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UO to post all faculty sabbatical proposals online?

8/7/2012: That’s the latest rumor from Dave Hubin. Apparently the proposal comes from Bob Berdahl, with support from unnamed other Johnson Hall dwellers. My guess is this is a reaction to my posting of the letters describing Interim Provost Jim Bean’s Berdahlesque sabbatical online last December, during the fight over whether Pernsteiner would appoint him as interim President. Perhaps related to Berdahl’s attack on the credibility of my research claim that other unnamed faculty are attacking the credibility of my research. That’ll teach the faculty what happens when they meddle in the affairs of administrators.

FWIW you can get a list of my publications and citations here, and some pretty random student comments at ratemyprofessor.com. (The official UO course evaluations are now behind a firewall, anyone know why?) Anyone can do the same searches for any UO professor. But good luck trying to get any sort of information on our UO senior administrators, without using the public records law. They don’t even post their c.v.’s. Randy Geller wouldn’t give his up until I petitioned the Attorney General.

16 Comments

  1. Anonymous 08/07/2012

    Who cares what the motivations of the proposal are – is it meritorious?

  2. Anonymous 08/08/2012

    I came very close to posting here a link to the proposal I wrote over a year ago for my own rapidly ending sabbatical. But I am reluctant to make public its detailed plan of my long-term project. It is not so much that I fear being scooped as that my ideas as I outlined them were still inchoate, unsettled, and not ready to be made available worldwide. I am in the humanities. I can imagine that this reluctance would be stronger in the sciences, where the risk of being scooped is so much greater.

    If the administration is willing to accept a brief and vague description of what a sabbatical applicant plans to do, then putting those proposals online would probably do no harm.

  3. Anonymous 08/08/2012

    Lemme get this straight: because of what Bill said about Jim, Bob told this to Dave — without consulting Doug? Mike would never stand for this, if only because he answers to George, who knows that posting faculty sabbatical proposals online is a disastrous idea from the point of view of state politics — and that would anger John. There’s no *way* a bunch of white guys would make a mistake like this.

    • Anonymous 08/08/2012

      Unless it was vetted by Randy.

    • Anonymous 08/08/2012

      Hah! Love it!

  4. Anonymous 08/08/2012

    Remember the old saying: If you fuck with the bull, you’ll get the horns…

    • UO Matters 08/08/2012

      That’s not how bullfights typically end.

  5. Anonymous 08/08/2012

    All the faculty I know post their work online, usually their vitae too. We’re not exactly hiding anything!

    • Anonymous 08/08/2012

      Links? I have yet to see a sabbatical proposal online, except for Bean’s of course.

    • Dr. Science 08/08/2012

      It’s a research proposal. There are many reasons to keep these confidential, and doing so is the general rule. For example when you review a National Science Foundation proposal you have to swear not to talk about the content with others, not use the ideas in it to aid your own research, and to destroy it when your evaluation is complete. Once the work is done of course it’s a different story, and professors bite and claw to make it public in the most visible possible way.

    • Dr. Science 08/08/2012

      And the fact Dave and Bob don’t understand this, or don’t care, reveals a little more than I’d cared to know about what goes on in Johnson Hall. I wonder what Espy thinks.

    • UO Matters 08/08/2012

      In fairness, Jim Bean’s sabbatical proposal, which I posted, also included confidential details of his research methods: meeting old friends to ask about literature, and attempted use of cutting edge scanning technology.

  6. Anonymous 08/08/2012

    Dog says

    This might be Much Ado About Nothing (I am planning to take a sabbatical to update that play to the UO situation – performances at the Hult later).

    Most sabbatical “proposals” I see in no way shape or form resemble a research proposal. Most of them are couched in terms of the need to get away for battery recharging, long term visits to a colleague, or teaching at another institution for a year.

    and I suspect all that would be posted on line is some form of
    Abstract.

    • Anonymous 08/08/2012

      Jeez Dog, the way uomatters skewered Bean’s sabbatical proposal I assumed most were of publication quality.

    • Anonymous 08/09/2012

      Well, some of us take them seriously, or at least cut and paste our latest grant proposal into the sabbatical bid. No, not publication quality. That’s the point.

    • Anonymous 08/09/2012

      Dog

      yes – I usually cut and past the abstracts from various grants that are accidentally given to dogs. That seems to be sufficient in most cases.

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