Press "Enter" to skip to content

Upcoming meetings for UO Trustees and cluster hires

Finance:

TO: The Board of Trustees of the University of Oregon

The Finance and Facilities Committee will hold a meeting on the date and at the location set forth below. Subjects of the meeting will include discussion of the University’s budget process, tuition and fee process, proposed tuition and fees for FY15 and scheduling future Finance and Facilities Committee meetings. The meeting will occur as follows:

Monday, March 17, 2014
3:00pm-5:00pm
Ford Alumni Center, Room 403

The Ford Alumni Center is located at 1720 East 13th Avenue, Eugene, Oregon. If special accommodations are required, please contact Amanda Hatch at (541) 346-3082 at least 72 hours in advance.

Clusters:

Dear Colleagues,

This is a reminder that our last scheduled campus-wide Academic Planning Session will be held on Tuesday, March 18, at 1:00 pm in Gerlinger Lounge. The topic will be the continued discussion of the proposed new faculty cluster of excellence hiring initiative.

Please give us your feedback on the draft process for cluster hiring of new faculty. We plan to finalize the call for proposals in the next two weeks, to allow groups of UO faculty to propose new faculty cluster hiring initiatives to be submitted by May 1, 2014. We hope to launch hiring of new faculty through this process as early as next year. Please join the discussions about the new process, in person or via the Qualtrics link.

Scott Coltrane
Senior Vice President and Provost

8 Comments

  1. Vlad 03/14/2014

    Two things struck me about the statement on cluster hires. One is the only dimension of high performing appears to be research. of course any renewed emphasis on research is a good thing, but there is no uggestion that an above Aau average department of 20 with a total of 20 graduates a year is any less high performing than an above aau average department of 20 with 400 graduates a year. there are some very hard realities lurking underneath the generalities of high performing.Secondly, the sole focus on diversity of faculty when we. Know that the arger social problem is diversity among graduate students is disappointing. Just a couple of reactions to an otherwise well intended initiative.

  2. Recall 03/15/2014

    The other thing with cluster hires and performance….

    We might get bigger bang for our buck by cluster hiring in the good/great departments on campus then the deparrtments which are already excellent. There’s probably only so many academics which would want to come to Eugene. If we have an excellent department, we might have already hired most of those for that field. If we want to maximize the research/grad student advising/grant winning for the university, its not clear that improving something that is already a strength is the best path forward. Really we should be asking where we get the most bang for our buck.

    • Oryx 03/15/2014

      Sorry, but this is totally absurd. “There’s probably only so many academics which would want to come to Eugene… we might have already hired most of those for that field.” Excellent academics have graduate students and postdocs, who have a good chance of being excellent, and of wanting to be faculty. The drawbacks of pyramid schemes aside, they’re great for the hiring side, since there is no shortage of top level faculty candidates. Being familiar with lots of faculty searches, I’ve never heard one say, “oh, there aren’t any great people out there.” Rather, the opposite, by far. I really can’t imagine *any* justification for “we might have already hired most of those for that field.”
      About people who might “want to come to Eugene:” The University and especially the area are very appealing. It’s true we sometimes have trouble hiring, but that’s largely because of our lack of plans and policies for 2-body issues, and other such things, not because of the place.
      I really can’t understand Recall’s argument for expanding adequate programs and ignoring excellent ones.

      • Recall 03/15/2014

        My point is if you want to maximize improvement, you’ll equate marginal benefits with marginal costs. The marginal cost of improving an excellent might be quite high, because we’ve already hired such good people that to hire someone better would cost a fortune. It might be cheaper to turn a top 40 department into a top 20, then to take a department which is top 10 into the top 5.

        • dog 03/16/2014

          I will settle for simple improvement, maximization is certainly not required

  3. dog 03/15/2014

    My main concern about the cluster hire is that some areas of emerging research will simply be too expensive for the UO to invest in , given our startup situation. Of course, such short term investments often pay great dividends in the longer run, but
    I suspect we are not very patient here.

  4. dog 03/15/2014

    to recall

    1) how do you measure “bang”?

    2) we haven’t got many bucks for this

    hell, how do you even measure a strength? – reputation and perception?

    • UO is a circus. 03/16/2014

      Around here, admins measure it not to be constructive or helpful, but to market themselves and their projects. For example, Moffitt both trashes the recent law school rankings while jumping on the opportunity to highlight the areas where they suggest small improvement. Almost Gottfredsonian right there. The spreading of this garbage is embarrassing.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *