The UO administration has discovered that if they want to hire competent people who care about UO, they can recruit from the UAUO Faculty Union leadership. First it was Ron Bramhall, now it’s Scott Pratt. From “AroundThe0”: The provost announced today that Scott L. Pratt, professor of philosophy, will become…
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3/17/2014 update: I went to the Library Committee’s meeting today. Dean Adriene Lim was adamant that she was not trying to avoid Senate review of the new library privacy policy, and that as far as she was concerned the Library Committee was the Senate, since it’s a Senate committee, but that she was fully willing to go through the regular Senate policy on policies.
She said had been told that AVP Chuck Triplett was the “guru” for UO policies, and so she asked him how to proceed. As you can see below, Triplett thought that there was no need for this privacy policy to go through the Senate process. Given that the administration’s motivation for this policy arose out of LibraryGate, or as they now call it, “the incident”, Triplett should have known better than to advise Lim to try and slip this through on the side.
This is from the OSU library’s privacy policy:
Patron information is strictly confidential. It is for the use of library staff only; it can, of course, be divulged to the patron. Patron information is not to be given to non-library individuals, including parents, friends, professors, university administrators, police, FBI, university security staff, or the CIA. Only a court order can require the disclosure of patron records. The university librarian is responsible for compliance with such orders.
Needless to say UO’s proposed new policy (in full below) is a lot weaker:
When a violation of law or established policy is suspected, the Libraries reserves the right to electronically monitor its public computers and network, and/or reveal a user’s identity to institutional authorities and/or law enforcement.
Frankly, it reads as a post-hoc justification for Lim’s decision to disclose my circulation records to the administration. I told Lim I thought this would be problematic, and that she should at least consider having something concrete to take to the Senate about implementing the promises that were made to the Senate about general review of UO’s public records problems, or perhaps something about the documents that were *not* in UO’s Presidential Archives – e.g. athletics money deals – and therefore were lost to history (yes, I did mention Hillary Clinton).
FWIW, the RegisterGuard report on that Senate meeting is here.
… The UO’s new dean of libraries, Adriene Lim, told the gathered faculty on Wednesday that she considers an individual’s right to privacy to be a universal human right.
But she also said that Oregon public records laws “spell out types of records that should be public and available for scrutiny. I’d be the first one to advocate for that openness and transparency.”
Coltrane and Lim said the issue of transparency will be reviewed by university officials after Hershner Hunter completes its investigation. [UO M: I’ve made a public records request to Dave Hubin’s Public Records Office for the contract showing what UO’s Interim General Counsel Doug Park has asked HH to do. No response yet.]
The university will “try to increase openness and transparency as much as we can,” Lim said. Coltrane said he’d bring the university’s Office of Public Records to the table.
Harbaugh said Wednesday that that’s what he had in mind when he sought the presidential documents at the archive – after being thwarted by the public records office.
He said he had no intention of violating student privacy laws or damaging the university.
“I’m trying to make a point about the university’s obsessive secrecy, about how it functions, makes decisions and operates as a public agency,” Harbaugh said.
3/12/2014: AVP Chuck Triplett advises Library Dean Adriene Lim that new Library privacy policy can bypass Senate review
Thanks to several people for leaking this email and proposed policy to UO Matters. Page down to see how it evolves as it gets exposed to the light of day. It’s now circulating on the Senate listserv, and we will be taking steps to
a) ensure Dean Lim does not implement this policy without Senate approval, and
b) ensure Chuck Triplett is monitored, to prevent future attempts to subvert the Policy on Policies.
Still no information on how Lim will deal with public records that were removed from the Presidential Archives by Johnson Hall.
The UO Board reaffirmed the PonP just last week. Triplett didn’t waste any time breaking it:
Date: March 11, 2015 at 9:20:07 AM PDT
To: Adriene Lim
Subject: Library privacy policy draft – latest version
Dear ULC members,
I’ve heard back from Chuck Triplett and he advises me that he doesn’t think our new Privacy Policy rises to the level of an “institutional policy.” This means that the draft would not need to go through more layers of review in the way that other institutional policies are reviewed. He thinks that, after we go through our library-level review, the policy can just be posted on our website.
Library faculty still have until March 16, 2015, to provide input and comments, but I wanted to share with you the latest version of the draft because it contains two new sections that were added last week: 1.) a section was added to address the security cameras we have in our Special Collections & University Archives area. These cameras are not new — they’ve been in place for a while, but the Libraries had not finalized a policy regarding them yet); 2.) a few sentences were added to address the privacy audit and compliance concerns that were raised at our last ULC meeting. When the policy is finalized, the Libraries will conduct an audit of systems and services to make sure that we are complying with our own policy.
If you have any final comments about this latest draft, please let me know by March 16, 2015. Thank you for your help with this.
Best regards,
Adriene
Adriene Lim, Ph.D., MLIS
Dean of Libraries
Philip H. Knight Chair
University of Oregon Libraries
1299 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1299
Phone: 541-346-1892
Email: [email protected]
Note: After I sent this email to Lim and cced the Senate listserv, she sent out an email changing her mind and deciding to ignore Triplett, and send this policy through the regular PAC process, which will bring it to the Senate.
Here’s the policy in dispute:
You’ve got to wonder who UO will have ghost-write their response this time. Tobin Klinger? Rita Radostitz? Jennifer Winters? Roger Thompson? Tuesday’s editorial page in the Register Guard. The RG’s editorial board leads: Federal lawmakers have trouble agreeing on anything these days, but they should have no difficulty agreeing on the need…
UO’s well paid NCAA FAR Jim O’Fallon, and his explanation for why UO students should spend their tuition money subsidizing athlete-only tutoring, is not getting much respect. In the RG, here: Free up money by cutting teams The University of Oregon president and the UO Board of Trustees have the…
Story here. This is at UNC. I’ll go out on a limb and guess the money comes out of the academic budget, not from coaches’ pay.
3/16/2015: Diane Dietz has the report in the RG, here. Long story, many interesting quotes from Ralph, Coltrane, Rognlie, Freyd, and Duck PR flack Craig Pintens: [UO Trustee] Ginevra Ralph hesitated when she brought up the subject to fellow members of the University of Oregon Board of Trustees recently. She could…
That’s the word from those on the deptcomp listserv, who are not at all happy about the decision.
With TSA. Dashiell Paulson has the news in the RG, here.
3/15/2015: From InsideHigherEd.com, here: This article contains explicit and potentially offensive terms that are essential to reporting on this situation. Instead of practicing on Thursday, University of Oklahoma football players held a silent demonstration protesting the behavior of an Oklahoma fraternity that was caught on video using racist slurs while…
Sure, it’s a national problem, but not on *our* campus. From the 2015 InsideHigherEd survey of college presidents, via fivethirtyeight.com, with thanks to an anonymous reader: Back in 2012 the survey asked about athletics. College presidents also thought athletic spending and control were big problems – at other colleges, that…
I can’t imagine why they are stalling. With luck, Prof Tublitz will get these names in time for me to post them before the bargaining session with Jamie Moffitt starts: On Mar 13, 2015, at 10:22 PM, tublitz <[email protected]> wrote: Dear Ms Joubran: I submitted the following request over a month…
Former RG reporter Joe Moseley has the game news at goducks.com. Dana Altman’s contract gives him a $10K bonus for this Duck win, to top off his ~1.5M base: You can help pay Joe Young instead, at Fan Angel, here. The NCAA is a classic hiring cartel. College athletic departments…
For years Lorraine Davis, a former UO VP and current assistant to Provost Bronet for athletics, has been at the center of UO’s admissions of athletes that don’t meet regular academic standards. Now, just 2 days after the UO Senate voted to appoint two new faculty members to keep an…