Unfortunately that would be $20M more in funding for the 2021 Track and Feld Championships, not for UO’s academic bucket.
HB 2047 passed the Oregon House by one vote, and goes to the Senate tomorrow. OLIS link here. It seems Hans Bernard and Libby Batlan were being paid out of the academic budget, but working for something or someone else:
You’re assuming the Senate is open for business tomorrow.
Ah yes, the old deny them a quorum move. I remember back when Dave Frohnmayer did this to prevent the UO Faculty Assembly from holding a vote on something or another he didn’t like.
It was a proposed vote on a statement opposing the invasion and occupation of Iraq, if I recall correctly, in 2003. Not to speak ill of the dead, but that was a real dick move.
I searched the web but was unable to find a document describing the event. I was there, though. I believe that it was in the EMU ballroom.
The Iraq War meeting was in February, 2003. Dave Frohnmayer asserted that there wasn’t a quorum, so we couldn’t have a vote. This started an ongoing dispute as to what constituted a quorum of the faculty. Senate President Gordon Sayre eventually requested the opinion of Attorney General’s office, and they responded in November, 2008, that the whole governance structure of the University, including the establishment the Senate, was illegal, as the Statutory Faculty had not properly delegated its authority to the University Senate.
This led to the Statutory Faculty Assembly in May 2009, which blanket-approved all the legislation and motions that had been previously voted upon by the Senate (including the conferral of degrees). An Internal Governance Committee was formed to write a new University Constitution that would meet the AG’s approval, and this Constitution was adopted and signed in December, 2011. The Constitution states (9.2.4): “Statutory Faculty Meetings have no quorum requirements.”
It only took eight years, but at least we straightened that out.
Oh yeah, I remember that I bet he was worried some of the military related research dollars headed towards UO might get redirected to some other school.
Yes, I was there too. It was a UO Assembly Meeting called by petition, all exactly according to the governance document of that time. About 500 members attended (in the new student rec center), probably making it the largest Assembly meeting on record. There were an additional hundreds of observers present.
The Assembly met, on a Friday afternoon, to vote on a statement that would put the UO on opposition to the impending invasion of Iraq.
The President of the University generally acts as Chair of the Assembly. Instead of full filling his role as Chair, Frohnmayer simply announced that this was not an Assembly meeting, and left the hall. I do not recall him giving an explanation for his statement, but it was commonly understood that he was acting on the patently false belief that half of the Assembly members had to be in attendance for the meeting to be legal. This was transparent nonsense, since no quorum requirement for the Assembly had been observed since the founding of the University. (A subsequent statement by the Legal Counsel of the Attorney General spelled out in full that there were no grounds for a quorum requirement for the UO Assembly unless the Assembly imposed one on itself, which it had not done.)
In keeping with Frohnmayer’s action, the meeting, which voted overwhelmingly to put the UO in opposition to the Iraq invasion, is (I believe) not mentioned in the UO archives.
It was a sad day for UO governance.
The invasion of Iraq was a monumentally tragic day for the people of Iraq and America — and the insanity continues.