UO Matters

That would of course be Oregon State, with an informative email and detailed list below. Here at UO, our Government Relations Office hasn’t even updated its blog since August.

From Raghu in Physics:

After the first week of the term, when students had a sense of what the course is about and my approach to asking and inviting questions, I asked students to move. We’d have two zones in the classroom, an “active” zone in which I’d expect students to interact with me and with each other, and an “inactive” zone, in which I’d have no such expectation. I made clear that there was no grade advantage or penalty associated with either choice. (Was there an indirect effect on grades? Stay tuned!)

Andrew Gelman at Columbia posted about UO Matters, which doubled recent hits. Thanks Andrew! His comments are open here.

Check it out at https://strengthenuo.org. Instead of the whining and obfuscation you’ll find on President Scholz’s website, the union has directly relevant data, for example:

Back of the envelope, if Scholz had the stones to cut his admin costs back to the 2015-21 average there’d be enough to give faculty a 10% raise this year even with no revenue growth. I can’t imagine why Jamie Moffitt didn’t want that info posted.

Also the union site has a much nicer design, almost like someone cared. So how much of your union dues did our Union Bosses spend on putting this together? I asked them, and of course put the same question about UO to Carol Keese, UO’s VP for Communications, both at 3:26PM today. 15 minutes later I got this from the union:

The link is https://strengtheninguo.org. I’ll save you the trouble, it’s the usual Jamie Moffitt bullshit about why UO needs to cut real faculty pay. To paraphrase Claude Rains, “A person who tells lies merely hides the truth, but one who tells half-lies has forgotten where they put it.”

So why isn’t it posted on the uoregon.edu domain? Maybe this is a test site from the presumably well-paid consultants who put it together? In any case they *really* don’t want you to know who’s responsible. From https://www.godaddy.com/whois/results.aspx?itc=dlp_domain_whois&domain=strengtheninguo.org:

Dear friends, As we wind down 2024, I am reflecting on what an eventful year it has been, both on and off campus.  Among other things, we completed our five-year CAS strategic plan and have created an implementation plan to put our priorities into action. We also welcomed 64 new faculty—both…

Dear colleagues,  The end of the year is a natural time for reflection and showing appreciation. I am grateful for all that you do to help make the University of Oregon the remarkable place that it is. I don’t use the word “remarkable” lightly. We have more Oregon students in…

In bargaining today. That’s a nominal bird flip, in real dollars economists refer to it as a fuck you.

Zoom into the sessions here. Union is telling the admin team to go back to their imagineers and thought leaders and think again. “Oregon Rising” for JH administrators, Oregon Falling for the faculty.

Scholz’s team is refusing to schedule winter bargaining sessions because they don’t like it when Keaton bullies them in public with numbers and PowerPoints showing that the percentage of the budget going to faculty pay is falling. Wants to do the bargaining behind closed doors to keep us ignorant.

Or maybe he just doesn’t care if his university thinks that he doesn’t. In any case his student interviewer has one, and she makes him look like the terrified brainwashed victim of his PR flack masters. Link here.

Duck football coaches, sure. But the faculty and students? Uncle Phil played us for fools:

And unlike the UO faculty will have to do, they didn’t even strike. From the RG. Note that these 5% COLA raises are on top of the regular step increases teachers get, which if I understand correctly average 2.75% per year, plus other raises for getting a Masters degree, etc.…