Last updated on 01/30/2016
1/29/2016: Diane Dietz has the report in the RG here. CoE Dean Randy Kamphaus:
Kamphaus wrote that he shares the alumni’s desire to see SEP continue and flourish, and he pledged to work for a smooth transition.
“The dialogue surrounding this decision has been thought-provoking, respectful, and focused on the future,” he wrote.
It’s true, the Keep SEP Alive Facebook page has been very respectful – in notable contrast to the behavior of Kamphaus, who tried to kill SEP program without any discussion with the parents, students, and teachers whose lives he was messing with, and who then made his Associate Dean take the heat in the press for a week. He did show up to announce he’s giving the program a reprieve, however. Classy.
Meanwhile there’s still no explanation for why he made this decision in the first place, or for how the collaboration with Oak Hill will work in practice, or how it will maintain the high quality of SEP.
1/28/2016: Revenge of the Nerds? Maybe, but so far the Jocks are winning
Rumor down at the faculty club tonight is that the money to restore UO’s Summer Enrichment Program will come from cutting the stipends of the assistant coaches who run Dana Altman’s summer basketball camp, as Diane Dietz of the RG reports that UO leaders are reconsidering the decision to kill its academic Summer Enrichment Program for high school students:
High-level University of Oregon leaders are discussing the fate of the UO’s 35-year-old summer “nerd camp” for gifted teen-agers.
The College of Education announced about a week ago that it would no longer offer the two-week residential Summer Enrichment Program (SEP) that provided intellectual and social enrichment.
The closure sparked a protest from some of the 7,000 or 8,000 alumni of SEP, who are now spread across the United States, including some of them at elite colleges and universities.
A Facebook page titled “Keep SEP Alive” picked up 653 members in one week; members say they are conducting a letter writing campaign, producing videos with personal stories and politicking with officials they hope will help them preserve the program.
Earlier this week, Lauren Lindstrom, UO associate dean of research and outreach at the College of Education, said the university made the decision to close SEP for economic and noneconomic reasons.
The Register-Guard requested financial information that would show the size of the shortfall, but the numbers may not be available until early next week, a UO spokesman said Thursday. …
They closed SEP because of a budget shortfall, but they need time to put together the budget numbers. You don’t have to be a nerdy economist to be skeptical of that claim.
1/24/2016: New Ed School Dean Randy Kamphaus ends UO’s SEP pipeline program
In two days the Facebook group has collected more than 400 members and many, many comments – including more than a few on the latest raises for the football coaches, and noting that today’s RG also had a story about the installation of a giant bronze statue of the athletic department’s mascot in front of Matt Court:
Go Ducks. This seems to be shaping up as just the sort of top-down decision making from the Dean that President Schill assured the Senate would not be done during the budget realignment process.
UO’s Summer Enrichment Program runs 2-week residential camps for about 120 talented and gifted middle and high school students each year. Self-supporting, and with tuition at $1600 and only a few scholarships, these generally aren’t low-SES students, but when the Econ department started SAIL 10 years ago they were our model for a successful local program aimed at showing HS students what college was like, and Director Marjorie DeBuse was very helpful with info on the practical details of how faculty could successfully teach middle school students.
Full disclosure: My god-daughter went to SEP last year, loved it, and is expecting to come back next year. This is the first I’ve heard that it won’t be offered. The supporters have started a facebook page, here, with many moving stories from former students about the program’s effect on their lives.
Diane Dietz’s one-woman fight to fix UO continues with this report on SEP’s closing, and what its parents and alumni are doing to try and save it:
“Parents paid (tuition), but that didn’t cover the complete cost of the program,” she said. “The college had to subsidize to be able to offer it.”
Lindstrom said she didn’t know the size of the shortfall. Marjorie DeBuse, who was the program’s UO director until she retired a year ago, said it long has been self-supporting.
Parents anteed up as much as $1,595 for the two-week residential program.
“It wasn’t just a financial decision,” Lindstrom said. “We are focused more and more on our research and other programs for college-age students (not those younger).”
The SEP program was created in 1980 out of a father’s grief.
Late UO College of Education professor George Sheperd started the program in the years after his teenage daughter, Kristy Sheperd, committed suicide.
“He felt very strongly about having a program for high-ability, bright young people that would do more than address their academic needs, but would also address their social-emotional needs,” DeBuse said.
SEP each year has served about 120 academically talented and gifted students in grades six through 10. Participants returned in grades 11 and 12 to serve as junior counselors, a role that included instruction in leadership.
Each camper took a half-dozen classes each year that were created, enriched and taught largely by UO graduate students, some professors and community members.
The young teachers and counselors were an invaluable part of the program, said Cathy Bellavita, a Cottage Grove parent whose son has attended SEP for three years.
Read it all, the rest of the report includes many stories such as this:
A place to get away
Those two weeks were a haven from the judgment and embarrassment wrought by classmates at high school, she said. Marx said she cried when she learned SEP was no more.
“Obviously, I’m not suicidal, but I feel it does something to (help) me, knowing there are people out there that I will be able to connect with. The community will be lacking in that safe place for people,” she said.
Over the decades, as many as 8,000 passed through, Debuse said.
Gifted students need a chance to interact with their intellectual peers, she said, “to be validated for what they know rather than put on hold while other people catch up.
“To not be told ‘we’ll be working on your social skills now because your academics are already really high. You’ll make it on your own.’ ”
Gifted students drop out or check out of high school after the doldrums of days or weeks when they don’t learn anything new, participants said.
But at SEP, the classes are mostly fascinating and clip along at a challenging pace. Some examples: Multivariate Calculus, South Park, Space Law, All Natural Math, Criminal Justice, Quantum Physics.
Jay Steinmetz, a former UO doctoral student in political science, said students he taught at SEP were the best he’d ever had — and he has since been teaching regular university classes at the UO and Willamette University.
I’ve had my discontents with labels like “talented and gifted,” perhaps more so with parents of kids labeled as such. But this seems to be a good and valuable program, and presumably introduces very smart students to UO, the kind we certainly want to encourage to attend, and more importantly — it’s not broken. No need to fix it. If anything, adding SAIL is a perfect example — bring these kinds of opportunities to more different kinds of kids, not fewer. Let’s not go backwards, folks.
As an alum of the program from its early years I am devastated by this decision. Those weeks on campus at such a young age contributed directly to awakening my mind intellectually. Those few weeks are a major reason I am an academic today with a love of research and critical analysis of complex social problems. They were the wellspring of my deep interest in happenings the world over. Those weeks provided the earliest stirrings of the concept of collective intellectual work and cooperating with peers in creating knowledge.
Whatever the degree of savings here they strike me as false savings for a university aiming to elevate its academic and research profile.
I recognize there are likely factors of which I am not aware that help explain this decision, beyond a desire to focus on college age students. Perhaps with the encouragement of those who value this program decision makers will reconsider.
Seems like another bungled public relations move by UO. And an unfortunate program decision, too. Will they never learn?
The RG article mentions someone named Lindstrom, not Kamphaus. I have no idea who was responsible, but Lindstrom is made to sound clueless — she didn’t even know how much the program deficit is (and the former director claimed it was self-supporting).
They could at least have their facts ready when they ax a popular and probably very valuable program. And is there no way someone could have started a fund-raising program if that is needed to make the program (at least) revenue neutral? We must be talking about something on the order of $100K/year, or less.
Was Schill and the other top people in on this? If not, they should have been. If they were, it has been handled badly, in my opinion.
Rumors are flying about the real reason they axed this. I don’t claim to know anything, only that, once again, seems like UO blew it.
Here’s a frustrating point, as far as I’m aware (ex SEP employee and attendee), the program was self sustaining. Our old program director, Marji DeBuse, is even quoted in the above article saying the same. This program isn’t a budget burden for the College of Ed (or for anyone else that could take us on), it’s just an easy way to avoid taking full responsibility.
Yes, I know. The disconnect between what people are saying is puzzling. Surely this is not higher finance! Makes me wonder what the real reason is, or if it’s just nobody knowing what they’re doing.
I wonder how many tuition scholarships 1,000 pounds of bronze would have paid for.
This is definitely the result of the president’s current initiative, which will continue to result in the axing of diverse, innovative, effective, humane, community-oriented, self-supporting, and high-value university programs. There’s a subtle brand of social darwinism being imposed upon on the institution — using highly insensitive statistical key indicators in a drive towards an efficient educational factory: producing students of a certain age, assembled in four years, served by departments with an ‘ideal’ mix of employees. The loss of real quality is the normal result of such technocratic reorganizations.
maybe worth looking again at his academic background. professor of what real estate law? I forget, something for when back on the grid. seems more and more off the hook.
Good luck with that Bernie.
I must have been very tired when I wrote that!
The bronze Duck is the outright gift of a donor. The decision to axe SEP is shocking. We only focus on college age students??? Where does this new dean think college students come from?? Does this mean the COE is next going to discard nationally acclaimed programs that turn out K-12 teachers? What about the HEDCO clinics and the diverse non-college age students they serve? With leadership like this, I fear our COE can say goodbye to its long held position near the top of the rankings. I am appalled.
Another day, another piece of evidence that UO doesn’t give a flying fck about its academic mission. In this case, what’s being jettisoned is any sense that we should act like a public university – you know, with a responsibility to enrich the community. Programs like this are how we make a difference in the city, county, and state. But it’s not just altruism – as the article notes, this program very likely contributed to the UO being able to recruit bright, promising students.
Every year we see an expensive new state-of-the-art sports facility erected, while classes are taught in buildings that are falling apart around us. Every year we see coaches paid obscene amounts of money while teaching faculty get squeezed, and now squeezed out.
Anybody else getting as depressed as I am?
I’m too mad to get depressed.
Yes how much UO money is being spent to subsidize the costs to recruit promising high school students and parents at out of state football events? SEP is a targeted local community outreach effort that really demonstrates how a public university can concretely serve the public and attract great students.
Also: SEP doesn’t just serve local students; since it’s a two week residential experience, students can and do come from anywhere in the US and even abroad. That too is good for local students: lots of opportunity to meet and mingle with kids from beyond Eugene.
I’m both sad (as is my SEP-child) and mad (like UOM).
If you want depressed, you should check out the Facebook page. People from all over the country are chiming in about what the program has meant to them or someone they love. These comments are spot on.
You gots to wonder, just how economically fit is the U of Owe? Reading your post made me ask why would any uni get rid of a program which appeals o those potential students wanting academic rigor? It can’t be anywhere near as much as sending a bunch of admins to a damn football game. The only reason I can come up with, along with your point that U of Owe could care less about academics, is there exists a need to find more resources to pay debt service. The bright lights at JH have created some pretty steep financial holes. Couple that with a leveling off of admissions makes it more apparent that all the smoke blowing regarding the efficacy of some of these white elephants is finally clearing…
Seems to me that having a program for young students would move to insure future students for the UO. Just sayin….
Maybe there are too many instate students attending. The program may just be on hold until the UO finds a way to make the program for out of state and international students only. Then the have to hire a new VP, Assoc VP, Asst VP and of course an asst for the assoc VP and an asst for the Asst VP. include the asst to the VP for internal communications who will work with their Assoc VP and the Assistant VP to provide a blockade to anyone wanting information….then they will have everything to run the program.
Actually, there are international groups from South Korea and Taiwan that attend the program annually. And obviously while the major stronghold of campers come from Eugene and Portland, there are a lot that come from Washington, California, and from scattered states around the country.
A shameful decision that ignores the UO’s responsibility to the community, and it sounds from the article that the reasons given are made up, not the actual reasons. If the spokeswoman doesn’t know what the supposed deficit was, and the person who ran it says there wasn’t a deficit, it’s easy to see the reasons given are not the real reasons. How well this fits in with a university that despite all the talk about academic excellence, only puts money and effort towards its athletic programs and overpaid coaches. The gifted and talented kids don’t have a lot of places to get the kind of stimulation this provides, and it was to our advantage to give it to them and in the process encourage them to attend UO for college. Even if they didn’t attend here, the UO still participated in making the world better, which should be a part of the aim of an academic institution. I have no connection to this program, I’m not even a parent. I just think this is a bad bad decision on many levels.
It looks like they immortalized the Duck making the sign for vagina and not the more rounded Oregon O.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/sports/ncaafootball/american-sign-language-program-attracts-oregon-football-players.html?_r=0
The statue was donated:
a) to promote men’s basketball recruitment
b) to honor greek life expansion
c) is to the Bowl of D as the Pioneer Mother is to the Father
d) all of the above
Neither – e) the bowl of dicks (a picture exists somewhere here on the forum) has been recast in form a duck.
Is this another’s victim of uncle Phils big track meet? Didn’t they promise to clear the campus of any academic stuff that might get in the way?
you have any evidence to back this?
Item 5 of UO email outlining agreement for the big IAAF track meet:
“The university will refrain from scheduling any events (seminars, orientation, camps or academic classes) that would conflict with the 2019 IAAF World Championships.”
from UO Matters at:
https://uomatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Screen-Shot-2015-12-17-at-11.12.49-PM.png
and
https://uomatters.com/2016/01/irs-investigating-track-town-lananna-offers-to-spread-iaaf-pork.html
Interesting, that is consistent with rumors that are abroad. By all means, bring it out in the open if it’s true. (I’m not sure what would constitute a “conflict” with the IAAF event.)
The conflict maybe the use of dorm beds
It’s happened before. The program has had to change dates many times in the past few years to work around track meets, Olympic trials, and various other athletic programs that “trump” SEP. Which is absurd considering we’re perfectly happy using the worst dorms on campus..
BTW, COE has an FAQ now re: SEP
http://uoyetag.uoregon.edu/faq/
This has nothing to do with Knight or track meets. It’s the COE using metrics as a justification to wash their hands of SEP (esp. wiith the long-time director retiring). Note the otherwise wholly irrelevant admission: it didn’t bring in grant money.
A FAQ? That’s like breaking up with someone by text message. Cold, cold, cold.
I don’t read the COE post quite the way you do. (Note that I have criticized the SEP action and the way it has been carried out.) The “metric” they are using seems to be money, i.e. that they claim the program was operating at a loss. The “admission” about grant money is actually a claim that private funding had not stepped forward to cover the losses. Other popular UO auxiliary programs have had to stanch their financial losses and resulting subsidy over the years, e.g. the Bach Festival and KWAX.
I do think the silence about the size of the loss is telling. Also the lack of effort to arrange private funding to keep this worthy and obviously much-valued program going.
UO will just have to figure this one out. A lot of ongoing competition for the UO’s perpetually taxed PR brainpower.
This isn’t a huge surprise, and it seems to be a part of Schill’s broader mission to axe any programs that he (or the board, or whoever) think aren’t “worth” the university’s resources. I’ve heard the Chinese Flagship program is getting axed as well, and if it’s gone, I’d assume the global scholars program would be in some jeopardy (along with all the associated funding for study abroad), though I don’t have any inside info on that.
But hey, at least our “‘No Brand’ brand” is “going global,” even if our students can’t.
So if the program was self-sustainable, why do they cut an academic program that relates to UO’s mission? Or did SEP students leave the state once they graduated high school and UO didn’t benefit?
If the program wasn’t self-sustainable, why did they not look for donors? If they can’t find donors for such a program, how do they want to raise $2bn for UO’s academic-educational mission?
Does the University need to cut and it is going to doing it intelligently?
First, the University needs to cut. The days of passing 10% annual increases in U cost to students is unfair and unsustainable. I don’t know about you, but US college student debt exceeding 1.2 trillion dollars, more than US total credit card debt and US auto loan debt is bonkers. So yes the U has duplication and waste big time.
An example is CAS being able to cut 5 office FTE and tell the rest they have new responsibilities within days of a goal to cut 2% spending. While I feel for the people losing jobs, CAS obviously had a serious case of empire building going on, mirrored “countless” time through the U. That is when it was totally acceptable to make our most economically vulnerable youth debtor prisoners, i.e. students pay for every inefficiency no matter what.
Second, the 2% spending cut should be added to at least a 4% increase in PERS as a component of overall employee cost, equal to 80% for overall costs. I might need an unbiased economist here, but my take on it is the overall real cut at the U is more like 5.2% (80% of 4% + 2 %) next year. And as far as I know PERS increases will be at lease that for the next 3 biennium and the 2% may be recurring. Just know that our most economically vulnerable youth debtor prisoners (students) are and will be paying pension guarantees instead of for education for the foreseeable future, while they will likely never be able to benefit in the same way.
Third, cuts are needed and they need to be intelligent. Cutting SEP abruptly with no process is certainly not intelligent. Like any organism, the U in this case, is acting like an animal trying to get away from fire instead of thinking. This is typical organizational dysfunction; spend like there is no tomorrow and then go Oh Sh..!
Regarding your debt comments, the economic return for undergrad and grad degrees is very high. It has been increasing in both absolute terms and relative to just having a HS degree. Unemployment rates for college grads are also much lower for HS grads. The expectation is that these trends will continue as the economy moves toward higher skilled jobs.
The student debt problem is generally only a problem for students who do not complete their degrees and who therefore not get the pay increases that will allow them to pay their loans and, on average, have plenty left over.
UO’s completion rates are good, given the characteristics of our entering students, but Pres Schill is trying to increase them even more. He has made it clear that part of these administrative savings will go towards efforts to improve graduation rates, and the state has already appropriate money to give grants to students who are on the margin to help them complete. The completion rates for students starting at community colleges and for-profit universities are much lower.
I’m not saying that there are not many people who have high student debt and are unable to pay it off, but on average the model of funding education costs in part with debt has been very successful and the trends are good.
Plain — I think you are just misinformed if you think CAS was larded with fat before these cuts. I suggest that you read what XDH said above.
Nor is UO a high-spending university. Compared to the rest of the country, it is way on the low side in per student funding, at least when you compare to the schools that are supposed to be our comparators, i.e. the big state research universities.
You may be right about PERS being a burden, but there is nothing — nothing! — that I can see that UO can do about that. In addition, as I have pointed out here many times (often to disbelief), the high pension benefits especially for more senior faculty have compensated (to some extent) for UO’s notoriously low (historically, the situation has improved in recent years) faculty salaries.
With your remarks about supposed UO profligacy, you don’t come off as very credible to me with the special pleading for SEP. I think the SEP decision was probably a mistake (from what I know about it), but somewhere cuts must be made. I see the SEP cuts as no less and certainly no more lamentable than the CAS cuts.
As for student debt — it may be unfortunate, but it is a perfectly predictable outcome of the societal decision made years ago to cut subsidization of higher education, especially in public higher education.
As uom says, higher education is still a good deal for the individual, overall. If students think any particular school is not worth it, they are free — they owe it to themselves — to look for a better deal.
The statue was donated. It was also created by a UO Alum.
Does anyone know how many SEP participants ended up attending UO? (not to dismiss the importance of the program or the attempt to support the education of young people).
If the program is truly self sustaining, what was being lost?
Anonymous, that is indeed the question. A question not yet answered. As a proud alumnus, I know I speak for thousands of my cohorts when I say we’d all help make up whatever shortage exists; no matter how meager our capacity might be financially. It would get covered.
One possible factor in the demise of SEP might be that the COE no longer has any faculty invested in talented and gifted programs and has been run by graduate students under the supervision of Dr. DeBuse who retired recently. The program might very well thrive under the leadership of a private school devoted to these students.
I agree completely–except I’m not sure Oak Hill can accurately be described as devoted to talented and gifted students, though they market themselves that way. Eugene’s top high school students invariably come out of the public school system.