UO professor goes rogue, posts confidential presidential archives on internet

Alea iacta est. I’m posting it all, despite the threats from VPAA Doug Blandy and Barbara Altmann, the claim of Interim President Scott Coltrane that this is unlawful, and the protests of Interim Provost Frances Bronet that it is immoral.

I am not saying how I got these archives, and I’m not giving them back. UO is still a public university, and we need more transparency and more informed debate about where we’ve been and where we are going, especially now that we’ve got a Board of Trustees with very strong opinions, and near dictatorial power over these matters.

As might be expected from the private correspondence of the UO President, many of the documents below address important matters of Oregon higher education policy and blunt talk about UO finances. Sadly, I must report that they also disclose blatantly discriminatory faculty hiring procedures. There are also surprisingly passionate arguments over the trivial question of how to brand “The University” (hint: the students win).

Here is a summary of what I’ve found in the archives so far:

1) Unofficial and unauthorized minutes from a meeting of the new UO Board, revealing a plan to impose 20% pay cuts on UO faculty, because of low endowment earnings:

2) Employment practices that discriminate on the basis of both gender and age. As with the recent hire of VP for Collaboration Charles Triplett, this position was never publicly posted on http://jobs.uoregon.edu, and the university administration ignored its own Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity hiring policies, which could easily trigger expensive DOL and OFCCP audits:

3) A conflict among faculty and students over the University’s new branding campaign. In my 20 years in the UO Economics department, I’ve never heard a professor use this sort of language. This is a clear violation of UO’s civility policy, which requires respectful discourse:

The full document dump is here. But if you haven’t figured it out already, don’t worry about a Johnson Hall witch hunt for clicking on the link – these UO Presidential Archives are from 1878.

All joking aside, think for a minute about the historical insights, and the glimpse into the humanity of these people that you get, 136 years later, from reading just a few pages of their letters. What might people in 2150 learn about us, and themselves, from doing the same?

Not much, because if I understand their plans correctly, UO’s Interim General Counsel Doug Park and new Library Dean Adriene Lim will soon adopt new procedures to make sure that any documents that might someday embarrass someone somehow, are thoroughly redacted before they make it into UO’s Presidential Archives. This plan seems to have the full support of Interim President Scott Coltrane, who thinks that it is unlawful to post these kinds of documents, and Interim Provost Frances Bronet, who thinks there is a “moral obligation” not to embarrass people. How shallow.