10/26/2015: UVA, UBC, and now UNC. InsideHigherEd has the latest here: Fennebresque, a lawyer who has been on the board since 2011 and became its chair last year, was seen as largely responsible for pushing out the previous president, Thomas W. Ross, for reasons that were never quite clear. He led the search for…
Posts published by “uomatters”
Last spring Professors Kim Sheehan (Advertising and PAGIA Chair) and Tim Gleason (Journalism and Faculty Athletics Representative) refused to let me attend a meeting of the Presidential Advisory Group on Intercollegiate Athletics, as explained in detail here.
President Mike Gottfredson had set up the PAGIA – with handpicked members – to replace the UO Senate’s elected Intercollegiate Athletics Committee, in the midst of the basketball rape allegations cover-up. The IAC is known for asking tough questions about athletics at UO and keeping the Senate informed. The PAGIA, on the other hand is still meeting in secret, and the administration is still letting athletic director Rob Mullens skip IAC meetings and avoid IAC questions.
UO Matters has now obtained a secret video of what seems to be a PAGIA meeting. It shows some disturbing conversations between the president and his advisors, about a plan to subvert academic standards so that the football coach can recruit the kinds of “student-athlete” transfers needed to get the team back to winning. They lay this all out in explicit detail. Much of the plan is not just a violation of NCAA rules, it is blatantly illegal, as the meeting participants openly acknowledge.
We all know this sort of thing has been going on for a long time, and we all know the administration and the NCAA winks and chuckles at it. I don’t think it’s funny. I think it’s an outrageous effort to subvert higher education and the proud academic tradition that universities like ours once stood for.
I’m against it. Therefore I felt I had no choice but to post the video below, despite the inevitable retaliation that will follow:
Rich Read has the report in the Oregonian, here. The record enrollments are at Lewis and Clark in Portland (UO’s should be out next week), and I’m kidding about their winning football season: Hmm, maybe there are some students out there who don’t really want to go to a football factory…
10/24/2015 update: From the Ornstein stories in the Chronicle and ProPublica:
“I don’t blame the University of Oregon for a rape,” she said. “It’s not their fault. I blame them for how they responded to it. I found out months later that every single meeting I had with a therapist, she took detailed notes on, and the University of Oregon had read these notes before I had even seen them.”
And now there’s a Slate op-ed about the reports, here:
Viewing medical records for medical reasons could help a university protect a student at risk of harm. But the University of Oregon’s meddling into Hanson’s private account of her rape would have only helped the university protect itself. The value of therapy lies in the patient’s expectation of confidentiality; if a student thinks her private exchanges with a doctor could resurface in the office of a university administrator, helping her heal will be much harder. A therapist’s office can be one of the only safe spaces available to a rape survivor on a college campus. Exploiting that trust to try to avoid paying a legal settlement is a cynical maneuver that can only exacerbate an already-low rape reporting rate.
The Jane Doe records seizure happened on Doug Park and Sam Hill’s watch. The Hanson incident apparently took place while Randy Geller was GC. I think the correct phrase here is “institutional betrayal”.
10/23/2015: Chronicle and ProPublica report on UO counseling record confidentiality
Reporting by Charles Ornstein, here. He picks up on the report first made in the Eugene Weekly in May by Camilla Mortensen, below. (Without citing her – wow is that bad form.)
Ornstein gets Doug Park to offer a complete and utter apology for the UO General Counsel Office’s behavior in these two cases:
A bold claim? I’ve yet to meet the parent that could out-bargain a crying baby. Alison Gopnik, author of “The Scientist in the Crib“, will explain this Friday at 7PM in 100 Willamette Hall. Not into crying, or infants? Read her detective work on Buddhism and Hume in the Atlantic, here.
10/22/2015: The one time I try blogging about something that couldn’t possibly involve a public records scandal, it turns out it involves a public records scandal. Mark Baker has the report in the RG here. 10/19/2015: EUG Flying People to depart for LCC? Bob Keefer has the rumor in Eugene Art Talk, here.…
10/22/2015: Just got back from this. It was the usual, with a large helping of self-congratulation on the side. I wonder how much the event cost, who paid for it, and how intelligent people can sit through this pablum. Oh, right, free lunch and an all-expense paid trip to Oregon. As my PhD…
Over the summer former Interim President Coltrane enacted three emergency IT policies. The administration is now looking to make them permanent, and is asking for feedback. My own initial reaction, as someone that Coltrane’s administration tried to fire over the UO Presidential Archives release (and he did fire two others) is…
That’s Chiles. Part of the B-School. Across Kincaid from the “Duckstore”, behind the hotdog stand. AVP for Collaboration Chuck Triplett will be taking attendance, so don’t ditch this one. I did a little live-blogging below. Senate Meeting Agenda – October 21, 2015. Agenda | Watch Live [Not working] Rm 128, Chiles; 3:00-5:00 pm 3:00 pm Introductory…
SAIL is UO’s faculty volunteer led program to encourage low-SES first generation students to go to college, by bringing them to campus for free summer day-camps on different academic subjects. They meet a lot of faculty and undergraduate mentors, and come back every summer during HS for a different camp, so by…
Darren Rovell from ESPN has the news here: Cleveland Browns cornerback Ifo Ekpre-Olomu collected a $3 million insurance policy on Monday for slipping in the NFL draft, a source confirmed to ESPN.com. It’s the most a college player has ever collected on a loss of value policy, which insures the…
Normally they post this by the quarter, but, in my opinion, UO didn’t want to reveal the administrative and athletics spending during SEIU and faculty union bargaining (UAUO’s Unfair Labor Practices complaint is here) so this time it’s all in one pdf for the 2014-15 AY. Handy reverse-engineered excel spreadsheets, courtesy of a…
involving the Lane County DA or the Eugene PD. Seems pretty broad: Arnold’s website is here.
10/16/2015: No, of course I’m not talking about Chuck Lillis and his statement to Oregonian reporter Rich Read that he hoped the UO Senate could survive my election as president. Lillis will come around.
I’m talking about UBC board chair John Montalbano, who resigned today, 7 weeks after he called up UBC professor Jennifer Berdahl to complain about her blog post, which called his board’s decision to fire the UBC president racist and sexist. Berdahl’s chair was funded by a $2M donation from Montalbano.
The CBC has a report about the subsequent investigation and Montalbano’s resignation here, and Professor Berdahl is gleefully blogging about it here:
Two months ago I wrote about my experiences of reprimand at UBC after publishing a blog post that raised uncomfortable questions about organizational culture, diversity, and leadership. A fact-finding process was agreed to by the University of British Columbia’sFaculty Association and the UBC Administration into allegations of interference with my academic freedom. The findings of the third party investigator, the Honourable Lynn Smith, Q.C., led her to conclude that UBC failed in its obligation to support and protect my academic freedom.
The Smith Report notes that “The protections of academic freedom extend to the dissemination of scholarly research and opinion through these new electronic media” (p. 5) as well as to “commentary (whether positive or negative) by members of UBC on the extent to which the central functions of the University are being advanced or hindered by decisions or initiatives affecting the University” (p. 6). Some people did not understand that an academic blog, and comments about one’s university and its leadership, are protected by academic freedom. So is scholarly opinion and speculation; asking questions and proposing theories are crucial to the advancement of inquiry and knowledge.
Academic freedom is to a university what love is to a family….
8/26/2015: UBC Board’s John Montalbano defends self against blogger Berdahl
He comes off very well. I particularly liked the part where he explains that the UBC faculty *elects* several board members. Don’t tell that to UO Law Professor Susan Gary, who was first appointed on recommendation of UO Law Professor Margie Paris without faculty consultation, and then kept her position on the board last year without an election, despite UO Senate legislation to hold one for nominees.