That would be Mark Wasikowski, who is “honored and humbled to have this opportunity from Rob Mullens, Eric Roedl and the University of Oregon administration”. The Oregonian has the exciting news here.
Add in OPE, bonuses, car, club memberships, tickets and travel for family and friends, and miscellaneous other porkalicious perks, and we’re talking $750K easy, for a program that costs UO millions every year, and which averaged 987 sports-fans per home game this year.
$750k is what a one percent increase in resident tuition will bring in. President Schill will be going to the Higher Ed Coordinating Commission on Thursday, to ask for a 7% increase.
Here are some snippets from his predecessor’s contract:
Say what you will about the decline and fall of Rome – at least my games filled the Colloseum.
Headline should read baseball, not basketball.
whatever
Okay
today, June 17 (ironically graduation day) this budget crap is going to start to effect real people because they will be terminated today.
Little known to most on this Campus is that the UO’s ZeroWaste Program is nationally known and recognized as a very good model of campus sustainability and the UO should be proud of this effort, except that the UO doesn’t know it exists. Today, the architect and overseer of this highly successful program was terminated due to “budget cuts” and the entire office is now being re-organized to a more bureacratic and inefficient thing.
Indeed, some students I know have come here precisely because of the UO’s reputation of sustainability in some areas. I suppose the football team attracts more students, but frankly, while it once did, I don’t think it does any more. This is seriously stupid
and counterproductive by the UO budget people, but like I said,
a) they are ignorant and b) they don’t care.
Can’t we just lay off everyone associated with “transportation services” and turn that all over to the City of Eugene?
I’m very sorry that people are losing their jobs–in my opinion transfers and attrition make more sense. However, award-winning, cutting-edge, money-losing recycling programs are something that filthy rich institutions do to impress each other. UO is not such an institution.
It’s hard to believe that anyone would choose a university based on its recycling program. One hopes that such students learn during their time here the critical thinking skills needed to avoid that sort of foolishness.
Zero waste does not lose money
students do choose based on sustainability appearances these days, the fact that you don’t believe this is irrelevant.
I have no idea what critical thinking skills even means, to me, this has always been a throw away phrase, which clearly indicates that
I have never instilled critical thinking in any of my students all
these years
I must be deficient in all respects, how the hell did I get tenure –
oh right, that was at another University …
With due respect, if it wasn’t losing money, it would not have been cut. It’s an iron law of institutions that they do not shrink unless they must.
Given that local (and perhaps national) recycling programs are currently failing, due to China’s refusal to accept our crap, ahem “aspirational recycling”, it’s not hard to imagine that UO’s program has also fallen on hard times.
There could be other plausible explanations for this cut, but they seem unlikely.
the program has not been cut – there has been a re-org and zero waste will be re branded to another name- but the principal architects of the original Zero Waste have been laid off now.
I am well aware of the China plastics problems (even preparing a paper on this) – Zero Waste did have to adjust to this and find new markets, which they did. All that knowledge has now been lost.
And I think, according to this Iron Law – Baseball should have been cut long ago ….
That’s pretty circular reasoning. Of course institutions cut otherwise profitable programs, often because the profitability is masked while the costs are clear. But it’s not hard to believe a sustainability program saves money: reducing waste means less spent on things like electricity, water, food, materials, etc.
Not seeing the circular part. Yes, administrative incompetence is always a possibility. But aside from that, I’m inclined to think that if this was a cut, it was because the program was NPV negative.
An important caveat here is that it doesn’t matter whether the program saves money in a global sense. What matters is how it affects the UO bottom line (now and in the future). And arguably the UO financial situation is all that the UO administration should concern itself with (as opposed to global warming, etc.).
Not even all Fortune 500 companies make decisions from a pure NPV context. How can you be so sure about this decision?
I’m not sure. It could be incompetence. It could be that someone higher up simply dislikes the guy. It could be all kinds of inside baseball that I as a very lowly peon will never know about.
But the balance of probability is that–like most vanity projects–the recycling program loses money. In the current environment of austerity, it looks ripe to be cut.