5/6/2012: There’s a report card on the right, the comments here are open for praise, criticism, and suggestions for improvement.
5/6/2012: There’s a report card on the right, the comments here are open for praise, criticism, and suggestions for improvement.
The 4 votes for “A” probably came from the usual JH suspects.
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Nice guy. Smart, reasonable, pleasant, but when will he step up and take charge?
He is rarely on campus and when he is he never bothers to get out of JH and see what’s happening. He didn’t even try to negotiate the rift between central administration and the faculty. So an A+ if you like the vote to unionize, although that probably would have gone through anyway.
If that’s true, then he’s just cashing in on a golden opportunity and is a big disappointment.
Nothing like I thought we’d get after his R-G op-ed piece late last year. All talk and no action. Is he charging mileage from his Portland and Government Camp homes to UO and croissants ala GP and JTM even though he has a car allowance?
Not much of a presence to the UO community. I’ve been on campus every day; think I’ve seen him once. His primary communique so far to us the rank and file who teach and try to do research seems to have been about the union.
I believe he’s spending most of his time behind the scenes working on the priorities he set — presidential recruitment, an independent board, etc. Everyone I know in the admin. and among the donors/supporters absolutely loves him and expresses gratitude to the *faculty* for getting him.
There are two kids of interim presidents. One kind cleans out the deadwood and makes the tough choices then leaves a well-ordered ship for the permanent hire. The other kind is a caretaker who tries to avoid trouble and lets the permanent president deal with the problems. We needed the first kind, and got the second. I think of Berdahl as a watered down Frohnmayer.
I’ll echo most of the other comments: Not once, over the past several months, has Berdahl dropped by my office to chat. Hasn’t he noticed that the door is open? He’s never helped me go over thesis proposals. That time I was carrying a big pile of exams and could have used an extra pair of hands — no Berdahl to be found! Sure, dealing with the task of trying to find someone good to be the next president is an enormous task. Sure, it takes time and persuasion to try to win more independence for the university. But really, is one quick shoulder massage too much to ask for?
things look pretty botched at the moment but if can hire us a reasonably competent president it will be fine.
Dog to anon 10:38
Define “fine”
Does it occur to anyone that like the United States, it really doesn’t matter who the
UO President is, since Institutional Inertia dominates all things. Initiative can
only be implemented with the cooperative spirit of others – democrats and republications, pro and anti unionists, ducks and dogs …
the most dismissively arrogant South Dakotan I’ve ever met.
I would have given him an A if he would have stopped the union.
An interesting distribution in the grade voting. Looks like he’s converging on a C+ GPA. Its really sad that Berdahl didn’t aggressively open communications with the campus at the beginning of winter quarter, especially with the faculty and faculty leaders. A missed opportunity. He’s obviously been an administrator for far too long. Administrative dry-rot has obviously set in….
Had he communicated and reassured faculty in more open and public forums, I think he might have been able to stop the card check from getting its “numbers”. What could have been…..
I doubt he could have stopped the union without a major administrative shakeup, which he obviously was not willing to even consider. The funny/pathetic part is that JH now thinks we betrayed them!
Dudes, this is ludicrous. When Lariviere was fired everyone was desperate for someone who wasn’t a Pernsteiner yo-yo, and desperate for two things: someone to fight Pernsteiner and someone to be assure that the next, non-interim president wouldn’t be a Persteiner yo-yo. No one asked for, and Berdahl never promised to be, a shared governance messiah. And at that point, no one expected he’d be dealing with unionization, which has prompted faculty to voice loudly totally opposite positions. (Some are mad he opposed the union at first, others that he “caved”.)
The presidential search is still under wraps, so can’t be assessed. But has Berdahl knuckled under to Pernsteiner? Not that I can see. Has he continued to pursue the indepedent board legislation that is the key to permanent freedom from under Persteiner’s thum? Absolutely–and probably more than we can see.
It’s like you are grading a kid who enrolled in a history course for his failure to master physics…