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Posts published by “uomatters”

WTF? Ignorant anti-government Texans vote to support research universities?

11/4/2009: From the Chronicle: Voters in Texas on Tuesday approved a ballot measure designed to strengthen the state’s research universities, with about 56 percent voting in favor of the proposal. … The Texas measure, known as Proposition 4, will establish a National Research University Fund to provide financial incentives for…

College President’s pay

11/2/2009: Stories in the Chronicle and the WSJ about high salaries for retired private university presidents. I think the Chronicle will release new data on publics soon. This story would suggest Frohnmayer’s golden parachute deal is unusually fat, however – only 20% of private schools pay ex-president’s more than $200,000.…

Big and Expensive Green Ideas

11/1/2009: Harry Esteve has an article in the Oregonian today about how Governor Kulongoski bullied state analysts into low-balling their cost estimates for his green tax break schemes. It’s complete with careful documentation – obtained by public records requests – of spreadsheets with hand written “corrections”, emails about the need…

OHSU problems:

10/31/2009: Verbatim from Jack Bog’s Blog: Red flag goes up at OHSU The new chief financial officer at OHSU has quit after just two weeks on the job. Apparently it has something to do with family issues, but given all the turnover in management on Pill Hill lately, the situation…

Tenure and Promotion

10/29/2009: Curious about who got tenure or was promoted to full professor at UO last year? So are the members of the UO’s Faculty Personnel Committee. According to their official report,That’s right, Provost Bean refuses to say who has been given tenure and promoted. He won’t even tell the faculty…

The Dog

People ask me all the time “who is The Dog?” I honestly don’t know. He/she seems smarter than the average dog, but that is true of many UO faculty, and administrators too.

Union

10/25/2009: Greg Bolt has a good article on the faculty union in the Sunday RG: (Marie) Vitulli (Math) said concern about pay and benefits is one reason for considering a union. UO faculty are generally ranked at or near the bottom in pay among institutions in the groups the state…

PERS

10/24/2009: Ted Sickinger at the Oregonian does a lot of good reporting on PERS. I’m no economist, but a lot of strange things seem to be going on with their investment strategy – they have a politically appointed board which can and does overrule the staff about investment decisions. And…

More ICC rate nonsense

10/23/2009: Latest from Melinda Grier and Doug Park on the ICC rate. They wrote last week, telling us they would show us the documents explaining why the rate was cut – costing UO research efforts $2 million per year – but only if we paid them $173.11. So we sent…

Carl Malamud talk on Friday:

Should America’s Operating System Be Open Source?Carl Malamud, President and Founder of Public.Resource.OrgFriday, October 23 at 11Am, Studio A, Knight Libraries(Enter through STEM door on the RHS of the library). Who owns the law? A thicket of copyright restrictions has arisen around the primary legal materials of the United States.…