That would of course be to the salaries of the Duck coaches. Thanks to Raghu for the notice. Given that the faculty will be voting on a strike soon, you might think this is unfortunate timing for the administration. Actually it’s intentional – Scholz wants to destroy the faculty’s morale before the vote, and what better was to do it than by ostenstatiusly making it rain for his millionaire sporting friends?
Live at 10:30 at https://www.youtube.com/live/NNaDY6JgE1k
This reward for the coaches is in tribute to their great performance against OSWhatever in [UOM: redacted because this isn’t a sports blog]
The best sports blog would be a [UOM: redacted on the grounds this is not a sports blog]
[UOM: redacted on the grounds this is not a comment]
This is ultimately Scholz’s and the Board of Trustees’ decision, and they screwed this up in a bad way. But our Athletic Director and the three football coaches in question are also culpable and should, frankly, quietly apologize to internal stakeholders for the PR mess they made.
The money itself is not an issue per se. Like all employees, coaches deserve competitive compensation in line with performance and market realities. But the tone deaf way in which they applied this raise — just before two possible strikes by faculty + student employees, and right when the budget writing committee of the legislature is deciding how much money to give to universities for the next two years — is just shockingly reckless politically. Mullens and Lanning and the other two forgettable coaches dropped the ball on this one, and screwed over multiple other stakeholders at UO in the process.
Gotta wonder if the impending implosion of DoE, and the massive mitigation of student loan subsidies, is effecting any of these shenanigans? And what about UOwe’s inclusion in the 45 unis that allegedly violated Title VI? If found guilty, wouldn’t that end all Fed magic money given to the flagship? Why would UOwe be exempt from the economic reckoning nonprofits face when the boxcars of Fed grants disappear?
To an outsider, it looks as if JH is makin sure UO’s most important marketing gimmick, that being football, gets theirs, at the expense of whatever’s left of the institution’s academic mission. Just sayin…