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New Honors College Dean Terry Hunt writes to Register Guard

Op-Ed on the role of the UO HC in keeping smart Oregon students in Oregon, here. Co-authored with UO Foundation trustee Jim Shephard. I’ve supervised a bunch of their students over the years. They are great students with many outside opportunities, keeping them in-state is not cheap but it’s a good investment – especially when compared to some of the other things the UO administration spends money on. And while I’m on that subject, the links to the peculiar Jock Box contracts between UO and Phil Knight are here. Amendment #1 is the best:

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Who is in charge of this “Academic Center” now, and what are their job responsibilities? Our administration *really* wants to hide the details:

5 Comments

  1. All Philled Up 02/05/2014

    All anyone needs to understand is this statement, “Any scheduling of the Academic Center for use by the University and the public will require approval by the Athletic Department.”

    So, even the President can’t schedule a meeting without permission from their bosses in the athletic department?

    Also, that statement implies that the Athletic Center is NOT the “University” – it is somehow a separate thing.

  2. OVA 02/05/2014

    Speaking of Admin bloat…
    Perhaps UOM and Uncle Bernie can work their magic and get something to compare the Delta Cost Project report Admin Bloat to the situation at the UO:

    http://chronicle.com/article/Administrator-Hiring-Drove-28-/144519/
    Delta report referenced:
    http://www.deltacostproject.org/sites/default/files/products/DeltaCostAIR_Staffing_Brief_2_3_14.pdf

    Some quotes from the Chronicle writeup:
    “What’s more, the report says, the number of full-time faculty and staff members per professional or managerial administrator has declined 40 percent, to around 2.5 to 1.
    Full-time faculty members also lost ground to part-time instructors (who now compose half of the instructional staff at most types of colleges), particularly at public master’s and bachelor’s institutions.

    And the kicker: You can’t blame faculty salaries for the rise in tuition. Faculty salaries were “essentially flat” from 2000 to 2012, the report says. And “we didn’t see the savings that we would have expected from the shift to part-time faculty,” said Donna M. Desrochers, an author of the report.”

    Thank you UOM and Bernie for all you do.

  3. honest Uncle Bernie 02/05/2014

    The Honors College certainly a great asset to UO and to Oregon. I can’t access the article online because I’ve already mooched my quota of free reads on the RG, but I’ll get ahold of a hard copy (what an odd sounding expression in speaking of a newspaper, to one of my era!)

    I hope the HC dean will get his article published in the Oregonian.

    Re the question of administrative bloat and the Delta Cost Project — the latter is a great source of information on higher education funding. Their data have been invaluable to me in understanding the underfunding of Oregon 4-year colleges, and the relative overfunding of the CC’s.

    There’s nothing I can find in their report that you linke which is specific to UO, however — it generally notes and implicitly decries the national growth of non-teaching personnel at colleges.

    I’ll see what I can come up with on administrative vs. non-administrative growth at UO. There’s a fair amount of info on the UO website now that makes it much easier to do this than before.

    My impression — based on following this casually over the years — is that non-Instructional budgets were rising rapidly under Frohnmayer (relatively), and “the Hat” stopped this trend. I don’t know what’s happened since the Hat left — and that is getting to be a while now, so worth a fresh look.

    I think that Shelton et al. are aware that UO is being watched on this stuff more than used to be the case. That in itself is a good development.

    It would be nice if the senate budget committee reported on this annually — I don’t think they have ever done this — have they done any kind of report recently? If so, it would be good to publicize more — if not, they should go back to doing the good work that they used to do.

    • Fishwrapper 02/05/2014

      Not that I would actively encourage ripping of the RG, but if you toss their cookies, your counter will reset.

      • honest Uncle Bernie 02/06/2014

        Ah, some people say that trying to get something for nothing will land you in hot water — I wouldn’t know. Interesting about the cookies — sometimes reading the RG makes me want to toss my cookies — but of course, I couldn’t do anything like that.

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