More news from Johnson Hall: Dear Campus Community, Our students attend the University of Oregon for the excellence of our faculty and the strength of our research opportunities. Academics are at the heart of everything we do, but our students also choose to be Ducks because of the exceptional student experience…
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The puck drops at 7:30PM. Data from IPEDS 2014 and USA Today 2015. Ducks Cavaliers Game Points: TBA TBA Finances: Endowment $659,671,118 $5,876,310,216 Instructional spending $294,436,620 $405,715,209 Research spending $81,982,046 $332,297,288 State funding $49,430,860 $145,711,683 Athletics spending $103,880,557 $91,345,925 Athletics spending as % of academic 28% 12% Students: Undergrads 20,538…
our pointy-toed boots. Maxine Bernstein has the report in the Oregonian on the government’s latest infringement of our constitutional rights to occupy a bird refuge and wear a bolo tie, with 1064 comments so far.
These are not easy to find on the Board’s website, so I’ve put them here. Schedule and links. Each link below takes you to a post with the respective committee agenda, documents, summary and sometimes some commentary. The full board agenda and materials and some live-blogging are at the bottom.…
Or will this just make their work less transparent? I don’t think it’s bad for universities to teach about how free speech can offend, but it’s not the sort of thing that the faculty should leave up to the administration to police. From InsideHigherEd: The University of Northern Colorado has announced that…
9/8/2016: Federal Judge McShane has ruled in favor of UO. The Emerald has the story here. Duck advocate Tobin Klinger has the party line in Around the O, the official organ of the Ducks:
“The court’s decision dismissed all of the students’ claims and upholds the University’s position that the students were afforded appropriate due process under the UO’s student conduct code. In addition, it affirms that the student conduct processes are separate and independent of criminal matters.
But Klinger fails to report that Judge McShane left the door open to refiling. And, according to the more accurate report by the Oregonian’s Tyson Alger here, it seems that the young men’s legal counsel, well-known celebrity attorney Alex Spiro, plans to try phoning it in one more time:
Court documents show that many of the claims of the players against the university were dismissed without prejudice, meaning they’ll be allowed to refile within the next 30 days. U.S. District Judge Michael McShane did dismiss the players’ claim of not receiving due process with prejudice, meaning that it can’t be refiled.
“We are simply redrafting the pleadings and moving forward with the case pursuant to the court’s decision,” said Alex Spiro, the lawyer for Dotson and Artis.
Judge McShane’s full opinion is here. I believe this is the last of the lawsuits related to the alleged rapes on the night of March 8, 2014, if it ever ends. UO paid Jane Doe $800K, Morlok and Stokes $425K, $2.5K for Shelly Kerr’s ethics fine, and unknown amounts for lawyers, including defending UO attorneys Doug Park and Sam Hill from an Bar ethics complaint. And, of course, UO’s “brand” took a huge hit.
As it happens, just an hour before this opinion was released Duck AD Rob Mullens was talking to the UO Board of Trustees. They had no questions for him about any of this, including why the academic budget had to pay for it.
The gist of Judge McShane’s decision:
I’m no law professor, but it seems pretty clear-cut. UO’s Deputy Counsel Doug Park offered the student-athletes a deal that would allow them to go play basketball somewhere else, and they took it after getting advice from their own lawyers:
Then they had second thoughts. Judge McShane essentially said “too bad, a deal’s a deal”.
8/27/2016: Celebrity lawyer Alex Spiro calls Dana Altman’s black basketball players “boys”
Executive and Audit Committee —1:15 pm – September 8, 2016 Ford Alumni Center, Giustina Ballroom [Materials] Whoops, that’s from OSU. Also see their detailed work plan posted by their Board’s Executive and Audit Committee. Compare with the minimalist info the UO Board is willing to share: UO: Convene – Call to order, roll call – Approval…
Elevator version: Moffitt says the academic budget is sort of OK. Meanwhile Mullens is raking in the dough, and spending it just as quickly on whatever he wants. No talk of the long overdue Athletics Department contributions to UO’s academic mission. Finance and Facilities Committee — September 8, 2016 10:00 am…
These are not easy to find on the Board’s website, so I’ve put them here. Elevator version: A long rambling report from Coltrane on academic program assessment, followed by a substantive report on UO’s new student success initiatives, with Schill’s new hire Doneka Scott and Bramhall and Freinkel. The trustees…
Here’s the latest in a series of papers using football game wins and losses as a source of independent variation. Other work has showed the relationship of football to domestic abuse, rape, drinking, and, at UO, bad grades for undergraduate men. This time it’s about racial bias among Louisiana judges. Former CAS Dean…
Because the State is wasting the taxpayers’ money on other things. UO will get about $65M from the state next year. In comparison, Governor Kulongoski blew about $200M on green energy schemes. How did subsidies for corporate wind farms and solar panels for McMansions become more important than accessible education for the middle class? Governor Kitzhaber and Cylvia Hayes kept…
Bob Berdahl and Randy Geller were working on a scheme to shut down the UO Senate in response to unionization. I wonder what sort of lock-out plans the administration had prepared for the faculty? Here’s what’s happening at Long Island University: From the Chronicle: Faculty members at Long Island University were locked out of the…
No, this isn’t about HLGR’s Andrea Coit and her failed attempt to warn federal Judge David Carter about the Bowl of Dicks jury’s potential involvement in a Masonic blood-oath conspiracy. The Cook County Record has the latest on former Chicago State University President Wayne Watson and the $3M his retaliation against a whistleblower cost the now bankrupt CSU, here:…
9/4/2016 update: Greg Lukianoff of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education points out the fallacies in Jim Sleeper’s NYT op-ed: Of course, this isn’t the only thing that Sleeper gets wrong. As he has done before, Sleeper attempts to present FIRE as part of a vast right-wing conspiracy, conveniently…
NBC reports that Colin Kaepernick’s NFL movement is spreading. Will any Duck players take a knee at today’s UC-Davis game, for “O’er the land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave”? Two years ago two of Dana Altman’s Duck basketball players tried a Black Lives Matter protest during his national anthem. Altman chewed out…