Last updated on 12/01/2016
Will Campbell has the report on today’s Senate meeting, in the Daily Emerald here:
My amendment to keep the IAC in reserve failed narrowly, and I then voted with the ayes to replace the Senate Intercollegiate Athletics Committee with a purely advisory IAAC. I regard the agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.
Who is the metaphorical Poland?
I don’t know. But running with the metaphor now the Senate has until September to break the Duck code and ramp up Spitfire production.
How the Senate can voluntarily give up control of an important campus committee is beyond comprehension. It is a damned lie to suggest the IAC was non-functional as the current Senate President and others have said. I know as I was on the IAC years ago and that IAC repeatedly fought back against the secrecy and shenanigans of the Athletic Dept. The committee didn’t have many successes in those years but it did manage to uncover the occasional truth about the disgraceful crap occurring in the Athletic Dept. It also kept the Athletics Dept’s feet to the fire, much to their chagrin. The Senate claims to be a champion of increased transparency and clarity but this action takes us backwards because now the Athletic Dept has no reason to share anything with the campus. I have been told by older faculty that we used to have a Senate that consistently fought the good fight in the name of shared governance. Apparently no more. I have the same response to you Senators that I have for Trump supporters: authoritarianism starts with actions like this one.
Former IAC member, did you speak against the motion at the meeting yesterday? Did you make your opinion known on the Senate blog? If so, kudos, and I’m sorry democracy did not break in your favor in this case. If not, then you were like one of the millions who stayed home on election day and saddled us with our new authoritarian regime.
Note that the Senate can bring the IAC back from the dead at any point. In the mean time we have a new athletics committee with elected faculty and participation from athletics. Yay.
There can never be friendship between the academic side and the athletic department, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. That power cannot ever be the trusted friend of higher education.
well personally I have always thought that barbarous paganism and the spirit of aggression dominates academic pursuits and politics.
Referee #2 likes this. If you revise it to read “the spirit of passive aggression”, I’ll consider a resubmission for comment of the week, depending of course on the responses of referees #1 and #3, which are overdue. The Editor.
Cutsy comments do not replace leadership. Surrendering on athletics and allowing the administration to remove the Senate from the free speech discourse? Not a good week for shared governance. And lest we not forget that a cool 1 billion will be spent on this campus to advance the careers of a dozen current faculty and bolster the CVs of Schill and other higher administrators. Imagine what that money would have done if it was spread across campus. We’ll never know because we’ll will not see that kind of support for many decades to come. Nice work Senate leaders-your silence screwed 99% of us.
dear editor
yes that is an excellent point. In Academics it really is all about passive aggression, unlike the visceral and physical direct aggression asserted to be barbarism
cdsinclair, the theory of a representational governance system is that the elected representatives are supposed to represent their constituents, not cave in to executive/administrative pressure. The new committee is functionally still born thanks to our lily-livered Senate. And yes, I did voice my views. Unfortunately the spineless prevailed.
I am a Senator who voted for keeping the Senate IAC (in the form of Bill Harbaugh’s proposed amendment which was voted down narrowly). What I failed to say at the meeting (because I didn’t think fast enough) was this: the whole game here is deeply dishonest. The stance the administration presents to the outside world is that UO athletics is part of academics — otherwise how do we justify not paying the players — and not paying taxes on the profits? The stance presented by administration inside the university is that professors (and Senators) have no business interfering with athletics because it is not academic. This is the Big Lie.
The irony is that our Department of Athletics is not even fundamentally athletics. Yes it involves athletes in the operation, but it exploits them for a commercial purpose. It is actually a Department of Big Lies, or perhaps more politely: a Department of Entertainment and Sportswear. Arguably a Department of Entertainment and Sportswear would be okay if the entertainers were paid and if we were honest about it not being part of academics, honest about it being a fundamentally commercial venture.
As long as the administration keeps up the pretense that it is okay not to pay the athletes (or to pay taxes) because it is part of academics, then goddammit, it is within the purview of the Senate and it is the duty of faculty to oversee it.