Live blog: Margie Paris as Pres, and Senate agenda for 2/13/2013

Highlights of the Feb Senate meeting:

1) Gottfredson promised to either

a) make Randy Geller write an opinion explaining why he believes FERPA precludes faculty from seeing data that might allow them to identify individual students, or

b) finally give the IAC the data on academic performance of student athletes that they’ve been asking for since late May

2) The Senate voted 25 to 2 in favor of Nathan Tublitz’s motion to appoint a committee to write Provost Bean a glowing recommendation for a job as President at another university, or community college, somewhere far away. There was some back and forth on the deadlines, but the message to President Gottfredson was loud and clear: Start the search for new provost, or come back to the Senate within 60 days and tell us why you think we should suffer this fool for another year.

3) What’s it all worth?

Live blog disclaimer: My interpretation of what people said, meant to say, or what I wished they’d said. Nothing is a quote unless in quotes.

3:16: UOM: Low turnout of faculty. Peace Corp, economic impact. Donations are mostly for the jocks, but some increase in academic giving. Thanks to staff. What’s happening in Salem is critical. Support for in-state tuition for children of illegal aliens, worked well in CA. Foundations of this are in the Morrell Act. Our job as a public university. Mentions Ted Wheeler’s bond sale for student aid. Gov’s budget: Will he mention how we got screwed on capital funding? Nope. He will try to get funding for Science Library project added. Governance: Likes current legislative proposal, now in Senate. Working with PSU. Senate Business: New ombudsman from the Senate committee on respectful workplace. Reports to his office. Great idea.  Impartial 3rd party to help faculty, students, staff resolve disputes. Admin review and evaluation: Believes strongly in this, 5 year min, with lots of input from faculty and others. Will start in fall. Nothing on Bean.

Data: Supports IAC request, but allowed aggregation. Will work on a process to get data out to everyone’s satisfaction. More delays.

Drugs: Appoints Robin Holmes and a 6 member committee to stall. First I’ve heard of this.

Guns: Committee has been appointed, holding forums to collect public input, but of course the decision has already been made.

Q on Union: Progressing well.

Q on IAC data from Waddell: Data have to be made available, but …

Q from Bonine: No legal problem, so is issue that faculty are not trustworthy.

Follow up from Waddell and Harbaugh: Gottfredson: “I will be happy to ask the General Counsel to provide a statement”. Still not clear if he will release the data called for in the resolution.

Q Phillips: Any evidence our drug problem is worse than other universities, or increasing? No.

Kyr: New meeting for Academic freedom, facilities use, and what to do about the Geller problem:

(Obligatory Randy threat insert:) Then there’s this threat from Randy Geller, sent to Senate President Rob Kyr and IAC Chair Brian McWhorter this summer, threatened retaliation for meddling with his efforts to sneak Rob Mullens’s drug scheme through without faculty or public review:

Bonine on Elections: 2 nominations for president for next year: Margie Paris from Law and Chris Phillips from Math. Statements, then a vote. Lots of service from both. Committee recommends Paris.

Phillips: If not elected I’ll go back to my research. Vision is organizational, policies to be decided by Senate not Senate President. One issue is transparency. Another is size of administration. Curious about MOOCs. Main campaign promise: Better spam blocking. Gonna be tough for Paris to beat that!

Q on governance: not into sharing. Will work for Senate.
Q on getting more Senate participation: Yup, not many people here, that’s a problem. No specific ideas, other than agreeing to serve myself.
Kyr: Seems we need more than “Around the O” to get people interested.

Paris: Faculty, was Dean for 2 years, happily back with the faculty. Likes to help the underdogs. Senate has important role, is way to do this. Kyr has done important things, e.g.: Faculty evaluations of administrators – Model for what Senate can do. Also Committee on Committees 10 year review, important momentum. Wants to see good work of past two years continue.

Senate must push back against admin at times, that’s a good thing.
Transparency: vital for university, need clear procedures, faculty also has to be responsible for not overtaxing the system.

Vote: Paris wins, starts work immediately as VP. Question about announcing the numbers: 4 for Phillips, 23 for the pro-spam candidate.

Guns: This decision has been made already, so I’m going to save you the trouble of reading the arguments.

Executive review: moving along nicely.

Bean review: Time to do it. Complement to executive review motion. Passes with two nays.

5:00 Gottfredson, Paris, and many others bail.

Huaxin: Move to adjourn:

2/12/13: Communications and Agenda

Excellent news from Robert Kyr:

I’m thrilled to announce that the Nominating Committee has approved the candidacy of Professor Margaret (“Margie”) Paris for Senate President-elect (VP for 2012-2013 & President for 2013-2014). Professor Paris’ departmental bio can be accessed through this link: http://law.uoregon.edu/faculty/mparis/