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President resigns after being caught manipulating faculty senate

4/11/2012: That’s what happened at the University of Illinois 3 weeks ago:

Hogan has been under fire since early January, when his chief of staff, Lisa Troyer, resigned after being accused of posing as a faculty senator in anonymous emails sent to a faculty group to influence its debate. Troyer said she did not write or send the emails, but an outside investigation determined she was the likely author.

I don’t think Interim President Berdahl’s use of administrative members of the Inter-collegiate Athletics Committee (Jim O’Fallon? Rob Mullens?) to forward him the emails on internal committee debates, or his efforts to get Dave Hubin to secretly persuade administrative members of the UO Senate to stall motions on the IAC charge are anywhere close to this. They are just a sign of the pervasive contempt that the UO administration has for the UO faculty and for the idea that those faculty should have any substantive role in the administration of the university.

Earlier this year Berdahl rejected a proposal to add just one faculty member to his “Executive Leadership Team”. One too many, I guess. Then there was the matter of former IAC chair Dev Sinha setting up a listserv for the executive committee, secretly adding Rob Mullens and Lorraine Davis to it, and then telling the IAC executive committee members that the listserv only included faculty. But that was last year, before Berdahl’s time. Of course, Mullens and Davis both knew all about this and kept their mouths shut, presumably while reading the emails. But surely that’s not a crime.

18 Comments

  1. Anonymous 04/12/2012

    Hello? The UIUC faculty censured Hogan for trying to subordinate a flagship AAU campus to a state system. That’s the relevant comparison here, not the one UOMatters is making to a stupid internecine squabble here over the number of students on the IAC.

    • Anonymous 04/12/2012

      Seems like a bit of both, actually. The board hired him in part because of the admissions scandals, and in part to pull a Pernsteiner. But they fired him because he could do the later without totally outraging the faculty.

    • Anonymous 04/12/2012

      whoops, meant to type “could not do the latter”

  2. Dev Sinha 04/12/2012

    [UO Matters] Before IAC leadership saw fit to do things such as threaten to use public record requests to obtain and reveal names of candidates in a confidential search, there was a good level of trust between the IAC and the Administration. The Athletic Director met with the Executive Committee a couple times a year to discuss the agenda and have frank discussions. My putting the Athletic Director(s) on the list reflected the attendance of those meetings, and let the Athletic Director communicate directly with us since they were a list member. There was a misunderstanding, for which I have apologized, but it was not a secret. As for substantive roles for faculty in governance, Lariviere for example briefed me fully on the Bellotti firing – before anything came out in the press – and involved me directly in picking a new Athletic Director, promising “it will get better.” And it has. I find your word “contempt” interesting in light of the tone of this blog towards the administration, on President resigns after being caught manipulating faculty senate

    • UO Matters 04/12/2012

      Wow, you were really in the loop Dev.

      Did the administration tell you about the secret deal to spend $2 million in tuition money on athlete only tutoring? The $600,000 a year Matt court garage parking subsidies? The secret Frohnmayer/Kilkenny deal to set the jocks overhead rate at less than half what the students had to pay? UO hiring Bellotti’s daughter without a search? The balloon loan from the foundation to pay for Kilkenny Park?

  3. Anonymous 04/12/2012

    If we’re listing absurdities of student athlete spending, don’t forget the parking lot near the urban farm.

    I have a view of it from my office and other than when it’s used as arena parking, there have never been more than 9 cars in the 150 space lot. Usually there are just 2 or 3.

    Supposedly it’s intended to be for student athletes only while they’re being tutored in the jock box… has anyone ever asked what the maximum number that can be tutored at once is?

    it can’t possibly be 150.

  4. Dev Sinha 04/12/2012

    Funding for Services for Student Athletes was not a secret deal. Well before athletics department revenues were such that we could even think of asking them to pay for these services (that is, back in the ’70’s – roughly 2000), the general fund was paying for tutoring.

    Some – but not all – of the rest you mention, yes Richard told me about. Hence Richard’s saying “I promise you it will get better.” In case you haven’t noticed, they appointed people from the “academic side” to their interim leadership team (maybe you haven’t noticed – all administrators seem to be the same to you) and conducted the first completed proper search for an Athletics Director in a decade.

    No offense intended to our colleagues in the History Department, but perhaps your agenda for the IAC would be better suited for a project there.

  5. Anonymous 04/12/2012

    Dave Hubin is a good guy with a tough job. If he does what the president tells him to do 90% of the time, then 10% of the time he can tell the president he is making a mistake and should change direction and the president will listen to him.

    But if he tells the president that he is wrong 15% of the time the president will tune him out.

    The problem with this system, and Dave’s conundrum, is what do when you have a president who does the wrong thing 20% of the time?

  6. Anonymous 04/13/2012

    wait, bellotti *firing* ? oh do tell…

  7. Anonymous 04/16/2012

    Bob Berdahl not going to show up for Senate meetings and listen to people criticize him. He came in January and he told the senators who’ve been trying to make this work exactly what he thought of them. Berdahl is done with faculty governance and presumably he’s looking for a successor who feels the same way. It’s why I signed the union card.

    “I have seen cases where the principle of shared governance was present by design, but where it functioned very poorly and ineffectively because the faculty senate was controlled by faculty who commanded little respect from either the administration or their faculty colleagues; as a consequence, the best faculty refused to be involved and the faculty senate became the playground of the malcontents who ground their own axes and operated, not as an advisor to the administration, but as its adversary.”

    • Anonymous 04/16/2012

      I would say that most of the blame lies with the axe-grinding malcontents of whom he spoke.

    • Anonymous 04/16/2012

      I have to agree that Berdahl has a point. At least for the departments I know fairly well, the faculty that run for the senate are not in the top 75% by pretty much any measure (I’m sure there are good folks on the senate too – this is just my own experience). And “axe-grinding” seems like a pretty apt description. In the past I haven’t paid too much attention as I figured it was a good use of their time since the rest of us were busy with “more important things”. In retrospect maybe that’s been a mistake… I haven’t been around long enough to know if the senate was more functional at one time.

      I don’t believe Berdahl is done with shared governance or that he is looking for that quality in his successor (to whatever degree he plays a role in that process).

    • Frank Stahl 04/16/2012

      Dear 5:30 ANON. So, the Senate got a January scolding from Prexy and you want them to give up on shared governance? Our new Constitution prescribes procedures for shared governance — what is lacking is folks who will test it. Opportunity for a meaningful test is coming at us. The Administration appears ready to propose a policy that permits UO personnel to conduct research on campus that, by contract with the university, cannot be published at the discretion of those personnel. “Secret research” is what some people call it. Others call it “nongovernmental classified research”, while still others call it “proprietary research”. The faculty of the 1960s ruled that such research had no proper place in an institution in which research is justified for its educational value. Should today’s Senate feel the same way, our Constitution may get the chance to show its stuff. I hope that folks who care about the nature of our University, one way or the other, will show up at the Senate meeting to express their opinion on this matter. The Administration’s policy proposal should be available on the Senate web site shortly before the May meeting. I presume an advance copy is available from Beth Stormshak.

    • Anonymous 04/17/2012

      Prof. Stahl, with all due respect, if the constitution were intended as a set of instructions on how the university shall be run, then it is as if our DNA has just been rewritten by a bunch of mad scientists monkeying around with our genetic code. But our DNA is not in fact the constitution: it is a set of delicate bonds between faculty and administrators — mirror images in a double helix, if you will. How life can go on once they are torn apart is a burning question for which we have no answer. Any ideas on that front?

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meselson-Stahl_experiment

    • Frank Stahl 04/17/2012

      Dear 10:04 Anon. Your analogy is interesting, and offers me an opportunity to deliver another wee lecture on our Constitution.
      The complementary strands of DNA may be compared with the complementary functions of Faculty (F) and Administration (A) in the operations of the University. The complementary DNA strands may encode different functions, and those functions must, in aggregate, provide for successful operation of the whole. Sometimes, however, a function (gene) on one or the other strand of DNA mutates to create a poorly functioning organism. In the same way, F or A functions may mutate in a manner that obstructs effective operations of the University. Life deals with such a problem through Natural Selection – i.e., by death of the relatively unfit. The University, armed with a belief in its own importance, is unwilling to leave itself to such a stark Darwinian fate. It has, instead, created a Constitution that prescribes nondestructive procedures for resolving conflicts between F and A.
      Class dismissed.

    • Anonymous 04/17/2012

      Sadly, there is no course of action to deal with the non-lethal One Eyed Pinhead mutation that occurred within the Office of the Chancellor.

  8. Anonymous 04/16/2012

    look folks if we can’t work with berdahl who’s succeeded at three other AAU universities better than the UO, perhaps we should look at ourselves.we only seem to be able to muckrake or unionize. surely we could have a more positive, collaborative agenda?

  9. Anonymous 04/16/2012

    we must!

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