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Posts published by “uomatters”

UO exempts cold-fusion powered hoverboards from campus ban

After a long fight with the usual backward-thinking Johnson Hall admins, Prof. Emmett Brown (Physics) and the UO Senate’s Radiation and Skateboard Safety Committee have succeeded in exempting cold-fusion powered hoverboards from the new Emergency Electronic Skateboard Ban Policy: In related news, the UOPD is confiscating the spontaneously combustible electronic skateboards from students and shipping…

Law School buys Google ads to boost undergrad legal studies enrollment

While Google’s targeting algorithm knows enough from mining my gmail account and web searches to correctly deduce the importance of “Security v. Privacy” to my everyday drama, they apparently don’t know I completed my B.S. degree a while back. I wonder what the law school is paying per click-through: Not a bad idea though. The law…

Ken Prehoda’s paper on slime-mold evolution causes stir

Cocktail party version: In a new paper in eLife UO biochemist Ken Prehoda and co-authors show that a simple mutation was all it took to allow single-celled organisms to evolve into the cooperative assemblies that formed the multi-cellular choanoflagellate slime-molds that you and I are descended from. While one co-author on the paper…

U of Cincinnati to pay $4.85M for alleged murder by armed campus cop

1/19/2016: The NY Times has the report here:

The University of Cincinnati has agreed to pay $4.85 million to the family of an unarmed black man who was shot to death in July by one of its police officers, a settlement that also requires the college to provide an undergraduate education to his 12 children, create a memorial to him on campus and include his family in discussions on police reform.

… Mr. DuBose, 43, was shot and killed on July 19 by Officer Ray Tensing, who pulled him over in a Cincinnati neighborhood adjacent to the campus because his car lacked a front license plate. The shooting was captured on a body camera, and Officer Tensing, who was fired from the department, faces trial on a charge of murder.

Here at UO, there’s still no formal announcement of when UOPD Chief McDermed will be replaced by new Assistant Chief of Police Chou Her. Presumably UO is delaying the announcement so as not to damage its efforts to convince the judge in the Bowl of Dicks trial to cancel the jury’s $755K award to former UOPD officer James Cleavenger. That hearing is Feb 12th.

The federal jury agreed that McDermed and other UOPD officers had violated the First Amendment by retaliating against Cleavenger for his opposition to arming the UOPD with Tazers. On which note the NYT adds:

Mr. DuBose is not the first black man to die as a result of an encounter with the University of Cincinnati police, and he will not be the first to have a memorial on campus. Kelly Brinson, 45, a psychiatric patient, and Everette Howard, 18, a student, died in 2010 and 2011 after campus officers fired stun guns at them, according to lawsuits filed by their families.

Of course campus police can be victims of shootings as well as perpetrators. It’s not clear if armed police are safer, even for themselves. One particularly sad story comes from the University of Central Florida, where a university cop was shot and killed by another officer, who was trying to control drinking at football game tailgate parties.

The green-shirted man with the gun is an undercover UCF police officer, pointing his pistol at a drunk UCF student. The student apparently grabbed the gun, it went off, and a uniformed police officer who hadn’t been told of the operation then shot and killed the undercover officer.

What happened to Richard Turkiewicz, the UCF police chief who set up this botched operation? Frances Dyke, former UO VPFA, hired him as UO’s interim Director of Public Safety. No kidding. Dyke then went on to persuade the Oregon legislature to allow UO to set up its own armed police force.

What sort of oversight does UO have for its police?

7/29/2015: Prosecutor and Trustee says university police force should be disbanded

University & Nike agree on $252M contract, includes academic scholarships

That would be The Ohio State University & Nike. Details in the WSJ here: Nike Inc. has agreed to a $252 million deal with Ohio State University to extend its existing sponsorship by 15 years, escalating an arms race among sportswear makers and top sports schools. Ohio State will receive $112…

APA reports higher pay for faculty at unionized public universities

One of the debates during the union organizing drive was whether or not a faculty union would really mean higher pay. There are surprisingly few studies on this. The American Psychology Association recently released a very detailed report on 2014-15 salaries for psychology faculty, here. The result is just correlational (despite the language…

Diane Dietz hunts, kills 160over90 branding deal, then writes its obituary

Back in May 2015 Register Guard reporter Diane Dietz published five stories on UO’s inane 160over90 “What the If” branding campaign, and the administration’s efforts to hide what it cost. (One strategy was to run the payments through the secretive UO Foundation, just as Paul Weinhold and Vin Lananna are doing with the 2021…