From former Daily Emerald reporter Gordon Friedman, now at the Oregonian, here.
Posts published by “uomatters”
The campus community is invited to join Jessie Minton, Vice Provost for Information Services and CIO, for the next IT town hall meeting: When: Thursday, August 31, 1pm-2pm Where: Knight Library Browsing Room White Stag 149 via video conferencing
At first I read that as “Brain Awareness Study”, but no such luck. VP of Communication Kyle Henley is going to commission a phone survey of 1900 random people and ask them if they think UO is excellent: Full RFP/RFQ on the PCS website here. Apparently this is follow-up on a previous study…
The only information the administration gives to the UO Board of Trustees, here, is rudimentary data on past expenditures with no long term year-over-year comparisons. Apparently the board does not see any budget priorities plan for the future, just projections for spending for the upcoming FY. UO’s VP for Finance…
The OSU Board of Trustees finance committee is meeting in two weeks to prepare for their full set of Board meetings Oct 18-20 – when their students are actually on campus. You can find all their public meetings notices, agendas, and minutes from their many substantive meetings (10 so far…
8/25/2017: While the Ducks are so broke they can’t pay for tutoring their student-athletes, they’ve got no problem paying Southern Utah $500K to show up and lose the football season’s opener next weekend. The contract is below.
10/13/2015: It’s not really a fair contest. While for years the UO administration has used its Public Records Office and their $300K budget to delay, redact, and charge excessive fees to frustrate the intent of Oregon’s public records law, the PRO’s at most other universities are in the business of making public records public. Here’s the latest example.
Monday morning I emailed identical public records requests to UO and Southern Utah University, asking for copies of the contract for the football body-bag game scheduled for September 2017:
Date: October 12, 2015 at 10:14:21 AM PDT
To: Lisa Thornton <[email protected]>
Subject: public records request, football game contract with SUU
Dear Ms Thornton –
This is a public records request for a copy of the football game contract between SUU and UO, for the game to be played in the fall of 2017.
A sample of the sort of contract I am looking for is here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/971644/uomatters/IAC/Football%20contract%20-%20Georgia%20State%20(Final%20Executed%20Version).pdf
I edit a news and opinion blog about the University of Oregon, and I ask for a fee waiver on the basis of public interest.
I would appreciate it if you could send a pdf copy of this contract to this email address.
Thanks for your assistance
This sort of request typically takes UO a week or two. But SUU responded in less than 24 hours:
From: Jennifer Oberhelman
Date: October 13, 2015 at 9:13:01 AM PDT
To: [email protected]
Subject: GRAMA Response
Good morning Mr. Harbaugh,
Attached is the contract between Southern Utah University and University of Oregon for a football game set for 9/2/17 in Eugene, OR requested 10/12 in the form of a GRAMA request.
Please contact me if you have any additional questions.
Thank you.
Jennifer Oberhelman
Exec. Asst. for Administration
“We don’t quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.”
Not bad, though the record is still the 50 minutes it took Georgia State to provide their contract, and Eastern Washington’s General Counsel only took 3 hours.
So Rob Mullens will pay SUU $500K to come to Eugene. Presumably AAD Eric Roedl will get the cash by raising the price he charges ASUO for “free” student tickets to these body-bag games:
…
9/14/2015: Georgia State Panthers whip Oregon Ducks in football public records release
Reporter Ryan Dunleavy has the scoop here.
If you’re a UO professor, the only path to a significant pay increase is to get an outside offer in writing and then use it to convince your dean to give you a 10% raise to stay at UO. For most of us, this requires that we lie to colleagues…
8/21/2017: 1970 eclipse “Will Be Seen Only in Florida”, from the NYT in 1932:
By 1970 the astronomists were using a few more significant digits and they’d changed their prediction for the path of totality to include good chunks of Georgia, the Carolinas, and SE Virginia. So my Mother drove me and some Boy Scout friends down to Virginia Beach in her new Datsun 510. Sorry professor, it was total.
This time NASA seems to have nailed it. Lebanon Oregon had perfect weather, maybe 50 people in the park, plus the kid across the street yelling “Mom, you’ve got 5 minutes, come out here!” At totality we used some binoculars and could see the corona, beads, and 3 orange solar flares erupting at between 30 and 80 degrees. Of course no trip to Lebanon is complete without a stop at Research Mannikins, Came home the back way, no traffic to speak of.
8/29/2016: Duck physicists lose bidding war to Beavers for lucrative 2017 Solar Eclipse
It’s a bitter night down at the UO Faculty Club after NASA’s announcement that Corvallis – not Eugene – will have a place in the lucrative Path of Totality for the August 21 2017 Solar Eclipse. The official map is below.
NASA is still refusing to respond to my public records request for “all documents showing how the eclipse’s path was determined”, but the physics profs seem pretty sure the fix has been in for years. I’m guessing Corvallis took a page from the UO Foundation’s IAAF championship playbook and promised the NASA bosses free tickets and luxury hotel rooms, subsidized with their cut of the state’s lodging tax.
That’s the conclusion of David Card, based on results from a new paper by Alice Wu, analyzing messages on the econ job rumors website. The NYT story, with links, is here.
Joan Robinson – The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a ready-made set of answers to economic questions, but to avoid being deceived by economists. Can any other academic disciplines make the same argument? Law comes to mind, and of course Political Science. Other subjects? Other arguments?
8/16/2017: Just kidding, Altman got a fat raise and contract extension, despite telling his players to stop protesting racism during the national anthem. However Duck radio station KXTG has now fired DJ Dino Costa for telling people to run over anti-racist protestors, according to today’s WWeek report. 8/15/2017: Duck’s KXTG…
DIY video on youtube here. I’m no sculptor, but I’m thinking the yankee who sold this thing to Durham would have used a little more bronze if he’d wanted it to be permanent.
UO’s labor relations AVP Bill Brady is leaving UO, apparently for a better job back east, just as the faculty union and the administration are negotiating an extension of the second contract, as explained in this post from July. Extrapolating from the salary data meticulously documented on UO’s IR website…
Dear University of Oregon Community, Over this past weekend we witnessed a tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia. White supremacists and neo-Nazis, many of whom were armed and dressed in military uniforms, marched on the University of Virginia’s campus and took to the streets to spew venomous hatred. When they were confronted…