Force to investigate the administration’s “alleged plans to establish groundwork for disciplinary procedures” against Philosophy Dept Chair Bonnie Mann and other faculty who refused to issue “fraudulent” grades. Apparently there is also an accusation that a CAS administrator not only gave out grades for courses, but then raised them after students complained. I don’t know if the TAIF will also investigate that.

I’ll post the video when available, and I expect the motions (passed unanimously?) will be on the Senate website soon, here. Meanwhile check Try Bree Nicolello’s twitter reports on the meeting: https://twitter.com/breenicolello.

12/10/2014 update: (see below for Coltrane response)

Sorry, I’m at the Board committee meetings, no live-blog.

Updated w/ pres search news. UO Board of Trustees, Friday Dec 12th meeting live-blog

Highlight of the day’s meetings: Page down for the live-blog of the Presidential Factors Committee meeting. They are setting up a reasonably open evaluation process for UO presidents starting next month, and setting pay for a new President.

Ginevra Ralph is chair, she runs a tight meeting. She was very cognizant of the need for transparency and the problems with paying a president more than our comparators when staff, OA, and faculty salaries are below comparators.

VPFA Jamie Moffitt really didn’t want to talk about that data. I assume she’s just being modest, since she’s making out pretty well. So here it is, from UO’s own IR website and other easily obtained public sources:

Screen Shot 2014-11-17 at 11.00.05 PM

And a snapshot from last year, showing salaries for faculty and some specific central admins at UO versus comparator data:

 The reports from the Wednesday’s committee meetings are here, and from Thursday’s meeting are here.

12/12/2014: The 8AM full board meeting is not off to a good start, given the quotes from Board Chair Chuck Lillis in today’s RG story about UO’s new Sports Product program. They make the University of Oregon Board of Trustees look ridiculous. And a board in their position cannot afford to look any more ridiculous:

… Lillis, however, wasn’t prepared to let the subject of efficiency drop. His friend, retired UO business professor Roger Best, worked at General Electric when Lillis was an executive there, he said.

“He was a world class business school professor,” Lillis said. “In the ’80s he routinely turned down $10,000-a-day as a consultant. He was the executive of a big British firm when he lived in Eugene and he commuted on the Concorde. He has started two businesses and sold them both — and is a very large donor to the university,” Lillis said.

That certainly is an interesting definition of a world class business school professor.

If the university is not going to trust someone like that, Lillis said, who will it trust. “We have this, like, superstar. …

… Barbara Altmann, vice provost for academic affairs, said the various committees gauge the soundness and coherence of proposed programs and ensure that the proposers have a stable line up of courses to guarantee quality for students who pay a lot, especially for business graduate degrees.

8:00 am (other times approx.) RECONVENE PUBLIC MEETING, FORD ALUMNI CENTER, GIUSTINA BALLROOM

Usual live-blog disclaimer: This is my opinion of what people said, meant, or should have said, nothing is a quote unless in quotes.

Notice  |  Agenda  |  Minutes

8.    Overview of Research Funding  
Vice President for Research and Innovation Brad Shelton will give an overview of the University
of Oregon’s funded research programs.

I missed most of it seems pretty similar to last year’s. Shelton is interim VPR, appointed after Espy left for a university that she thought had a better football team. Whoops.

Shelton doesn’t have the research background that would be normal for this job (short vita, no NSF grants) and he’s rather amazingly overpaid. He gives a reasonably informative talk though, and given his control over our limited research funding, no one on the faculty can afford to look cross-wise at him, unless you’ve got a pipeline to that sports product money.

Shelton ends his talk with a note of approval for the changes that Espy made in UO’s research office, and a word of thanks to Mussolini for getting those trains to run on time.

UO Board of Trustees, Th Dec 11th meeting live-blog

Short version: It was good.

The board listened to the faculty and the students today. More than that, it felt like they heard us. They even responded. They took the administration’s policy-grab motion off the table, until the Senate has had a chance to fix it and restore some semblance of shared governance. Yesterday’s committee meetings were also very positive. It felt like we’ve got the board that we’d hoped we would get, when we supported the legislation to get UO out of OUS.

Here’s hoping Scott Coltrane and Frances Bronet heard us too, because UO is not going to make progress until someone performs a few Johnson Hall defenestrations.

The Board meeting resumes Friday at 8AM with the first item being a presentation from Interim VP for Research Brad Shelton. I expect to live-blog it too.

12/11/2014 Live-blog. Usual disclaimer: my opinion of what people said, meant, or should have said, unless in quotes:

Show up Th at 8AM! UO Board and committee meeting agendas and links for Wed-Fri

12/10/14 PM update:

I encourage faculty to show up at the full Board meeting, 8 AM Thursday, to support the guest speakers supporting faculty governance. I’ll do my best to live-blog it.

12/10/2014: Some erratic live-blog reports below, in the committee agendas. It’s rough, I’ll try and clean it up later.

Highlights from the 12/10/2014 committee meetings:

– Helena Schlegel has been confirmed by the state Senate as new UO student Board Trustee.

– UO’s financial position is still strong, independent auditor gives “clean audit”.

– ASUO and Lamar Wise get the board to amend tuition and fee setting policy.

– Board abandons the Triplett / Park scheme to supersede the UO Constitution and faculty governance – at least for now.

– Board Chair Chuck Lillis presents draft plan for how the board can take pro-active steps help improve UO’s academic excellence- including improvements in administrative efficiency, fundraising, etc.

– Board moves forward on the Sports Product MS program. As much as it pains me to say it, this program probably makes sense for UO. Of course Jim Bean, our former provost and new $250K Sports Product program head, skipped the meeting. Having heard Bean talk many times, I can say that this was probably also a good idea. Two minutes of Bean would have killed its chances forever.

12/9/2014: Some highlights from the committee meeting agendas for Wednesday, and the Board meetings for Thursday-Friday:

– In the committees, starting 10AM Wednesday: A new Duck sports marketing deal, audited financial statements, Jim Bean’s sports product design sinecure, and Coltrane’s presentation on how he’s replacing Senate committees with his own “Administrative Advisory Groups”.

– In the full Board meeting, starting 8AM Thursday: Public comment on the Lillis motion to replace the UO Constitution and the UO Senate’s role in faculty governance with top-down control by the UO Board and its UO President, followed by a vote by the board. Update: The faculty has now been promised that this motion is off the agenda.

The committee meetings are all in room 403 of the Ford Center, and the full Board meeting is in the first floor ballroom. The list of UO Board Trustees is here. It will be interesting to see if Chuck Triplett uses the support staff tables to form a defensive wall between the university community and the board members, as last time.

The “Agenda” links below go to the docket material. However these dockets are not completely trustworthy. At the last meeting Board Secretary Angela Wilhelms did not post the most interesting parts of the dockets, e.g. Chuck Lillis’s power grab on presidential hiring authority. Even the board members didn’t get that until just before they were forced to vote. This secrecy led to confusion and embarrassment for the UO Board, as noted in this InsideHigherEd report by Ry Rivard.

This time I notice that the audited financial statements and the auditor’s report are not posted. The docket says they’ll be distributed at the meeting as hard copies, so no one has a chance to read them in advance and ask tough questions. I’m no CPA, but an auditor might say that this sort of lack of transparency “raises a potential matter of concern”.

Chronicle of Higher Ed quotes Coltrane on Senate strike vote, Board Chair Lillis speaks.

Scroll down for the Senate agenda and live-blog.

Institutionalized News Media Updates:

Once again Johnson Hall’s administrative incompetence crowds out the important news, in this case Chuck Lillis’s speech. Alexandra Wallachy does have this in the Emerald: UO has “bad reputation” for faculty-admin relations, Lillis says. And well paid former TV journalist and UO PR flack Jennifer Winters has the spin in “Around the 0“.

Chronicle of Higher Education: University of Oregon Draws Criticism for Response to Threatened TA Strike

The University of Oregon’s Senate voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to rebuke the institution’s administration for planning for a threatened strike by graduate teaching assistants in a manner that bypasses the faculty and stands to bring about “the dilution and degradation of teaching standards.”

The Senate, which includes representatives of the faculty, student body, administration, and staff, adopted the motion in response to a confidential memorandum that Oregon’s top academic and human-resources administrators sent to deans and directors last month. …

Scott Greenstone has a good report in the Emerald on the dilute and degrade legislation, here:

By supporting this resolution, University Senate is saying two things:

– University Senate does not support the administration’s plan to change finals and called it “diluting academic standards” in the resolution. The plan includes turning final essays into multiple-choice tests, shortening long essay finals, or hiring non-GTF graduate students, officers of administration or even upper-level undergraduates.

– University Senate doesn’t appreciate the UO administration sending the plans to department heads instead of discussing the plans with the senate. University Senate wants to instead work with the university and come up with a solution together.

Originally, the plans were sent out with a stamp of ‘confidential,’ which the faculty pointed to as an attempt to hide the plans from them in the resolution. Barbara Altmann, senior vice-provost of Academic Affairs, denied this. Altmann said the watermark was “vestigial,” and that the university knew emails would be shared and faculty would learn of the plans.

Altmann says she and Blandy marked the plan as confidential, and only addressed it to deans and directors – not department heads, not faculty – because they knew that meant they’d get a lot of attention and feedback from the faculty. And these people wonder why no one trusts them?

GTF Union updates:

GTFF responds to today’s flex-time proposal from the administration here, and officially calls the strike for Dec 2nd, press release here.

Senate Meeting Highlights:

1) UO will dump Blackboard course management software for Canvas. Live Spring 2015. Yea!

2) Lillis speaks, answers questions. Very honest about UO’s situation and in the Q&A. (See below.) He wants administration and faculty to cooperate more to help UO. But will the Johnson Hall administration step up to the plate? Their refusal to work with the faculty on how to deal with the GTF bargaining and strike planning is not encouraging.

3) Opposition to administration’s efforts to dilute and degrade academic standards in the event of a GTF strike. AKA “educational malpractice”: dropping essay exams, canceling classes, having students watch videos, etc. Blandy: Tries to cover his butt, it’s all about protecting our undergraduates. Altmann: THe confidential stamp was there to attract more interest for what was an initial draft. We knew it would get leaked in 30 minutes to UO Matters (WTF? It wasn’t stamped “draft”, it was stamped “confidential“. And it took me days to get it. Embarrassing. And Altmann just can’t keep from digging that credibility hole deeper and deeper.) Dreiling: Sometimes good people make bad decisions. This secret memo was a bad decision. Just Settle. Lots more discussion, Coltrane gives a weak defense of how he’s handled the situation, gets called out on mis-statements by many in the room. One speaker gives HLGR’s $300-an-hour lawyers a special mention for abusing and insulting our grad students, during the year of botched negotiations that led UO to this point.

Legislation passes unanimously almost unanimously (25 to3?) at 5:10, Senate then adjourns. How’s that for Senate action to help UO improve its research standing, by making clear we stand behind our grad students? Now it’s the administration’s turn to show they can work together on this important goal.

Packed room. I’ll try and live-blog a little. No promises, check the livestream link. Usual disclaimer: nothing is a quote unless in quotes.

Lillis reiterates new Pres will be an academic, appoints faculty to “advise” search

9/23/2014 update:  Alex Cremer has the Chuck Lillis interview in the ODE, along with an excellent Dominic Allen photo, here. Q: What are you looking for in terms of the new president? A: When I think about what the most important attributes are of the president, having once been a…

Blogger booted from BOT breakfast meeting on “legal training”

9/14/2014 update: Diane Dietz of the RG – also booted by the board – explains what this secret meeting was really about. Sports. Of course. 9/13/2014 Brails update: I was politely evicted from our the Board of Trustees’ Saturday breakfast “legal training meeting” with Interim GC Doug Park. It was supposed to be…

UO Pres Mike Gottfredson resigns for $940K cash, Coltrane is interim

8/9/2014 update: Christian Wihtol reports in the RG that UO was not obligated to pay Gottfredson $940K. 8/8/2014 2:30 pm update: Still a beautiful day out there. Gottfredson’s separation agreement, here. $940K, half in cash within 5 days. Dr. Gottfredson agrees not to sue The University or its employees 8/8/2014…