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CAS Imagineering Dean appointed Interim Dean of Honor’s College

Last updated on 09/05/2020

Info on Carol Stabile’s 2018 no-search no-consultation no-notice appointment as CAS Assoc Dean is here. She may well be an excellent choice and the CHC faculty may have been fully consulted and engaged in this new appointment. I don’t know, post a comment if you do.

Updated with pay: This promotion will, at least in theory, mean a substantial cost savings for UO. Stabile was paid $226,762 as CAS Assoc Dean Strat Initiatives, while the salary for the Clark Honor’s College Dean was just $186,281, as of Spring 2020. (Data here). 

Dear Colleagues,

I am extremely pleased to announce that I have named Carol Stabile, the associate dean for strategic initiatives for the College of Arts and Sciences, as the interim dean for the Clark Honors College. She will start in her new position on September 8, 2020.Carol has extensive, interdisciplinary history at UO. She will bring a strong and resourceful approach to guiding the CHC, and she will continue the work that former Dean Gabe Paquette and his team have worked on over the last two years.Since 2008, Carol has served as a professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as well as the School of Journalism and Communication. She has been a faculty in residence at CHC for the last year, and has taught a variety of courses in the honors college since 2013. She is author or editor of five books, most recently The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist (MIT Press, 2018). She has taught courses on media history, feminist science fiction, and public writing. This winter, she will be teaching a Calderwood seminar in the CHC on writing for social justice.Her service record at UO is equally impressive and Carol has had an impact on the way we support our students and protect them from harm. Most notably, she co-chaired the University Senate’s Task Force to Address Sexual Assault and Survivor Support in 2014. One year later, she co-chaired the UO Committee on Sexual and Gender-based Violence. She was awarded the Wayne Westling Award for Distinguished University Service and Leadership by the University Senate for her work in that area. In 2016-17, she served on President Mike Schill’s Sexual Assault Advisory Committee.She also chaired the Student Success and Remote Education Task Force in April 2020, and was a member of the Student Success Working Group in the Division of Undergraduate Education and Student Success for the Office of the Provost during winter 2020.In CAS, Carol worked with all departments, the Division of Undergraduate Education and Student Success, and the University Career Center to open Tykeson Hall and implement a new advising model, including the creation of major and minor maps that combine information about academics with career readiness materials. In addition to her work on student success, she organized and led faculty writing circles, and worked with CAS leadership to plan and launch its Interdisciplinary Research Talks series.Before coming to the UO, she held academic positions at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Pittsburgh.Please join me in congratulating Carol. In the meantime, I will work with my team to formulate a plan on conducting a search to fill the position of CHC dean permanently. 

I hope you and your families are healthy and safe.

Patrick Phillips
Provost and Senior Vice President

 

19 Comments

  1. Friend of the CHC 09/04/2020

    Carol Stabile may be an excellent choice. She does have an impressive CV. The CHC faculty were not consulted or involved in the process. Heard from a friend, a CHC TTF on the call, that Provost Phillips had a QA on Zoom that lasted about 30 minutes in which folks were given no names or criteria or useful information of any kind. They weren’t told who was being considered or consulted, if anyone, beyond Phillips.

  2. Anonymous Alum 09/04/2020

    From a student’s perspective: Carol Stabile is one of the most excellent professors I have ever had. She is kind, generous, and an inimitable scholar. We need more administrators like her.

  3. Observer 09/05/2020

    I don’t know anything about the consultation, but she’s one of the most sensible, smart, and reliable people we’ve got in administration. My fear is that they’re just using her (read: exploiting her) as a placeholder until they can find some standard-issue metrics-driven, toe-the-line, overpaid flunky in place.

  4. Another Voice 09/05/2020

    Watch the title interim disappear within 9 months.

  5. vhils 09/05/2020

    Phillips’ academic bio of Stabile is noticeably missing a few pieces. Stabile was also, originally, a member of the English Dept., and her “Imagineering” position was given to her by Marcus after she had already left for what she thought were greener pastures at the University of Maryland.

    While some of her former students might love her, that’s not the case for the vast majority of her former colleagues across campus, in English, SOJC and WGSS, where she nominally remains. How many other faculty do you know that burn through three different academic homes (and three other Universities) in less than a decade? She’s also left a trail of trauma with many UO faculty of color, which was documented and described in detail to both CAS admin and Provost’s office when she made her over-compensated return two years ago.

    Best of luck CHC faculty, what’s left of you all anyways.

    • Anonymous 09/05/2020

      Can you elaborate as to what you mean when you say she is disliked by/has caused trauma among fellow faculty?

      • Another Anonymous 09/05/2020

        As a member of one of the categories mentioned by vhils, I would dispute that “the vast majority of her former colleagues” dislike her. On the contrary. Everyone I know in my unit thinks of her highly. We must run in very different circles.

  6. Dogmatic Ratios 09/05/2020

    It doesn’t matter. We need to get rid of all executive administrative positions. Convene assemblies and put decisions in the hands of the campus community, which knows far better how to run a university.

    • Dog 09/05/2020

      agree completely

      during my time at the UO I have been associated with the HC and 6 different deans. None of them ever exercised initiative and none of them (well one maybe is an exception) really cared much about the HC and what it really represents. Dean of the HC was merely another title for them to collect. These individuals basically had no commitment to the HC and improving it. That indeed may be generic to all UO administrators.

      At least Dan Williams gave a shit that things actually worked …

    • uomatters Post author | 09/05/2020

      Right. Every decision should be made by committees, preferably a committee of the whole sitting through endless meetings followed by a vote. Actually, that sounds like hell.
      .
      I’d settle for a process that ensures administrators are picked in an open and transparent manner. The Senate made an attempt to force Pres Schill to take that modest step toward better governance, but the resulting policy seems to be nothing but a fig leaf for top down management: https://policies.uoregon.edu/search-procedures-academic-administrator-positions
      .
      From the preamble:
      .
      “Decisions around hiring processes reflect the university’s values around shared governance between faculty and professional administrators, professional excellence, rational decision-making, efficient and responsible management of resources, and diversity and inclusion. As such, whenever possible, searches for new academic administrators should be conducted with broad and meaningful participation from faculty and the university community. In addition to providing an appropriate voice for the university community in such decisions, participation leads to more informed decision-making and positions new hires for success when they arrive at the UO.”

      • Dog 09/05/2020

        oh get real man
        no one makes a fucking decision around here and hasn’t for a long time – decisions actually make some people unhappy, just like “effective teaching” makes some students unhappy. Unhappy outcomes at the UO are verboten …

        instead we use the consensus is excellence approach

      • Dogmatic Ratios 09/06/2020

        Yep, this is pure managerialism: ” … participation from faculty and the university community.” ‘Participation’ is not power. The first thing we need is direct democracy, without the bureaucracy. When all decisions are made by the campus community, the process for electing someone to a position of ‘administrator’ will perforce be transparent. It’s odd that someone who logged so much time in the University Senate would call democratic deliberation “hell”. Obviously some form of grassroots democracy is the only legitimate way to rid ourselves of the useless BoT and their irresponsible ‘professional’ administrators.

  7. Dog 09/05/2020

    Increase in Pay to Paquette offsets this – zero sum game be Us

  8. Cheyney Ryan 09/05/2020

    I may have had the longest association with the Honors College when I was at the University of Oregon. I first taught in the HC in the fall of 74 and returned to teach one course a year there after moving primarily to Oxford. While there were Deans that were indifferent, in my experience some made a very great difference. I would single out David Frank, but there were others.

    Also, having worked with Carol closely my last years at Oregon I feel she is an excellent choice. My worry, from what I have heard, is the administration’s larger plans for the college. When I first came to Oregon the HC had hardly any resident faculty. When it expanded to get its own faculty it was a massive improvement in every way; I think everyone who experienced that transition would agree with me. For some reason the administration recently decided to abolish the resident faculty. At the same time, it decided to substantially increase student enrollment in the college. The worry is that this is no longer a “college” in any meaningful sense, with its own community, but just a program whose faculty only have a marginal connection to it.

    Perhaps there was much discussion before making this change, but I am not aware of it. I would’ve thought the administration would have sought input from faculty such as myself with years of experience with the college. If this means the end of the Honors College as it has been, it would be a terribly sad event. The HC students are without question the finest students I have ever taught anywhere. My hope is that Carol will be able to maintain this vibrant community through these changes.

    • Dog 09/05/2020

      for what its worth, DF is the exception that I mentioned earlier

  9. Excellence 09/07/2020

    Well, shave my back hair and call me Tinkerbell. UO faculty and matters coming out in support of not one, but two newly appointed administrators. It seems that tenured faculty, the permanent stake-holders in our institution, might do a more effective job than the expensive and revolving door of administrators who make “interventions” then leave for greener pastures.

    Keep this up and we’ll refund CAS and migrate campus police to a Cahoots model (and migrate Johnson Hall to a Cahoots model, migrate PR to a Cahoots model….)

  10. Watching all this 09/07/2020

    Offensive as the lack of consultation was, no one should be surprised. Phillips consulted with Honors College faculty for about 30 minutes regarding this interim appointment. Banavar gave the HC faculty about 10 minutes more to comment on the complete reorganization of the college. UO seems to want to use the Honors College as a tool for sales and not a lot more, and it completely disregards the HC faculty.

  11. Another Voice 09/10/2020

    Fascinating statement by Phillips in today’s BOT meeting that he consulted with HC faculty and called many individually. I’ve spoken to several HC faculty about this, and he didn’t consult any of the ones I talked to, even ones who wrote directly to him. I hesitate to call this a lie because there are a number of HC faculty who I didn’t talk to, but it is not true that the Provost engaged in any real way with faculty who showed an interest in the matter.

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