Union Discussion

Can someone comment on the survey methodology? I’m a NTT faculty, and never had an opportunity to complete a survey.

question for the NTT survey –
If a union that included NTT faculty were to be formed, do you think that combining NTT and TT faculty into a single union would be better or worse than having a union of only NTT faculty?

Today’s Chronicle article relates an obvious truth: adjunct discontent creates opportunities for organizing. But I wonder whether unions actually solve the issues about which NTT faculty are concerned. There’s an interesting web site worth seeing: http://www.adjunctnation.com/blogs/part-time-thoughts/?cat=19

I wonder if a union would simply be another source of NTT discontent.

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UAUO seems to be basing much of their appeal to faculty on the fact that UO faculty salaries fall below comparator institutions. That led me to wonder if our union-represented colleagues at other institutions are faring better. Apparently not. The PSU-AAUP blog decries the fact that those faculty also are at the bottom of their list of comparator institutions – and they pay union dues. Not a very compelling argument in favor of unionization. See: http://www.psuaaup.net/blog/2009/04/how-is-psu-faculty-doing.html

Faculty at Western and Eastern, both represented by AFT, have very competitive salaries, even though Eastern has had serious financial problems. Keep in mind that OUS and the UO administration might play nice at UO and OSU for a while to hold off the union, but will go back to business as usual when they feel there isn’t the threat of unionization. Our salaries may improve once or twice under the Provost’s plan, but will there be a sustained effort to keep our salaries competitive? I don’t think so. Seems to be a good argument for unionization.

The individual making the claim that faculty salaries at WOU and EOU are very competitive needs to review the union’s web site. Posted there is a Register Guard article from 6/15/09 that contains this statement: “Western Oregon University, Southern Oregon University and Eastern Oregon University are 11th, 12th and 13th, respectively, in their group of 13 comparable universities.” Apparently, AFT representation has not helped those faculty any more than AAUP representation has helped faculty at PSU.

The person arguing that salaries are “very competitive” at EOU and WOU also initiated use of “play nice.” Perhaps he/she can explain the meaning.

Dog Barks about Privatization (a word that dogs have trouble spelling)

It ain’t gonna happen here at the UO unless the UO jettisons all of the sciences (which it should as so few undergraduates get degrees in the so called STEM fields) and commits itself to having a 7-8 thousand student body, oriented towards traditional liberal arts and then charges them Bennington like tuition.

In addition, if the UO actually did this, they would be taking an enormous step backwards in terms of what a modern day University should look like in terms of curriculum and programs (not that our current trajectory – wait, we don’t even have a trajectory so nevermind).

So, bark, bark, bark, privatization is a ludicrous idea at our current state of student enrollment.

Your 2/8 post regarding the 2/5 meeting misstates the objection I expressed in my post of 2/6. The absence of an anti-union speaker did not concern me; Professor Tublitz announcing this meeting as “non-partisan” did and still does. Sorry if I was unclear in my post, although I’d think my calling him a liar would have made the point. Also, you note that the highest paid AAUP employee made $132,793.00 last year, making it inappropriate for Mr. Park to comment on union officials’ salaries. Did you only read the financial report posted for AAUP and miss the one for AFT? That report shows that last year the retiring AFT president was paid $177,640.00 plus $21,007.00 in post-retirement fees and was given the title to his company car, a 2007 Lincoln, while the incoming president was paid $208,056.00. The year before, the president was paid $390,783.00. Teachers’ dues funded all of that. Lastly, I agree: there are too many administrators who make too much money and, in some cases, are too inept. But would bringing in a union fix any of that? Their salaries would not be negotiated; ours would. Can the union show us just one instance of administrator salaries being lowered as a result of unionization or contract bargaining for faculty? It’s an issue intended to make us angry so that we stop thinking and drink the union cool-aid.

I’m sick of any union trying to round up all of the NTTF, TTF, OAs and ORs all into one group in a “wall-to-wall” blanket. OAs, like myself hardly have the same concerns as NTTF and TTFs. Be that as it may, I see unions as a detriment to society as a whole. Reasons:
1. Unions reward the lazy employee. Pay should be based on merit. Period.
2. Unions want to make you feel that you’re getting screwed by management. Remember, your employer hired you to do a job. Be thankful for that job. If you don’t like your job, find another!
3. Unions extort (that’s right, extort) money from you monthly in the form of “union dues” or “fair share” fees. I don’t need ANYONE to protect nor represent me for anything. I take responsibility for my own actions. These monies go to lobby political groups that I wouldn’t let my dog be around.
4. Trying to get rid of “dead-wood” or otherwise unproductive employee should be the sole responsibility of the employer. If you’re not holding up your end of the job, your employer should have the right to terminate you.
5. Unions foster bitterness between management and union employees.
6. Our state is monetarily broke. Where is the money going to come from to fund these expected raises and benefits promised by unions? Turnips don’t bleed money.
7. If you’re whining because your pay is low, look in the mirror. Ask yourself, “Am I doing my best every day?” Chances are your pay reflects your attitude.
8. Unions have outlived their use. We have federal and state laws currently on the books regarding number of hours worked, overtime, holidays etc.
9. Unions fund primarily election campaign of Democrats. Hello?! Some of us have different political views.
10. Where’s the fairness when unions try to indoctrinate “everyone” regardless if there are many who want nothing to do with unions.
11. Unions life blood is money. You can expect dues to rise. Are you willing to succumb to extortion?

Concerning out administrations growth in salaries and numbers. Really what’s going on is the people on the top of the ladder want to make a lot of money and if they’re going to make a lot of money, they have got to pay the people under them a lot of money and make it impossible for them to speak up about the “behind closed doors” dealings.
Then this same administration defends themselves to the rest of campus on their outrageous salary expansion on their expanded portfolio and responsibilities (which they created). I don’t know what the legal definition is for “Using the power of your office for personal gain” but it looks like its happening here. I mean….DF creating a position for himself that no one in past history has held???? Come on!!!

The posting states “Since that statement he and Bean have piled on a lot of new administrative hiring, while faculty pay is frozen. Why? Some people think it’s because Brad Shelton’s long-delayed budget model will reduce administrative growth, and they are trying to grandfather in everything they can first.”

Correct. The administrative changes have been going on now for 5 years plus. I don’t think they thought that anyone would figure out what they were doing so quickly and they would be able to complete their plan without conflict. It didn’t happen that way so now they are in a rush to complete their plan before it all crashes in on them..ie…becoming a corporation…that is why DF is lobbying in Salem to make it lawful for Universities to be corporations. (Begs the question…is making the changes into a corporation styled administration legal right now? Hummm I think not or DF wouldn’t be lobbying for it. Remember the comment “it makes doing business easier” that DF blurted out in a heated discussion during that last Spring Senate meeting?

Remember please: faculty pay may be frozen but those people in classified positions that get paid thousands less that you are being forced into taking furlough days. Everyone is paying for what the administration has done and is still doing.

I’m really confused. Did Bellotti quit voluntarily or was he fired? If the former, why the golden parachute? If the latter, where is the contract? Was this contract publicly available beforehand?

With the Athletic Department apparently having financial difficulties, and a real possibility of trouble servicing its debt when the new Arena bond payments start very soon, this kind of dealing with athletic management personnel must not be allowed to continue in the future.

It’s not just an ethical/public relations issue for the University, it’s becoming a financial issue as well.

Bellotti was fired no doubt – there’s no golden parachute for one who simply chooses to follow his bliss. I imagine the knife in his back has the same prints as the one that brought down Moos. Another feather in their cap as they try to claw their way into the AD chair. Too bad Uncle Phil isn’t paying the credit card for their “shopping trip” these last 3 years.

My guess is as poor as anyone’s. Here goes. Dave F made some kind of agreement, verbal for who knows what reasons. Larivierre realizes that UO is looking like a stinking piece of dead meat right now, and decided he had to get rid of Bellotti, or at least wanted to. But there was some kind of agreement, and he didn’t want Bellotti going to the press and the coursts with who-knows-what. So, he “honors” the “agreement”. For some reason, he takes the fall for Dave F on this verbal agreement thing.

Bolt is talking about the payout being financed by the Knight “legacy” fund. Which means the athletic department is low on money. With the bond payments for the new Arena starting soon, they better hope ticket sales are better than I’ve heard.

The OUS and the legislature perhaps should have paid more attention to the cautions of the UO senate budget committee and others on the Arena financing.

The whole recent business really stinks. I hope the corpse is fully unwrapped, no matter how bad the aroma.

Who knows, maybe LaR really made this deal. In which case, maybe it’s time for his golden parachute to open!

How about that – a Frohnmayer apologist! Since I’m up late, I guess I get to go first…

“Dave Frohnmayer had nothing to do with the Bellotti agreement.”
Maybe – but he certainly was running the ship when Bellotti `would go for a couple years at a time without a written contract’ (a paraphrase from that same RG article). What was up with that?

“Have you checked with the Budget Office to see if … the Budget Office just “parked” this money in this line for some reason?” Uh, no. But maybe you could fill us in if you know something, which you seem to with your leading question (counselor). It seems that there would be much better places to “park” it (Hey – another parking controversy!)

“The statement that Frohnmayer receives $245,000 to teach 47 students for 5 weeks … Are there restrictions on how many students can
enroll in these classes?” UO matters might have gotten the 5 vs. 10 wrong, but while we can ding them on that detail, the point is still valid. I know some faculty teaching a full load of high-contact courses with over 30 students for about 1/5th of what Frohnmayer is making, which brings us to:

“Frohnmayer’s annual salary is not only for teaching but for a sabbatical leave during fall term and an educational leave in the spring as his contract
indicates.” A sabbatical might be in line. The educational leave seems fishy (given the quality, or lack thereof, of what he has produced so far). But this along with how much of a furlough he took goes to the heart of his qualifications to teach a seminar on leadership – basking in a cushy retirement, kicking around while the rest of the place burns to the ground…

Dear Anon –

I didn’t delete any of your comment – maybe the text box overflowed?

I don’t have the numbers but it would have been unusual for Frohnmayer to take a sabbatical as President. The purpose of a sabbatical is not rest, it’s to work on research. You propose a research plan and you make a report at the end. Frohnmayer’s plan – as I recall from a RG story – involved research on leadership. I think he said he might write a book on it.

When President’s step down and return to research and teaching it is typical to give them a sabbatical to get them back into academic life.

Again, as reported in the RG, Frohnmayer is using his, at least in part, to take a second job as a lawyer at Harrang Long, etc. This is not the purpose of a sabbatical!

Faculty sabbatical contracts require the professor to stay on teaching and researching for a year after the sabbatical ends. Frohnmayer’s contract does not require this.

At UO faculty get full pay if the teach a half -load. Frohnmayer is getting full pay for a quarter load. (UO pays for a GTF and also for Frohnmayer’s co-teacher Barbara West, who apparently does half the lectures and most of the grading).

Frohnmayer’s retirement arrangements are not typical for academia, and in fact similar arrangements at UNC schools led to reforms. I believe the administrators in question had to return payments to the state.

Dog Barks,

Okay, so I was wrong and its not Dave F being appointed as Interim AD – in fact its Lorraine Davis – go figure …

Maybe the Attorney General will be able to figure this out, I sure can’t. Larivierre claims to have made this deal with Bellotti. But it seems the deal must have been in the works before he arrived on the scene. Why then did Larivierre put the finishing touches on it, apparently willing to take responsibility if the thing blows up, as it (almost) has?

Did he really think an oral agreement to hand someone $2.3 million for quitting would pass muster at a public university? In a state as suspicious of government/higher education matters as Oregon? If he thought that, either there is some important reason for doing something so apparently stupid, or else he really is far dumber than he has appeared so far.

Either way, something to get to the bottom of!

The above refers to an issue involving the nomination of delegates for the AAU elections this year. The AAU and AFT are co-sponsors of the UO union organizing effort.

Lariviere must have thought Bellotti had a good moral and legal case for the buyout. Did he want a lawsuit UO would lose, in which Bellotti might have spilled who knows what beans? I think he probably made the right decision, given the mess he inherited.

But what does this say about the quality of legal thought represented by our famous law professor, esteemed Oregon attorney, former UO President (and former State Attorney General, of course)?

I’m not a lawyer, I’m not even a would-be economist! But I have enough sense to have known that the Bellotti situation, uh, had just a tad of a fishy whiff about it.

Now we have not only Dave but now also Melinda adding distinction to our already fiercely luminous law school.

Must make Phil proud to have his surname out front.

The article on the front page of the RG today is interesting and relates to UO/City of Eugene parking (cartel) related shadiness. To get more money it seems the Eugene city manager is pushing a budget plan to dramatically increase parking fees near campus. This after his planning dept. approved a UO arena building permit (and related M.O.U.) that lacks adequate parking. And then the planning director got her free tickets to the games. In his other hand he tosses the increased parking cash to the olympic trials. He is a real piece of work.

You know, it’s easy to blame Frohnmayer for everything, and I do my share. But his history here also shows some amateurishness and bush-league behavior on the part of the OUS Board and the State.

He was president for 15 years or so. An awfully long time to be president of a major (or “major”) state university.

There was something awfully casual about them letting him hold the reins that long. Especially after the Phil Knight/WRC fiasco in 1999. Up until then, I thought he had done some great things. After that, it seemed like one bad thing after another. Not surprising, given all the pressure, his health problems, his other problems.

What I’m saying is that after 5 years, they should have really looked at whether it was time, as it would be at most places, to look for some fresh blood.

After the WRC calamity, which actually was about the 5 year mark, they really should have taken a close look at whether he was still the guy for UO.

Duncan McDonald (then the fundraising director) took the fall for WRC. Maybe he should have, but Dave F was responsible, too.

Keeping him another 10 years was verging on irresponsibility. With all the weird things going on at UO, especially with athletics; and with the decline of UO as an academic institution — not Dave’s fault, in my opinion, mostly beyond his control, but still, he didn’t even seem aware — with all the problems, they really should have looked for a fresh leader.

Come to think of it, it didn’t verge on irresponsibility, it WAS.

Dog:

For the record, all comments on UO Matters are subject to careful peer review – if we could find a peer for you, that is.

When I read Dave’s comments I had visions of the three cups and a marble. We all know where the buck stops. Go ahead Dave try to hide your marble. This is the kind of hide and seek games corporate America plays. Is this why you want universities to be corporations Dave? I remember you saying once universities should be corporations because it makes doing business easier. What kind of business Dave? Screwing the public, employees and faculty? Or it makes it easier to pass the buck? Or both? Come on Dave…why don’t you just welcome us all to corporate America while the UO administration laughs at the rest of us all the way to the bank. You’ve shown your true colors and their not green and yellow.

Dog Barks

Whether or not Lariviere is a hat, and ex-jayhawk or a duck in disguise, I think is immaterial to the low support of the Union. Rather, given reflective moments, most individuals don’t see how a Union actually would benefit anyone on this campus. In addition, many faculty that I talked to around my water dish thought that if faculty were unionized there would be no more merit raises. Personally, I believe that is a silly argument against having a union, given the fact that the last significant merit raise pool was in the year 2000 (but apparently we have one this year – hey – once every 10 years).

The main surprise of the survey is that OA’s are totally against the union and many faculty felt they would be for the union. I agree on the NTTF issue – those people are continually screwed and a Union would be good for them but the main attempt to unionize UO faculty should now be viewed as a failure and rendered now to a status of being a historically idiosyncratic event.

Thanks for explaining, Texas guy.

Dog Barks Profusely:

On the Pros/Cons of semesters vs quarters in hopes of stimulating a real academic discussion on this.

Background:

Dog was an undergrad in a quarter system.

Dog went to grad school in semester system.

Dog has taught in both a semester and a Quarter System.

Dog has experience and favors a semester system.

Quarters:

Pros:

Can teach more course titles in an Academic Year and thus develop a more flexible or robust UG curriculum (in principle). This is a potential advantage for students, and I found it to be so when I was one.

If its a bad course experience for all, for whatever reason, it only lasts 10 weeks.

For a year long course you can probably cover more material in 3Q than in 2S, but this may be somewhat debatable.

Cons:

Can’t not give an adequate number of assessments in just a 10 week class to grade fairly (to me, this is a big deal)

Sometimes have to hurry through the course material to make sure you cover the expected content (obviously this varies from class to class).

No real built-in time to change course direction/content or to relax the pace.

3 Weeks of Finals instead of 2 –> 50% more taxing on everyone.

Semesters:

Pros:

Can have a more leisurely pace and spend more time on the harder portions of the course.

Course is much more efficient – say it takes 3 weeks for students to acclimate to your course culture, etc. In semester system you have 12 weeks left where as in quarter system you only have 7 weeks left (again, to me, this is a big, real life deal)

Can give more and deeper assignments.

Can save money on energy costs if you take a long winter break.

Cons:

Faculty on quarters don’t like teaching in September.

A bad class is stuck together for a much longer time.

One University I was at had a compressed semester system (i.e. short winter break) such that spring semester ended around
April 20 (fall Semester started beginning of Sept) –> there was concern that the state legislature would notice this and pay us for only 8 months

On balance, to me, the ability to give more assignment and more in depth assignments allows the students to connect with the material in a more sustained way and this is why I favor a Semester system – in the end I believe its more efficient.

Dog says:

Isn’t this development

http://blog.oregonlive.com/behindducksbeat/2010/05/university_of_oregon_under_ord.html

consistent with what is posted in
UOmatters?

Bean gave him tenure last year, and was going to promote him to full this year.

Are they really going to give out big raises in September? Where are they going to get the money?

Tuition increases? If so, this is not going to go over well in the current bad economic climate combined with looming state insolvency.

Other possibilities: Stop the growth of administration relative to other campus functions. Reorient private donations (which approach a $100 million per year but contribute only a small fraction of that to operating expenses) to relieve tuition increases while allowing for growth of academic-related budgets.

Most of the money will go to equity raises designed to get the departmental averages by rank to the peer average for that field and rank. This will cost $10 million per year when fully implemented, which will take 4 years or so. Most of the raises will got to fulls, since they are the farthest behind.

Tomlin’s plan is to grade the faculty on an A++. A+, A, A-, B scale (I’m not kidding) and distribute a small merit raise as well. This is controversial because the merit evaluations are time consuming, subjective, and contentious, and probably not worth the bother for a few hundred bucks.

No one yet knows how the administration will handle their own raises. Provost Bean thinks the equity gap is bigger for the senior administrators than for the faculty. In terms of merit, obviously they are all A++’s, Jim and Russ included.

dog barks back

“Just Amused writes”

“Most of the money will go to equity raises designed to get the departmental averages by rank to the peer average for that field and rank.”

Yes this is the general understanding and in principle is simple to implement.

So this is simple to implement:

Department Y has 5 full professors in that and, compared to some peer average at that rank, the department is 28,000 behind. Therefore, give each full professor 28,000/5 = 5600 increase
in base salary.

But, because this is Tomlin, this
straightforward procedure will be
maximally uberscrewed.

Dead wrong dude. The unionization effort is alive and well. Why would they leave when just the threat of a union has caused Admin to suggest raises this fall?

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

Dog responds:

Medical Schools are like Law Schools – separate salary structures and separate salary comparators. Those faculty are generally not (and should generally not) be included in any “average salary at some rank”

Indeed it is now customary to separate out all professional schools in salary reporting and comparisons.

Have to laugh at Senator Majority Leader Devlin’s touching concern about “quality.” This has been such a high Legislature priority! They have achieved so much over the decades!

“Senate Majority Leader Richard Devlin, D-Tualatin, former co-chairman of the higher education subcommittee for the House Ways and Means Committee, said he is open to changes in the relationship between higher education and the Legislature. But legislators are not going to give up control over issues such as protecting access, affordability and quality in the state’s universities, he said.”

“New Partnership” proposed ? They could not think of a less worn out phrase than that ? Well the RG supports this bonding scheme so it must be right. After all, it was the brilliant RG who recommended Goldschmidt as OUS chair (along with the Oregonian) just before his sustainable self-destruction.

Dog Verifies

Okay, I went to the original source on 2009-10 faculty salaries at different institutions:

http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/comm/rep/Z/ecstatreport09-10/

As suspected, for the University of Oregon the relevant note reads as follows:

16. Includes faculty in schools or programs of law and business.

so the 103K average full professor salary will include professors in the Law School – I suspect that raises the average by 8-10

From the same report I have cut and pasted the situation just for oregon – not sure if this gets formatted correctly or not in the Comments.

It won’t
so let me put the data in here by hand for average full professor
salaries:

UO 103.0
OSU 93.9
PSU 93.6
SOU 68.8 (yes that’s right – screw Shakespeare)

Reed 105.9
Willamette 108.5
U. Portland 86.2
Linfield 78.5

Dog, thanks for the follow-up. It does look like some Universities include the professional colleges. Business faculty also bring the average up, I think. I also confirmed medical schools are excluded. Good to know!

I think — at least I hope — that after the initial rather negative reaction, the state officials will see that this could be a very good deal for the whole state, not just UO. For the reasons I noted in an earlier post.

Lariviere, John Chalmers (of the business school), others are to be commended for coming up with this imaginative, positive plan.

It appears that Lariviere is willing to discuss and sell the plan, perhaps with modifications (especially the possible problems with running up against the state’s overall bonding limitations).

If the state is really willing to walk away from an $800 million infusion of new endowment, then things are worse off here than I even I imagined.

If the plan goes nowhere, Lariviere should be in good position to go some place that is more open to innovative thinking.

The NYT article about alternatives to college is a bit misleading. Forget that some of the principals — Richard Vedder, Charles Murray — are skeptical (Murray) to bitterly hateful (Vedder, who discovered his hatred of higher education after decades at Ohio U. as an econ prof) about higher ed.

The Obama proposals to increase the number of US “college grads” to the level of Canada include community college associate degrees and even 1-year certifications in vocational fields (which e.g. LCC offers in many areas). It would require raising the minority completion rate to the white level. A tall order, to be sure, but if we can’t do it, what is the future of the country?

Of course, 4-year college is not for everyone. I would be the first to say raise admissions standards, and especially, raise performance standards once students are enrolled. Get rid of the bottom 20% at UO, the complete goofballs, and it would be a much better place.

But without some kind of post-secondary higher education — 4-year college, CC, or vocational — most kids are going to be screwed. Meaning all of us!

dog — please take a look again at what I wrote about admissions standards, performance standards.

I do agree there’s a lot that could be improved about the curriculum. But I guarantee, my preferences would not be everyone’s. Derek Bok is not a favorite of mine, but in my own teaching, I try to accomplish at least something in several of the lines he emphasizes. Nobody has complained lately that my classes are too easy or content-free. I recommend the same for others.

While we’re debating the curriculum for the next 20 – 60 years, the students are being born and growing up and having their own kids. Some of us may even be getting older! Given the way the world is going, I don’t see much hope for them with just a high school education.

I’m no economist, but I believe Wild and Crazy Duck has developed an interesting flip of the “crowd out” effect developed in Bergstrom, Blume, and Varian, Journal of Public Economics, 1986. Simplifying, the logic of the original crowd out argument was that taxes to pay for public goods will reduce private giving dollar for dollar, since “purely altruistic” donors have a target level of provision, and are indifferent to seeing that acheived by taxes or donations.

His argument flips this, to argue that the state government has a target, and will (has) reduce UO’s allotment as donors give more. So why should donors give?

Interestingly, some economists argue that if donations are motivated by warm glow altruism rather than pure altruism, then government tax funded provision of public goods will crowd out private donations at much lower than dollar for dollar rates. This is because you only get the warm glow benefit if you donate voluntarily, not if you pay a tax.

In fact, crowd out is less than dollar for dollar empirically, and this is the standard argument in support of the warm glow model.

But if you look at crowd out in the reverse Crazy Duck way, you see that the state dollar for dollar crowd out effect still may hold with warm glow altruism.

In short, I think Wild and Crazy Duck is correct that this is a good argument for the Larviere/Redding plan, and if I were an economist I’d go write a paper on this idea, which I have never seen set up formally or empirically tested.

Roast Duck to Dog:

If only we still had the post-WWII curriculum! Far from perfect, but in many respects, it did the things Bok mentions better than the current mess does. If only the curriculum had improved as much as the dorm food! I remember the slop they used to feed us, not worthy even of a wild duck, as I was back then. And that was long after post-WWII, when food was scarce.

There IS increasing suspicion that we are not teaching the students much, or that what we are teaching is not so good for them.

OldMan would find the Roast Duck/Dog exchange more interesting and perhaps even more useful if the vague complaints were replaced with specific identification of curricular soft spots and, glory be, concrete suggestions for curricula that will best prepare our students for the 21st century.

FOR UOMATTERS

Dog lists some skills and understanding that would well serve anyone who aims to contribute, or even survive, in the 21st Century. What is needed now is a way to package that curriculum (or even part of it) so that most, if not all, of our students can chew it, swallow it, digest it, and grow with it. That is a daunting challenge. OldMan reports that, in the Natural Sciences, we do deliver such a program to a small fraction of our top students. Let me tell you about three of them.
Three students just finishing their second year approached me for the opportunity to do research, unpaid and for credit, in my lab. My colleagues had identified several experiments, all aimed at testing predictions of a novel hypothesis. The students were given some training in methods and then went to work. They designed the strains of yeast they would need, constructed those strains by genetic engineering, mated the strains with each other, collected and analyzed thousands of offspring from each mating, recorded the data in a retrievable format, and analyzed the data to determine their compatibility with the predictions being tested. As is typical in such work, they encountered obstacles. With help from each other (and occasionally from experienced colleagues in the lab), they overcame them. They were really humming when I ran out of money and told them we had only about 8 more months to go. As a group, and without help from their more experienced colleagues, they assessed their progress and concluded that several of the projects could not be completed in the remaining time and should be dropped. The other four, they told us, would be done on time, the data would be analyzed, and they would report to us their conclusions. They described how they would work in shifts to keep all four of the projects moving.
As the closing day approached, they called all lab personnel to a meeting and reported that, without doubt, the hypothesis we were testing was ruled out – its predictions were simply not met. But, they announced, look at what the data do say! And a new chapter in genetics was written.
During their apprenticeship, the students learned in a direct way (the only way that really works) how to do science from beginning to end, including the writing up of their work for publication. Two of the students enrolled in Harvard’s PhD program in Molecular Biology and one went for an MD/PhD at Johns Hopkins.
So, most of what Dog wants can be done in a limited way at the UO, but how do we provide such opportunities for a large student body, a small teaching Faculty and no state support for research?

Wow Even the Dog Did Not Know This:

The Christian Science Monitor ranks the top 25 college football teams according to their expenditures per athlete. UO tops the list at $61,972 per player. The closer contender is Florida at $48,092 per player.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Money/new-economy/2009/1026/bcs-rankings-top-25-teams-by-the-dollars#comment-44457

Dog Says: If this is really true, then this is beyond sinful. Hell,
that’s a decent salary for a starting assistant professor!

I think the “investigation” is being choreographed to create the impression that the UO boo boos have all been fixed. UO is getting worse not better…that is why they need these busy bodies buzzing around acting like it is not going to be business as usual anymore. Do you really think things are getting better around here ? The UO is busy strong-arming language into the City of Eugene “Walnut Station” planning effort to allow for a indoor arena next door to the Knight arena. The city planners all let UO write its own rules. So this looks like another indoor track site “option” (besides the 18th and University Street one)for PK. The Walnut Station plan still has a hearing before the city council.

Well, obviously you’re not a law student. :)

So Melinda is given the easy way out of her job…classified go through two to three years of harassment, intimidation, threats, and a constant barrage of nit picking badgering by their bosses, cut pay and a host of ugly behavior thrown at them…then they are given relief and fired. Melinda has it easy. Over paid…but easy. Too bad they can’t cut her pay and move her on. That would be fair.

Dog Barks@Linton

While this decision is probably Linton’s only I would bark that under his “leadership” as dean of the graduate school, our graduate programs have tanked (in terms of actual numbers of graduate students at a University – we are now down to something like 14% total graduate students – has to be the lowest in the nation for a research University) and ultimately he is accountable for this decline.

And are we supposed to admit graduate students who have very little chance of getting a job upon graduation? No doubt that’s not true in some fields, but in many areas it could be considered dishonest to increase the number of graduate students beyond current levels because job prospects are so dismal.

I don’t know if Linton was forced out or just wants to move on after many years here. I had heard rumors several years ago that he was about to leave.

He has been a classy guy, and has done a lot of good things e.g. to move faculty hiring along in the sciences by coming up with research startup packages from a tight budget.

On the other hand, he came from a background in the applied end of science, where UO has been known, to the extent it is known, in more basic areas of science. He has followed the path, it must be said in response to initiatives from certain quarters among the faculty, of pursuing “earmarks” from the federal and state government for supposedly futuristic research in over-hyped areas like nanotechnology, interdisciplinary brain science, and the like. Look at the new “integrative science” building and its planned follow-up. Look at where the Lokey money has gone.

Meanwhile, as others have noted, the graduate enrollments have lagged, rankings of UO research/Ph.D. programs have dropped. It certainly isn’t primarily Rich Linton’s fault, he probably isn’t rsponsible much at all, but he hasn’t been able to stop it and he has not resisted the tide of over-hyped dubious research initiatives.

Lariviere, unlike a certain previous administrator, is aware enough to know what’s been going on, especially with the rankings of the UO programs. So, it’s entirely possible that he decided it was time for a change.

It’s also possible, as I say, that Rich Linton simply decided it was time to move on.

So, Rich, I hope you find something better, you probably deserve it, you did about as well as anyone probably could have under the circumstances at UO the past decade or so. All the best to you!

If graduate students are down relative to the total population, that’s a sign of a growing number of out-of-state undergraduates who help keep the institution funded, not a deficiency on Rich Linton’s part.

dog @anonymous

we fell below 20% total graduate
student population and hence out of Carnegie Research 1 status 6-7 years ago – long before the current UG enrollment surge which started Fall 08

In addition, if there is an enrollment increase, shouldn’t the grad population scale somewhat with
undergrads. We aren’t even at fixed numbers of grads and rising
UG enrollment – we are actually at somewhat reduced numbers of graduate students (remember, Law students are grad students). This situation is not good for a Research University.

People can defend/praise Linton all they want on the Research end (although I believe there are deficiencies there as well as favorites played) but there is no defense at the level of the health of our Graduate School programs.

Actually, I prefer public records to innuendo. If you have any you’d like share, email them to [email protected]

As I remember last year during our directors evaluation I was surprised to find out that the upper OA’s evaluate themselves. Yup they write there own evaluation. When I asked why I wasn’t notified and asked for my input…I was soundly put in my place and told that it wasn’t any of my business. I said..I am supervised by this person I should have some input. “No, your opinion doesn’t matter”. Stunning. Living in the world of corporations. Wonderful isn’t it. So it’s no surprise the faculty hasn’t been asked for their evaluation of the President. You don’t matter…get used to it.

Why should faculty expect to evaluate administrators?

After all, you wouldn’t expect to be evaluated by students, would you?

Dear Soup:

An honest mistake. You were probably thinking about 2009, when UO tried to disguise the increases by raising fees on the sly earliere in the year. This time they are actually folding the fees into tuition – for some real transparency.

Dear Soup Fan: I try to live up to the standards of my idol Harpo.

As for UO finances: briefly, UO is a very low-budget place, an overachiever, but starved too long to have avoided academic decay.

However, UO could have reached its supposed faculty salary goals of a decade ago if it had really wanted to. Dave F, Moseley, Bean didn’t. I don’t know if this was due to intent or simply a lack of focus.

UO spends a lot of money on things that I don’t care to have in the pot. Some of these things would be missed by others.

Overall, there has been a growth of administration at the expense of more directly academic expenditures. Been going on for years, maybe decades. All of this is easily seen from publicly available figures. Why this is not an issue — in the state board, the UO senate, the completely feckless FAC and budget committee — is beyond me. Maybe too many would-be administrators in the latter three groups, a lot of surreptitious butt-kissing.

Finally, I don’t see how tuition can keep rising faster than disposable income of middle class families. UO (and most other universities without huge endowments) need to figure this out before the public rebels. Part of it can be solved by ending above-mentioned administrative growth/bloat.

But, another piece of the puzzle, I think, is a reorientation of private giving. UO brings in something like $100 million/yr, very roughly, in private giving. But very little of this, proportionately, goes to tuition relief — I mean holding down posted tution rates in addition to augmenting financial aid.

Where does all the booty go? Look around! Especially near the corner of 13th and Agate and surroundings. Some of it is worthwhile, but different goals are needed for the future.

Have I left anything out?

uomatters wonders at Knight imposing deadlines, this time on the new athletic construction. But the Oregonian article says he was unhappy about construction delays/cost overruns on the library and law school. Anyone know if this is true?

uomatters seems to be in favor of the Lariviere autonomy plan. What if Knight just happens to be one of the major donors to the $800 million endowment? (Any bets on that?) Do you think he’s not going to have plenty of demands before he’s through with the Legislature? (Hey, that could be a big bargaining chip for UO.)

I can understand his frustration if he feels he’s being ripped off. Or if he gets tired of playing with the fartaround club.

Won’t be too surprised if that billion or two ends up down at Stanford.

A case can be made that UO faculty are adequately paid relative to Oregon’s economic situation. You read that right.

uomatters posted the very interesting Oregonian article by Tim Duy which pointed out that Oregon per capita income is down to slightly under 90% of the national average. Dismal!

UO faculty compensation — including health insurance and pension benefits — is probably above 90% of national norms, even for the full professors. And a good deal higher for the lower ranks! Don’t take my word for it, check the UO statistics generated by the administration, the senate budget committee, etc.

How is this possible with full professor salaries at 84%? It’s the benefits! Especially if you are a Tier I employee, the pension benefits are lavish. They will move that 84% up quite a bit, certainly to 90% or more.

Does Lariviere think he can pull a fast one with big faculty raises for the highest paid group? Can this be kept secret?

I doubt it. When it comes out, there goes his store of trust, his political capital. Nobody will trust him on his “cut us loose” plan.

I hope they reconsider. This is not the right time. Not when they’re cranking up tuition 6%.

They simply can’t cry poverty and give big faculty salary increases at the same time.

dog has a lot to bark about here:

One of the things that has always bothered me about the UO is how much attention we pay on faculty salaries + benefits as our total compensation or resource package. Now of course this is important and it is mildly irritating to continue to loose ground every year, especially at the full prof. level. But …

I think we should be more creative than just mapping on extra tuition dollars into faculty base salaries. Personally, at this point in my career, I would rather have more internal UO funds to access (in a competitive programmatic way) to help support my scholarship (if its possible for a dog to have any) in teaching and research.

For instance, back in the day there were these Ed Tech RFPs which I personally found useful as a way to support some of my dabbles into instructional technology as a means of extending the way one can deliver course material.

So basically, I advocate that perhaps the idea of “increasing faculty support” should be broader than just a pay raise.

Dog agrees

Yes. Exactly – a configurable
compensation package would be great.
I for one, would be willing to forgo future salary raises (since I’m old,
near dead, and exhausted) if the UO
would guarantee me support of one graduate student per year.

Dog on ORSA:

I suspect this rumor is true. ORSA has become an extremely dysfunctional operation, unacceptably so in my view for a research University. Grants get lost, index accounts don’t get created in a timely manner, arbitrary rules change in arbitrary ways. I don’t know a single investigator that has had a good experience with ORSA over the last 18 months or so. Common sense just seems to be absent from that organization.

Shame on you greedy research faculty. You always want to skirt compliance. Dr. Roberts was brought in to restore ORSA to a place of responsive and responsible sponsored programs and grants management. You people always want to operate in grey areas. The problem is that faculty need to be trained on the proper use of federal money. This is not Dr. Robert’s issue, it’s yours. Oh, by the way, Dr. Roberts has not been fired! She’ll see you soon.

Dog @unimpressive Search Committees and Paula Roberts

Here is what the dog thinks that it knows.

1. Hey, its reasonable search committee with some conscientious and knowledgeable individuals on it.

2. Notice all the wording is only about VPR and not VPR/Dean of the Graduate School. Anyone wondering about this?

Well,

a) Sandy Morgen is likely to be the interim Dean of the Graduate School starting July 1

b) if the “right” person is found in this search to do both VPR/Dean of Graduate school then so be it. If not, then Sandra Morgen is likely to continue.

3. Paula Roberts is currently on paid administrative leave – presumably a prelude to being fired.

4. A lot of this has come to a head because of the need to balance and report things by the end of this fiscal year (i.e. in 2 weeks). ORSA was so dysfunctional in its ability to do proper financial reporting and records that the provost got rather livid and intervened.

The statement for the Search Committee indicates Linton stepped down. How do we know he got a terminal contract and did not step down? What is the source of info for the conclusion that he got a terminal contract?

I hope UO Matters does not think that our VP for Research should be beating the bushes for projects that will make money for the UO. The role of that VP is to facilitate the research of faculty who have been hired based on their intellectual abilities and the depth of their curiosity and energy. You can ask this Old Man about the horrors he observed at a University that undertook projects for the bucks that went with them.

Question: Why do we always resort to hiring consulting companies to fix our problems? It seems odd to me when you have a very large faculty who specialize in problem solving that we take on the added expense of hiring outsiders to solve our problems.

This seemed to really proliferate with Brady. What’s up with this practice?

Exactly. And what have happened to costs at universities? Why do we outsource all this stuff? Why do we pay these administrators/managers the big bucks? So they can choose to select the appropriate firm to do their job?

From an email:

It would be nice if your readers could comment on each post instead of in a long thread. I’m sure there’s a good reason for the current setup, but it must discourage participation. Most importantly, I don’t like it, and as a student my opinions are more important than your accumulated wisdom. ;)

You’ll go far.

The OUS has been so successful running the system, at maintaining and enhancing the quality of the institutions, hasn’t it? In particular, to be a bit parochial, UO has been on a soaring trajectory, right? Why shouldn’t things continue as they have in the past?

The question has been raised in this esteemed forum, “What is the deal with the Rich Linton resignation and what the hell is going on with the research office, ORSA, etc?”

Here’s what I’ve been able to find out about the view on campus of Rich Linton and the research operation. This may or may not be related to his resignation. It may or may not just be sour grapes, at least in part. But it’s part of how things are perceived.

Was he given a “terminal contract”? I don’t know. If he was, does this mean he was let go? Not necessarily. Maybe he just gave notice, to allow a search to begin. If needed, they could always ask him to stay on, I suppose.

There have been a lot of controversial things in the research office, however. Most recently, the apparent breakdown of ORSA. This really has some of the major research departments spooked, i.e., are they going to be able to get their grant proposals submitted and if they are funded, will ORSA be able to service them? This has happened well into Lariviere’s term. He can’t just blame it on Dave, it’s his baby now. If the UO research operation breaks down, Lariviere’s career is over, so he has to do something.

Plus there was the cut in overhead rate from 48% to 42%, about a year back. This might make some individual investigators happy, but it can’t make the central administration happy. Your faithful agent is not confident of having any information about who or what was responsible for that. Was it Linton or Dyke or someone else who was responsible? Was it anyone’s fault? Don’t know, but it has to have Lariviere concerned.

There has also been a lot of unhappiness about decisions whose responsibility is Linton’s, partially or entirely. Unhappiness about how the space has been divided up (so far) in the new science building (which exists only underground so far, but the above ground part is in the works). Much unhappiness about how the Lokey money was divided up. Finally, a lot of unhappiness about who was given access to Lokey to raise money. Basically, a few people in a few departments.

One or two or several of these few people have high positions in Linton’s operation and/or unusual access to him.

Then on top of this, there’s a special master’s science program, in which all of the above are heavily involved, which is not part of CAS. Their money all gets funneled through continuing education. The word is – nobody outside can verify this for sure since the details are kept secret – that all the tuition and other funding for the program goes to the program. Rather than half or so being siphoned off to other parts of the university – administration, libraries, deans offices, building and grounds, etc. etc. — all the things needed to keep the University going – as happens with virtually every other academic program. As you can imagine, this has been a sore point with CAS, and also within the affected departments, according to my sources.

My pals also tell me that various people are now frantically trying to get all the deals and agreements written down, because they exist now only as unwritten “understandings.” Does this modus operandi sound at all familiar?

All that said, there’s still a lot of good will toward Linton. So I guess he must be a pretty good guy in a lot of ways.

Well, it’s time to head overseas for another secret assignment.

to Anonymous

ORSA breakdown began before 2005/06. Prior to arrival of Paula Roberts ORSA’s administrator lobbied Rich repeatedly for increased funds in order to hire more staff and in order to attract better qualified staff since the best candidates were saying no to UO due to low salaries. Rich repeatedly turned down the requests for added funds even though the number of new grants and the increasingly complex grant rules clearly indicated a need to increase the staffing in ORSA. I like Rich personally and have had good experiences working with him, but he really messed up in handling ORSA.

Dear Soup:

The man sells shoes, not tires. But good try.

UO Matters

Dear UO Matters:

I must confess, I didn’t see this angle, and your logic is inescapable. I know you’re not an economist, but you are certainly thinking like one!

How much have per capita parking fees increased at UO during the period for which you have total revenue data?

There is lots going on with OIED why is there no updates in that area?

Dog says

http://collegeresults.org/search1a.aspx?institutionid=209551

should report the actual data for
UO graduation rates.

I will live it up to the reader to
decide how significant any gains are.

For me, personally, I think the best state Universities are defined by those with 4 year (4 year, not 6 year) graduation rates
that exceed 50%

To Dog: To me, the increase in 6-year graduation rate from 58% to 65.3% between 2002 and 2007 is quite impressive. I agree about the graduation rate for top public universities, but UO is not anywhere near being one of the top public institutions — the absurd and annoying claim on their press releases that it is “world-class” to the contrary. (That just makes us sound bush league, Lariviere should get out his editor’s axe.)

To Anonymous: Sorry that I was a little confusing, I must be a little rusty, as you note. What I meant to say was: an immediate increase in performance standards would probably decrease graduation and retention rates, as weaker students are weeded out. But a long-term increase in admissions and performance standards would attract better and more serious students, increasing said rates over the long term.

I believe economists (and others who deal quantitatively with complex systems) are familiar with such paradoxical behavior. I know “UO Matters” is no economist, but I would hope this would be appreciated here.

Dear Dog: Generally, dogs and ducks don’t get along so well — I’ve had many a close shave, saved by my surprisngly weapon-like bill, quick feet and wings — with cats as well as dogs — soft moist doggy noses and beautiful kitty eyes make for great fun — but you and I might be able to coexist.

I haven’t a clue whether your conjecture about in-state and out-of-state student graduation rates is true or not. I think you’d have to go to Karen Sprague or even higher to get that kind of data.

I agree that high SATs alone don’t cut it. I listen to friends at Cornell, Berkeley, Yale bitch about unmotivated students almost as much as we do.

Send your low-performing, entitled students to me and I’ll help shape them up. I think we’re on a similar page about improving performance standards.

I wonder what Lariviere’s take on this is.

Dog speculates on student study time evolution:

For me, I think there are three fundamental reasons, not necessarily listed in order:

1) I personally give less assignments at the UO than when I was at other institutions because I have less access to distributed grading resources (e.g. well trained
graduate students).

2) I do believe that finding “information” is not considerably less time consuming than in the pre-digital library era. I suspect this is significant.

3) I do think the phenomena of the part time student (12 credit hours)
vs. the full load student (18 credit hours) per term also plays into this.

There is also a possible 4th reason – students can’t add …

Old Man met with DF on two occasions early in DF’s tenure. On both occasions, he warned DF about JTM, who, according to many in the Science Faculty, viewed the UO as an institution created for his own exploitation. On both occasions, DF rejected Old Man’s warning. Old Man is slow, so It took him a while to figure out why.

The first paragraph of Bill Graves article on the OUS reshuffle:

“Oregon university leaders will ask the next governor and Legislature to change the Oregon University System from a state agency to a more independent structure, similar to a statewide community college district.”

What a brilliant, perfect expression of the situation, aware or not. This man should have a Pulitzer!

Does uomatters think it is safe to assume that for UO (actually uo foundation) keeping the legacy gift 20 million dollar payments coming in depends on the timely passage of the proposed restructuring ?

This is an example of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

The FAQ page of the University Counsel web site does, indeed, reveal a big improvement in their operations. Under the previous Administration, no one could consult the GC without permission from one of the top-two: Moseley and Frohnmayer.

Dog barks @alumni center

I don’t think any of us faculty disagree that having an Alumni Center is a bad thing. Of course we need one and of course that facility helps to gather donor dollars for things like scholarship. What is consistently missed in exchanges like this, is the scale problem. Yes, building an Alumni Center is a good thing. But, does building an Alumni center that costs 5-10 times more than it should, for its purpose, going to bring in proportionally more donor-based scholarship dollars – I seriously doubt this.

In other words, if the University decides it needs more faculty office space then it will distribute cardboard cubicles.

If the University decides it needs a better facility to support Alumni functions to improve potential donor dollars, then it builds a Palace.

The sense of balance at the University has been completely lost.

Dog says: Regarding Captain Herb and parking.

No he did not loose his job. In fact
this is a ne position, decreed by F.DYKE.

Herb was trying to do two different full time positions. before it got handed to him, parking was under a “manager” and is now going to be under a director…who will report to a director.

So this is just more layers in administration in Parking now (following the Don Harris Computing center model) so that
everyone can insulate themselves from responsibility

Nice work if you can get it, I guess …

Meanwhile, dogs no longer have any place to park – can I piss on a hydrant somewhere?

Dog on new AD

Dog pays a fair amount of attention to NCAA sports (for no apparent reason) and has inside connections at some universities. Dog thinks that Mullen was the right kind of profile for the UO to hire – good background at similar institutions, good vision and good financial management skills. So I think the trajectory here is a good one. Now, the issue is whether or not competent people can survive the environment here first, before they can start to change it. Go Ducks …

Thanks for the comments Duck soup. I agree about the Lariviere plan and donor incentives.

Duck Pate says:

The missing scholarship money was for Pat Kilkenny. We gave him a full-ride, plus a few million extra so he could finish up his degree.

The UO faculty, along with a small subset of students who are interested in such things, and Eugene’s obstructionist faction, will screw around with the riverfront project forever, if they’re allowed to get away with it. The site is (literally) a dump, has been for decades.

It would be no surprise if the Oregon Research Institute, which is under time pressure from the NIH, picked up and moved their project to where, Springfield? What a hoot that would be! (I had thought maybe that would happen with the Arena, but I guess with Uncle Phil pulling the strings, the dang thing is getting done — under budget? on time? Gadzooks!)

If the faculty etc. really think the RRP expansion is such a bad idea, here’s a suggestion: mount a fund-raising effort to buy the land, put it into public ownership as a park. That would be OK with me, though frankly, I don’t think it would ever be such a great area, too small, too close to the existing traffic. But do something to fix the damn place up and make something nice of it. But don’t expect the reset of the world to put up with with the fartaround routine forever.

The attitude that title IX doesn’t matter is because it is the Office of Affirmative Action & Equal Opportunities duty to report title IX compliance and we all know who that office answers to these days. Ask for the latest title IX report generated by the AAEO office see how Penny reports compliance.

Duck Soup remarked “It looks like Lariviere is getting an opportunity to learn something about the vaunted ‘Oregon values’.” That phrase, ‘Oregon values’, means different things to different peoples and nothing at all to others. Duck Soup may be taking it to mean the lack of any significant academic values. Indeed, the M.O. of recent UO Administration(s?) has led Old Man to doubt the commitment of some recent top officers to quality education. However, things have not always been bad, and “Oregon values” may have a positive tone to some. Old Man reminisces:
In the ‘60s –‘80s, UO was attractive for several reasons (beyond its glorious location). 1. It offered a Liberal Arts education in which quality humanities faculties cooperated with a growing, forward-looking science faculty that viewed their science as a branch of Philosophy, not Technology. 2. The Administrations respected the role of the Faculty in decision-making, which, in return, nurtured respect for the Administrations and a remarkable degree of loyalty to the University. Presidents and Professors duked it out in the Assembly in open, honest and enlightening debate. 3.Tuition was affordable, and the State supported the UO pretty well, considering its financial limitations. Except for lumber and agriculture, the State was, of course, poor. Faculty accepted that fact, proud that some of the poverty was apparently due to the unwillingness of Oregon’s Senator Morse and Representative Porter to play War Games, where the big bucks are. 4. Students were visible social activists. Faculty, too, recognized that education does not stop at the boundaries of the curriculum or the edge of campus. 5. The Faculty passed legislation prohibiting classified research on campus and, in Assembly, denounced the murderous intrusion of American military into the affairs of Viet Nam. 6. Until 1967, football was played in cozy Hayward Field, which had the constructive effect of discouraging delusions of athletic grandeur.
Can such “Oregon values” be resurrected? Old Man hopes so, but more Faculty Push will be required since it is in the eternal nature of things that some administrators will try to arrange things to their own convenience, forgetting that their role is to serve the Faculty in its efforts to execute the University’s educational mission.
The new Prexy seems to understand that mission and seems to be taking steps to clean up the mess he inherited. Faculty would do well to support his efforts.

On Douthat from the American Prospect:
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/adam_serwer
“Potts On Douthat.

Monica Potts sat down and read the study Ross Douthat cited in his New York Times op-ed that led him to the conclusion that “the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.” Potts spoke to one of the authors and ultimately found a somewhat different conclusion:

The researchers looked at a broad category of “career oriented” activities, of which those groups could be examples, and found that there was a “statistically significant but small negative correlation,” as Espenshade described it in a brief phone interview, with having held leadership positions in those groups or having won an award in them and being admitted to an elite college (just being a member didn’t make a difference). The study says, “These activities include ROTC and co-op work programs. They might also encompass 4-H Clubs, Future Farmers of America, and other activities that suggest that students are somewhat undecided about their academic futures.” Spending “too much” time in activities like athletics, or in holding a part-time job also seemed to have a negative effect, and what those activities have in common is that they take time away from purely academic pursuits. Of all the markers that seemed to matter to admissions officers, this was merely a side note.

So “statistically significant but small negative correlation” is the thin reed on which Douthat hung evidence of systemic discrimination against “white Christians” that justifies or explains the recent racial paranoia ginned up by conservatives. I hadn’t read the study either when I wrote that lower-class whites and blacks were fighting over “table scraps,” but the study suggests I was right:

The study looked at admissions rates for seven elite colleges. The study definitely found, as Nieli wrote, that admissions officers give preference to lower-class black and Hispanic applicants, but it’s worth looking at that fact in context. Overall, the applicant pool was extremely well off: Only about 10 percent of the applications to elite institutions, public or private, came from lower- and working-class families, and only about 19 percent of those applicants were admitted to elite private schools (acceptance rates to the public institutions didn’t correlate highly with class).”

The claim — I haven’t checked it out myself — is that the study concluded that belonging to 4H or FFA or ROTC will reduce your chances of admission by close to 2/3 if you happen to be white, holding everything else equal. If that’s true, it’s not a minor thing, it’s startling and it’s a shocking indictment of the admissions policies of the elite schools.

If the statistics are true and reasonably interpreted, they are true and can’t just be dismissed as “racial paranoia ginned up by conservatives”. The statistics should be refuted or further investigated, as the case may warrant, but they can’t just be dismissed or deconstructed or sneered away.

You know, people used to say similar things about the claims of unfair treatment of blacks. Just substitute “liberals” or “northern agitators” (or “outside agitators” if you remember Chicago or Boston) for “conservatives” above and you’ll have the picture perfectly.

Considering that a lot of these elite schools don’t even allow college ROTC, it’s entirely plausible — nay, entirely likely — that a ROTC background would be discriminated against.

It’s also amusing, if reported accurately, that membership in 4H or FFA would be considered evidence of a lack of decision or commitment about academic plans. As if running a modern farm is necessarily less “academic” or “intellectual” than, say, working as an investment banker.

Dog on Graduate School Data:

Yes it in includes the professional schools. For instance the Law School alone is about 500 students,
all of which are grads so if you take them out, the statistics get even worse.

One consequence of all of this is that the UO’s per capita PHD production rate is one of the lowest of any research University as well.

Obviously no one cares about this at any level.

A reader sent us this email on safety issues related to congestion. I kind of like the “Ice Cube” name – but I’m sticking to calling it the Jock Box myself!

This is such a dangerous situation being created by adding more traffic into the “funnel” that feeds students to & from the housing on MLK Blvd, the resources at Autzen and their classrooms, their dorms & the ice cube — oh, yes, & now the arena ———-

Several of my co-workers remember the evening about 10years ago when a lady jogger was exiting the park area & collided with a pickup in the intersection of Riverfront Parkway & Millrace Dr — needless to say the jogger lost that battle. There are constantly pedestrians, cyclists, skateboarders, people making u-turns to access the restaurant entrance, etc,etc on this road between Franklin Blvd & the entrance to Alton Baker park.

And if that isn’t scary enough there is the proximity to the bike path — on the inbound side of Riverfront Parkway you cross the bikepath about 6 car lengths in && must be cautious for fear a runner, bicycle or skateboard comes shooting out into your path. Then, looking at the diagram you see that the exit from the proposed parking lot is about 2 car lengths from the bikepath & 2 more from the entrance/exit of the restaurant. Yes, it is closed right now but it will probably be another fast food establishment —- When I asked the UO Planning Associate in charge of this project if anyone had looked at this, the suggestion was to put a control gate on the exit. The City planners are only looking at the Franklin Blvd intersection — it has controls & markings. It also has moving targets — I gave up trying to turn right from Riverfront Parkway onto Franklin Blvd – the walkers have the same green we do; the cyclists, etc are in your right side blind spot; & then there are those that cross against the lites — by the time all of the pedestrian traffic has cleared your lite is red.
There is another exit at the designated entrance but that would take one out onto Garden Ave. This is nothing more than a driveway which feeds into a curve on Garden Av. This “driveway” is right next to the driveway of the Mill Race Apartment complex & is further cluttered with parking from Track Town & since this lot will be used for event parking that’s going to be busy ——-

At every turn we hear about reduction of the UO’s liability — that’s why we can’t process transactions expeditiously anymore — there is probably more liability being created by this parking lot than by all of the paperwork on campus.

I certainly understand the skepticism attached to the blurb about the competitive cheer ruling, but please note that the sport as the UO operates it is different from the sport that the judgment came down upon. One of the primary reasons for concern in the Quinnipiac case was the fact that the team did not participate in sanctioned organized competition, which is not the case at the U.O. Oregon’s Team Stunts and Gymnastics team competes in NCSTA events – and while the organization is totally new and largely the brainchild of the UO’s own (or, perhaps stolen, is more appropriate) Felicia Mulkey, it is recognized by the NCAA.

dog on More Bloat

I think the perspective offered by UOMatters (and good job partnering with cafe press by the way) on this last issue of postsecondary spending is slightly unbalanced because teaching and research is being lumped together. The spin that UOMatters is trying to put on the data is that we proportionally spend too much money on administrivium.

I don’t necessarily disagree with that, but I, the dog, simply look at things from a different perspective.

From that perspective, we spend way too little on research and I will elaborate a bit on this below.

For instructional costs, in terms of dollars per student FTE, we are strongly limited by poor state funding since normally virtually all state funding goes to that category. As a result we raise tuition and increase the numbers of students without hiring any significant new instructional resource so our costs per FTE go down because we are not scaling correctly. Again, I think this is primarily due to poor state funding.

However, the research side is pathetic. Every research University I have been associated with in my long, extinguished, career (about 10 of them) has had a significant amount of internal money available for various RFP competitions – the only analog we have ever had here was the EdTech process in which individual Faculty could get grants for sizable amounts (50K or so). The summer research program here is a complete joke, for instance. There is also no sizable fund for graduate student research fellowships. So this is where the UO completely falls down; 63% is just horrible. The UO simply does not support faculty research at any sensible level. Period.

Personally, I think it’s time to put the Bend business behind us. I don’t know if it was losing money or not. I did have extensive conversations with the principals early in the Bend endeavor — Moseley, Frohnmayer, John Leahy (who was running it for a while). They all had good and honorable intentions, and I say this as someone who has rather severely questioned the intentions of the first two on some other, much more important UO matters.

One theory is that UO letting go of Bend is part of a maneuver to get OSU support for the Lariviere plan. No idea if true, but if it is, I will drink a toast to its success.

Hey, I have a great idea. Those who don’t think paying Moseley to work in Bend should start a campaign to bring him back to campus, to teach freshman physics! I bet he would even do a great job. The People’s Choice! How could he turn that down?

People who know and who do not have an axe to grind say UO-Bend cost UO between $5 and $10 million, net.

Lariviere believes we lost about $400,000 last year on it. But Bean still says we made a profit. He doesn’t try this with Lariviere – just the faculty and the newspapers.

What’s the point? Bend is done. But what about Portland? Anyone got any ideas on that? Anyone believe UO’s numbers on it? If so, why?

Interesting to and gratifying to see the back and forth about budgets.

A query about another aspect of “administrative bloat.” How much is “adjunctification” happening at UO and how much of this can be attributed to the allocation of “resources” aka “money”?

A few years ago I saw data that showed a surprising runup at UO in the number of adjuncts compared to tenure-track faculty. Anyone know if this continuing?

And if, as I suspect, it is so, how much can plausibly be attributed to a rising fraction of the budget going to “institutional support” aka administration?

There’s a lot of talk nationally about tenure fading away, because tenure-track faculty supposedly are too expensive, and besides, so many adjuncts available to be exploited.

But I wonder if this is just self-serving talk by administrators who would rather keep more of the (ever-rising) budgets for themselves, forcing the adjunctification of the real work of the university?

dog comments on adjuncts

Yes the UO, like most other state institutions did experience the adjunct/instructor/NTTF/whatever increase in the early part of this decade but that has since leveled off. Most of the increase was driven by cost effectiveness in terms of teaching large classes at the lowest unit cost.

In round numbers there are currently 650 faculty and 400 — 450 NTTF.

The rise in adjuncts came about because the University had a considerable number of people who had put many years working as adjuncts in the temporary status. It was argued that the University was taking advantage of these people by not considering them permanent employees (some more than 10 to 15 years on a temporary appointment)and that a change needs to happen to make these positions permanent appointments thus the NTTF. That would result in a huge jump in adjunct appointments even though those people have been here for many years…and not counted because of the temporary status they once held.

Dog Provides Real Data:

I was a bit wrong on my counts as well for NTTF but this data reinforces something the dog posted here long ago is that the actual Tenure Track Faculty Headcount has essentially not grown for 20 years – I guarantee that most faculty and admins don’t realize this.

Here is the data since 1992

TTF = Tenure Track Faculty
NTTF = Non ” “
Other = Adjuncts/Visitors/600 hrs retired

YR TTF NTTF Other Total

92 609 471 170 1250
93 639 477 179 1295
94 625 518 190 1333
95 656 548 192 1396
96 661 531 196 1398
97 655 513 234 1402
98 631 523 214 1368
99 613 511 267 1391
00 605 527 292 1424
01 627 589 351 1567
02 630 604 347 1581
03 612 610 419 1641
04 625 622 401 1648
05 635 660 371 1666
06 638 634 369 1641
07 642 678 394 1714
08 646 645 444 1735
09 660 644 482 1786

A few conclusions:

1. TTF is now, at best 10% bigger than it was in 1992

2. TTF are about what you expect – square root of N or about 25

3. NTTF has grown by 35-40% over this period.

4. In the other category there was a demographic PERS induced retirement wave that started in 2001 and has now petered out.

5. Adjuncts, which are not NTTF in this designation, have in fact increased significantly -so duck soup has that right

in 1992-1993 there were 90 or so
in 2008-2009 there were 360

but the real bottom line in terms of teaching, quality, whatever is that the ratio of total teaching done by those in the TTF category has gone down precipitously.

And the latest figures, 2009,
show that

660/1786 teaching individuals on the UP campus are TTF – that’s 37%

is this good or bad?

http://ir.uoregon.edu/ir_files/fac.pdf

Perf Indicators are often ambiguous
and have never been a proper way to actually measure manpower.

They are good at aggregate measures like collective teaching resource and collective SCH

Thanks for the link and the clarification about the different categories.

So, from your link it appears that there are greatly more personnel of the non-tenure track variety.

From the performance indicators, it appears that the ratio of FTE power of tenure track vs. non-tenure track (of all kinds) is pretty much unchanged.

Hard (for me) to conclude what it all means.

I wonder about the ratio of student credit hours taught by TT and NTT. My hunch: it has gone down i.e. more SCH relatively taught by non-tenure track. Probably concentrated in the intro classes. But only a conjecture.

Again, really a job for our provost, pres, and esteemed senate — not for amateur bloggers.

Again, according to the Performance Indicators, in ten years 98-08 student credit hours went up 14% — not 75%! — and tenure track FTE went up 6%. So yes, there has been a small lag in TT fculty. (That has probably allowed compensation per TT faculty member to go up relative to national comparisons — I believe this has happened, partly due to higher PERS and medical benefits, but also due to higher salaries, especially for beginning faculty.)

And yes, the lag is probably greater after the past two years — that is probably why UO has enough dough, despite cutbacks in state support, to raise salaries substantially, if allowed to do so by the state — which seems increasingly unlikely.

Bottom line: I see no definite evidence of a great shift away from tenure track faculty, nor a lag in “resources” devoted to faculty. Even if administration resources have been growing even more quickly.

Dog to Duck Soup

I see the reason for most of our qualitative/quantitative discrepancy

the last two years really matter
the 14% number in the Perf Indicator
is based on fall 1997 vs fall 2007

Fall 1997 UG enrollment is 13,347
Fall 2007 UG enrollment is 16,424

so that’s 23% increase which I think is consistent with 14% total increase in SCH if the average student is taking 10% less credits per term.

But this is misleading relative to the current state of the UO as the Bean plan wasn’t hatched until Fall 2008

So here is the ratio for the 10 year periods ending Fall 2008 and Fall 2009

Fall 2008/Fall 1998 = 17358/12972 = 34%

Fall 2009/Fall 1999 = 18210/13042
= 40%

A criterion for AAU membership:
Old Man notes that amount of federal research dollars is one qualification for AAU membership. Of course, one sure way to get on that Big Bucks Band Wagon is to initiate programs in secret military research. Old Man is pleased that UO has eschewed that path, and wishes it would eschew all DoD funding. Such an act might send a message and would not jeopardize UO membership in AAU – Old Man knows of no University that has been expelled from that organization for falling below the standards by which it was initially qualified.

At least for the Tier 1 full professors, the salary comparisons are kind of misleading. Add in the 6% pension “pickup”. Then add in the stupendously high “state contribution” to pension. Put those together and they’ve probably averaged 11% or so of EXCESS “salary” over the past few years, compared to most other places. I know because I’m in the optional retirement plan, Tier 1, I track how much pension contribution I get. (And you guys who stayed in PERS will make out like bandits, if the dear State doesn’t figure out a way to screw us). So now we’re up to around 95%. Add in another 2-3% compared to many schools because we don’t pay anything for the medical insurance (yet). Hey, we’re getting close to 100%! And in a state where the per capita income is 90% of the national average. In Lane County — per capita income 80% — you are comparatively close to top of heap. Sure, that won’t pay your kids way to go to a decent college. But make more money, and your kids get less financial aid. Ask my pals at MIT! (Or your not-so-bright kids might have to go to UO).

Hey, no wonder I haven’t left this dump! It’s not very inspiring, but it’s not so awful, either.

As for the research funding: face it, without a medical school, without engineering, or forestry, or pharmacy, or all that other stuff most of those AAU schools have if they’re state schools, Oregon is always going to be small potatoes. Let the AAU kick us out if they want, not much to stop them.

The question is how to make the most of what we have. Here, I have to say that UO has not done terribly well. It’s no surprise that our Ph.D. programs have dropped in national rankings. There’s been very little thought given, as far as I can see, to how to preserve what we have given the limitations of size and programs.

Dog @quacker

i agree mostly with your points and will add the following, just because I am a dog.

1. This old dog is also in Tier 1 and I agree that when you fold Tier 1 benefits into the total Full Prof package, it looks better.

2. I do believe the state is going to make a down correction to PERS guaranteed 8% – right now this is the best investment the dog has by far but every projection shows the state going further into debt to meet this Tier 1 obligation – it gets especially bad if all us old dogs live for another 20 years post retirement. So we will see what happens.

3. The dog has not left the dump either for similar reasons. Strange as it seems, the dog is better off economically staying at the UO.

4. On research funding, I don’t quite agree. Yes if you have a Med School and Engineering school you will have more opportunity – but even with just traditional departments our per capita federal funding should be higher – we do not favorably compare here. I do quite agree, as I have posted before, that the UO has or is allowing its graduate programs to die. This is beyond stupid.

5. As related to funding and benefits, while the high benefits are good for faculty, they do really rob your research dollars.
I will give specific example:

Dog has several people working for him – so that the dog enjoys leisure time.

One person is a professional paid at 40K per year. I would like to pay more but I can’t. Why.

Well the OPE on that 40K per year is 57% – that’s right 50 Fuckin 7
percent. Then I pay 42% overhead on that so the total cost is

40K salary
22.8 K OPE
26.4 K overhead

sum = 90K

90 Fuckin’ K

As other PIs know all too well, this is a real limitation on where our funded dollars can go.

If our exorbitant fringe rates were not taxed in overhead, things would be better.

I hear you about the effect of fringe benefits on grants. I restrict my summer salary on accout of it, in fact. Maybe, happy quacker, I should count this against my overall “compensation”.

On the other hand, I do have ways to stretch my grant expenditures on postdocs, that have to do with negotiating the salary in light of the benefits. I know I’m not the only one who does this.

On the research funding per student or faculty member: I’ve heard Lariviere say that UO actually does very well on funding per faculty member. I’m not sure how to square this this with the figures presented on this blogsite, I think they are research dollars per student.

I don’t see how UO can compete on those indices without all those programs we lack, especially the medical school. There simply are too few faculty members here who are in line for the major research grants. And, even those who are seeking NIH (medical related) funding are probably not in line for the really big money.

If the GTFF gets more insurance coverage, it’s going to come out of grants, with overhead added. I don’t see any way around it.

The problem is the ever-exploding costs of medical care.

A similar situation pertains with tuition, including undergraduate tuition.

The typical parent/taxpayer probably sees the tuition situation similarly to how we view the fringe benefits/overhead issues. Something to think about.

UO Matters, check it out — the Performance Indicators are Forbidden now! Let’s hope they’re just updating the files — for the new academic year?. Hey, has anyone copied the old files? lol! Just kidding. It will be interesting to see when they put that stuff back up. It will be going back up, right? There are some men in white coats outside my office, I’ll have to get back to you …..

dog on per capita research dollars

yes, this is a very ambiguous indicator that lets you spin it any way you want depending on what goes in the denominator

is it

# of TTF
# of Instructional Faculty ?
# of students
# of graduate students

to me the most meaningful comparator among research universities is

annual fed. funding/# of Grad Students

that’s a measure of research health

Impressive how UOMatters got those Performance Indicators put back up so fast!

Now, your alert paranoid sees an apparent discrepancy between two different versions of the Performance Indicator figures.

Click on University Summary here:

http://ir.uoregon.edu/indicators2008

and you’ll find that “Other” faculty i.e. part-timers and non-tenure track increased in FTE from 223 to 242 over 1997-98 to 2007-08. This is the modest increase reported earlier.

But go here:

http://ir.uoregon.edu/indicators

and go down to click on

University Summary FY98-08 and you’ll find that the increase was from 223 to 307. I haven’t checked the other years for consistency. But the apparent discrepancy, and the implications, are huge. Is this daffy, or have I just goofed?

Perhaps the powerful UOMatters operation could obtain a clarification, from the data wizards, or the Dog, or Duck Soup.

dog on numerical exercise

A simple exercise can show why SCH’s are very misleading and far removed
from issues of teaching and teaching quality.

Suppose we take the Economics Department at UOmattersUniversity
(UOmU)

UOmU has an impressive economics department that has partnered with CafePress for all kinds of memorabilia.

The faculty at the UOmU economics department consists of 4 esteemed Economists (that pretend not to be) and 1 instructor.

There typical teaching load in one term is.

Each of the 4 esteemers teach one
majors course , worth 3 credits, with 25 students each.

Total SCHs taught by the Esteemed Ones is then 300 SCH

The instructor teaches the lower division “economics are cool” course to 200 disengaged students that are fulfilling their General Ed requirement. That’s 800 SCH

thus 800/1100 (73%) SCHs are taught by NTTF folks and so the UOmU economics department sucks …

head count is far more important than SCHs …

dog on resolving the discrepancy:

if you look closely the two reports
are not for the same time period

this one

http://ir.uoregon.edu/sites/ir/files/PI_History_Summary_FY98-FY08.pdf

is one year farther along than this one

http://ir.uoregon.edu/sites/ir/files/PI_History_Summary_FY98-FY08.pdf

and there has been a big increase in “other” the last two years

The problems with the Perf Indicator reports are the following:

1. sometimes a time period say
2006-07 means fall 2006 only

2. Sometimes reports average the the three terms together

there is no way to tell

and, by the way, the perf reports only count instructional FTE
which is why the TTF count is always low by about 60 units
because there are 60 TTF or so that do not teach here – they are usually department heads, etc.

Is this series of revise and resubmits converging to an equilibrium? If so, and when you two get within epsilon, please post an abstract for the rest of us?

And email [email protected] to claim your free coffee cups. Assuming campus mail will deliver them.

dog says

one report is for fall 2007 headcount of others

the other one is for fall 2008

and yes they both say 2007-2008

in the last two years adjuncts
have increased significantly

The Dog Laments

1. Damn, I just lost my bet with my UW alumni buddies – I bet the Jock Box costs $35 Million and had to be within 10% to collect. Now I owe yet more dawgs.

2. Given this exorbitant per sq f price tag, how can any external view of the University see any academic priority? The more UO internal spin insists that we are all about academics, the sillier we look.

UOMatters has it right.

This is an EgoFest.

Faculty should stop whining about parking. We live in a town and work at a University in which, barring physical disability, driving is not necessary. In fact, this is one of the selling points in my mind for U of O/Eugene. Ride your bike (like this professor), walk, or take the bus. Driving to campus just degrades the place for the rest of us — more congestion, more pollution, more dependence on foreign oil, etc. That ought to stir the pot!

Perhaps senate Pres Nathan Tublitz is about to make a $40 million donation for all those good things? No? Then he has donor(s) in mind? Maybe the guy(s) who want to pony up the $800 million (or is it double that) for the Lariviere plan? Perhaps this is calculated to make them more eager to part with their money?

Or perhaps there’s another WRC fiasco in the making? Last time, it was the UO Pres + Senate + Students. This time it may be Sentate + State Legislature.

Where are the students when we need them? Maybe we can whip up their enthusiasm when the new academic year begins.

Dog Barks

1. I know that Moseley was tenured and believe he came to the UO tenured from Georgia Tech. He was chair of the physics department at one point.

2. Dave F was Dean of the Law School at some point, so was tenured.

3. LGD (Let’s go Ducks) was certainly tenured and has done a lot of scholarly research on Public Health issues.

4. I don’t believe that Dan Williams was ever on any academic track to qualify for tenure.

Since when has UO Matters gone over to being a European or German-style democratic socialist statist advocacy organ? Weren’t you just a little while back advocating for more independence for UO, for the Lariviere plan, for a massive infusion of private money to replace state support?

And the German guy is arguing against private charity in general, not charity for causes a particular group of people may not like, such as college athletics.

It’s up to Congress (the State) to decide whether things like the Jock Box and the Arena (and things like the Hult Center and the Schnitzer Museum and Carnegie Hall and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as well as the Eugene Mission and O’Hara Catholic School, etc. etc. you get my point) are tax-deductible. And the State has decided, so far at least, that the Jock Box is just fine.

Believing as I do that UO is doomed as a state university, I hope that our dear faculty don’t manage to screw things up with potential near-term major donors. Especially given how prickly some of them can be. (See the recent post about an unremarked letter, very interesting.) I know it’s hard to resist, and I dislike the Jock Box as much as many others do (especially the location), but sometimes it’s best to hold one’s tongue. If an SEG is too much, just keep quiet.

Let me just quote myself:

“I know it’s hard to resist, and I dislike the Jock Box as much as many others do (especially the location)”

I guess the more official it is, the more discretion should be used. Official faculty advisories, like the WRC business — was that the UO Senate, a special advisory committee, or both? UO Senate President Nathan Tublitz recently was probably not being wise, speaking as he does, in a sense, for the University.

What’s an SEG? A special pose for special occasions. Noted in the OED (that’s Oxford English Dictionary). It has a somewhat ambiguous meaning, can be used in two different ways. I think university presidents wear it often, in both senses, sometimes hard to tell which, maybe he didn’t know either. Definition 2 is how I usually think about it, perhaps from my own personal experience.

Learn about it here:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shit%20eating%20grin

dog on “being too hard”

As I have posted before, the issue
of Athletics vs. Academics is being made too black and white and this leads to distortion and gross misunderstanding of the issue.

While I will not post in detail now (as this exists somewhere in the UOmatters Archive) – simply go back the the University of Oregon of Fall term 1994 and compare that to the UO now in one key indicator

the amount of money spent on improving athletic infrastructure and athletic FTE compared to that spent on Academic Infrastructure and Academic FTE

You find the following:

Academic FTE is less than 5% of
Athletic FTE

Academic infrastructure is about
30% (because this includes new law, business, music and ed schools) – if you take that out 0
its about 3%

So the central has always been that the UO either internally or through external funding raising/giving has invested far more dollars in athletic infrastructure/FTE than academic infrastructure/FTE.

A university needs to do both in a BALANCED way and the UO is way, way out of balance (and I bet is the most unbalanced research university in the nation on this matter integrated over the last 15 years).

Just one clue: When was the last time the UO built academic infrastructure in terms of just a classroom building.*

Has anyone been to Kane Hall at the UW as an example …

*Answer – Gilbert Hall which we tore down …

The new parking under ground parking at Matt Court? Yeah someone should look into where the money for that is actually coming from. No state funds for athletics? Think again.

Little doubt that UO has had extravagant athletic private giving in comparison to academic giving. But it’s water under the bridge — maybe with more coming — and complaining about it may do more harm than good.

If the “Lariviere plan” is to have any chance, from what I understand, it’s going to be necessary to stay in the good graces of a big donor or two. I doubt that complaining too much about their present largesse is helpful.

Of course, even if the money does come through, and the Legislature approves the plan, there will be the job of dealing with both those donors and the Legislature.

Maybe we should all just admit that UO is doomed, and move on to something else.

Back in the day we grew ponytails and bragged we were rebels. But really we were hypocrites, and we cut them off right before our first serious job interview. So our kids raised the stakes by requiring a visible and *permanent* commitment. Nothing says I will never sell out for a real paycheck like giant ear plugs.

I agree with anonymous – the only way to stop this trend is for more old fat balding professors to do the same. We owe it to our students.

Anonymous sleek shiny stimulating mind M, I beseech you, be my man prof forever, you are my archangel, my eternal fire, I will carry your tatoo until the end of time, I will burn forever in your light.

As a member of the law faculty, I think it’s important to clarify Knight’s donation to build our new law school – something mentioned every time the adm speaks to the Knight issue.

Dave Frohnmayer was opposed to this donation. The donation was solicited behind his back by former dean Chuck O’Kelly, who knew that Dave would oppose it as possibly interfering with athletic plans. Dave’s anger over this was one of the reasons O’Kelly left the university.

Under Dave, the sole concern was raising money for athletics — even to the point of opposing a donation to his own law school. Hopefully this is changing.

We can only guess at Dave’s reasons for disrespecting the Faculty. Old Man will venture such a guess: Dave considered the UO Faculty to be infested by Left Wing Radicals that would bring disrepute to the UO if they were not kept on a tight rein. (The WRC business may have aggravated that view.) This attitude became evident to Old Man when some members of the Faculty proposed that the Faculty Governance bodies (The Senate and then the Assembly) denounce the impending invasion of Iraq. Prior to the Senate meeting, Dave wrote to each Senator a personal letter, which, I surmise, said “Don’t you dare.” When the Senate didn’t dare and an Assembly meeting was called by petition, Dave announced that he would impose a 50% quorum requirement for such a meeting to proceed. Furthermore, if the quorum “requirement” were met, an action could be taken only if 50% of the total Assembly Membership (not 50% of those attending) must vote in the affirmative. Everyone knew that the UO Assembly had never operated under such rules and, in fact, everyone knew that that the Assembly meeting that adopted the UO Senate Charter (presided over by DF himself) was in compliance with no such rules. For Old Man and many others, any residual respect for DF’s leadership was obliterated by that autocratic behavior.

dog on off target

Personally, I find it hard to believe that DF was actually “opposed” to the Knight donation to build a new law school. He may well have wanted to redirect the 25 Million dollars to something else, but I doubt he was out and out opposed to this and remember, at this time, DF had just transitioned
out from being law school dean to being UO Prez.

What are the plans for raises this year for non-union employees at UO?

Just reported today that state union workers get a 5% step increase.

Keep that in mind if the Administration claims that giving raises would be politically inopportune “at this time”.

not for publication.

Is there something wrong with the way Comments are displayed now, or did it just change? It seems weird there have been no comments posted since the Van Vliet, and that instead of getting the newer comments one gets the older.

No reply needed, just wondered if you’d noticed it.