The email sent on his behalf below would seem to go against the advice in President Schill’s Open Mike from last week, which said:
- Transparency is the best policy. Whenever possible administrators should be as forthcoming as possible, subject to the privacy rights of members of our community.
as well as UO’s Academic Freedom Policy, which states:
The University of Oregon encourages and supports open, vigorous, and challenging debate across the full spectrum of human issues as they present themselves to the university community. The University of Oregon protects free speech through Policy No. 01.00.16. This policy on Academic Freedom builds on these existing commitments by recognizing the special contexts of scholarship, teaching, governance, and public service. …
c. POLICY AND SHARED GOVERNANCE. Members of the university community have freedom to address, question, or criticize any matter of institutional policy or practice, whether acting as individuals or as members of an agency of institutional governance.
Thanks to an anonymous reader for the email:
This “no freelancing allowed” admin idea has been around JH spin for as long as I have been at the UO. It has, however, gotten worse.
The UO is way to concerned with controlled the message to preserve perceptions about it. Just ask the State Legislature how well that strategy is working …
All this controlling has allowed them to come up with the brilliant 11% tuition increase plan — or is it now only 10%? — whatever — the Legislature surely is going to love it — I can’t wait for them to bestow more riches on us in appreciation — surely JH could not be misreading the tea leaves — right?
Silly me, I thought the first amendment applied even to UO employees of all ranks and status.
New Year Cat: ha ha ha ha ha!
Supervisors can verbally abuse classified – as long as the verbal abuse is equally spread. Whereas a classified even reasonably disagreeing with a supervisor can be punished for insubordination.
“Message discipline” is pretty standard in a corporate environment, where people aren’t being paid to have opinions on company time. But I would have thought that a university would respect a range of independent opinions, especially about something that affects the entire community.
All I could think of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFRa7Ovym8s
(…that would be great. Mkay?)
This whole letter just exudes excellent leadership chain of commanding there at cent comm. I sure hope all our admin’s have this real gogetter attitude to lead the us into a brave new synergistic future. That would be great. Mkay.
Does that mean that other units can speak freely about the budget cuts? Why are JSMA, LERC, and MNCH singled out?
Victims are either kept in the dark or they are gag ordered. And the JSMA, LERC, and MNCH are definitely victims.
Corporate normal indeed. Except that universities aren’t supposed to be run the same way as corporations, and I don’t know many (any) faculty who went into academia because they were aching to work in a corporate-copy, top-down environment complete with gag orders. On the contrary: relative autonomy and transparency were always part of the compensation for the lower pay and prestige
Nauseated — but the administrators have been boosting their earnings and perks to make them more competitive with private industry/corporate, the BOT is certainly private industry/corporate minded, so this is no surprise to some of us. We expected nothing less.
No, it’s no surprise. Amazing how that doesn’t take the sting out of autocratic, condescending, and self-serving managerial fiats