Gottfredson now posting calendar, lots of athletics

11/4/2013: During his first year in office President Gottfredson earned the ire of the Oregon Commentator and the Student Press Law Center by trying to charge hundreds of dollars to see copies of his official calendar – and then not letting students use student funds to pay the bill. In a modest improvement in transparency, his office is now posting a selection of events from his upcoming week, here. Half of this week is about athletics:

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6 

2:00 p.m. — Travel to San Francisco 

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7 

San Francisco / Palo Alto, California 

8:30 a.m. — Pac-12 Network tour
President Gottfredson tours Pac-12 Network facilities with university and community leaders. 

1:00 p.m. — Oregon University System Presidents Council
President Gottfredson joins the meeting of OUS presidents by videoconference. 

3:30 p.m. — Duck Alumni Tailgate
The president joins UO alumni and Ducks fans for a pregame tailgate before Oregon meets Stanford at Maloney Field. 

6:00 p.m. — Football
The Oregon Ducks take on the Stanford Cardinal.  

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8 

San Francisco / Palo Alto, California

Not a surprise, given UO’s emphasis on big-time college sports. Here’s an interesting report on how such an emphasis can make it difficult for universities to recruit and keep top administrators who care about the academic side. Just another of the hidden costs of athletics:

After five scandal-plagued years as University of North Carolina chancellor, Holden Thorp was downright ecstatic to start over on a campus where the term “student-athlete” doesn’t evince snickers and groans. 

The new provost at the private Washington University spends little time worrying about academically suspect jocks — as a Division III school, WashU doesn’t even award athletic scholarships. It’s a far cry from Chapel Hill, where an academic fraud investigation found dozens of athletes taking no-show classes, along with assorted other abuses, and led to Thorp’s resignation from the top job at his alma mater — the sole college he applied to as a high school senior in Fayetteville, N.C.