Last updated on 04/18/2017
From the docket here:
ORDER: Granting Defendant’s Unopposed Motion for Extension of Time to Answer 6 . Answer is due by 5/18/2017. Ordered by Judge Michael J. McShane. (cp) (Entered: 04/17/2017)
Attorney Shayda Le of Portland’s Barran Liebman law firm is the same lawyer our administration hired, along with partner Edwin Harden, to defend Shelley Kerr and Robin Holmes against the lawsuit from UO counselors Karen Stokes and Jennifer Morlok over then Interim GC Doug Park’s effort to get them to give the GCO Jane Doe’s confidential counseling records, during Doe’s lawsuit against UO over the basketball rape allegations. I forget how much we paid out to settle that one.
GC Kevin Reed also hired her and Harden to investigate the “Halloween party incident”. That report is here. The commenters were not impressed with it.
Meanwhile, Freyd’s lawyer is Jennifer Middleton of Eugene’s Johnson, Johnson and Schaller law firm. Middleton was one of Jane Doe’s lawyers.
Is CAS’s idiotic refusal to address Freyd’s salary issues–as her own department asked–now an ongoing part of our lives?
Two weeks ago, Around the O celebrated an ENTIRE CONFERENCE dedicated to Freyd’s ground breaking research: https://around.uoregon.edu/content/regional-sociology-gathering-puts-focus-uo-psychologist. (The article notes the national attention to her work.)
But since she didn’t fish around for an “outside offer”–the true sign of merit in CAS’s eyes–we will now be subjected to regular bulletins on the legal team hired to justify paying her less than she deserves. Aren’t there better uses of our time and money?
Hey man, personally I live for this shit, endless CAS nonsense because a decision might be disruptive …
PS – to save money, I suggest the News Office designate the same person to issue press releases about her latest achievements and periodic defenses of paying her less than some of her junior colleagues.
There’s assistant psych profs making 150-160? I call BS on that…
Assistant Profs are making 90k. Associates are making 90-100.
Go on the market & get a raise like the rest of the academic world.
By junior I meant less senior. My understanding is she is paid less than others less senior than her. I am not aware that administrators must waste their time getting outside offers to get raises, if only because doing it just to get a raise is just that–a waste of time. This is only something faculty are supposed to do.
This is also something common to the entire university profession. Why is she suing UO to try to alter the entire markets operation?
Because UO is a local hiring monopsony.
Segregation was common to the entire public school system in 1954. Why did Brown sue the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas–to alter the entire system?
I hear this book does a good job explaining some of that history: https://www.amazon.com/Lawyers-lawyer-life-John-Davis/dp/B007EQKWUQ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1492623861&sr=8-2&keywords=john+w.+davis+harbaugh
Not that this is really the point of the important issues here, but the ignorance in these comments is getting tiring. There is no excuse in this case as UO salaries are public. Go to http://ir.uoregon.edu/salary and search for “Assistant Professor” and it won’t take long to find salaries of over $150K — even over $200K — in the assistant professor rank.
there is also no excuse for not providing any context.
These high assistant professor salaries are in the College of Business and if we had a Medical school, they would be high there as well. These are professional schools.
In both cases, the external world has highly competitive salaries so any University must offer very high salaries to these people to get them to leave the external world.
The rest of us CAS faculty , the external world has no use for us, so I suspect there are 0 assistant profs in CAS in that Salary range.
We must not forget that The Issue is not the wisdom of retention offers creating the largest salary differentials in a department [ corrected for rank] but whether this basis is a form of gender discrimination, and thus illegal.
The central issue of Frey’d suit is whether CAS practice is discriminatory. I am sure it is, but I have raised a separate point: it is idiotic. Most of the problems I’ve encountered with the U of O administration have been due more to stupidity than ill will. Even if Freyd were a male CAS’s position would be stupid. Schill should resolve this immediately, as he did with the victim’s lawsuit in the basketball case. It should never have happened, and now shouldn’t drag on.
I am not a lawyer, and don’t know UO-CAS-practices but the 2 universities I have worked-for both use retention offers as the main vehicle to boast salaries [ along with bringing in LOTS of money, promotions [ sometimes] and being an administrator returning to faculty ranks] and OFTEN ignore other signals of excellence,…. except in setting yr by yr merit raises.
I have long argued that there are other signals of excellence that deserve salary adjustment, but this argument has often failed to convince; I too consider this idiotic.
But is the ‘retention offer ‘ basis for salary differentials unlawful, a form of gender discrimination? this seems quite novel an argument.
to bark again
1. If she can prove that in each merit raise in her career, her raise was less than the average male raise, then she will win her suit easily. I seriously doubt this is the case, as this situation would have come up much sooner in her UO career
2. I suspect, like about 10-15% of us remaining UO full professors that were hired in the late 80’s to early 90’s that she came up for tenure and promotion
at the time that those raises were pitiful. In addition, new hires will come in at proportional higher starting salary than this contingent.
While I actually believe this situation should be universally corrected, and the Union should argue for this, I don’t believe that will ever happen.
Bottom line – while I certainly believe that gender bias is quite real at the UO (and most everywhere else) I think the dominant reason for her current disproportionately low full prof Salary, relative to her years of service (that is the key here) is an accident of uncorrected historical circumstance.
it may be a novel legal argument. it is, however, not a novel scientific one: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0013-0133.2005.00973.x/abstract
Is CAS’s practice of offering spousal hires discriminatory? Because this benefits females more than males, because males are more like to be married to non-phd’s who have to fend for themselves in the local labor market.
The point is that CAS–and UO in general–is never ever wrong. Being wrong about one thing would set a terrible precedent because it might mean being wrong about other things too. And then they might have to start making fair restitution to the people they wronged.