Given the threats I’ve had from past UO presidents, interim presidents, provosts, interim provosts, presidential advisors, VP’s, AVP’s, VPAA’s, general counsels, interim general counsels, faculty athletic representatives, and former journalism deans, which have ranged from vague to specific, I’m always curious about where the line on faculty blogging is. This…
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My previous post supporting the policy is here. I’ve also posted the comment below on the Senate blog (which requires a UO ID for login) here. The comment:
I thank Carol and the GSBV for their work on this policy. I think the balance between allowing faculty to confidentially advise their students, while making sure that perpetrators are reported and appropriately dealt with is difficult and uncertain. Given that, and my confidence in the committee’s judgement, I think the proposed requirement that all faculty should be mandatory reporters should be taken seriously
With that in mind I discussed the proposal with other faculty, and out of those discussions I started wondering about how it would apply to faculty who might give advice to colleagues who were being subject to sexual harassment by other faculty. I asked GC Kevin Reed about a generic example, and I’ve put that and his response below.
The gist is that this proposed policy treats faculty victims very differently than students. While students have a variety of confidential reporting options, the policy would require faculty to report the details of such harassment of faculty to Penny Daugherty’s AAEO office, regardless of whether or not the Ombuds office or other confidential resources had been consulted. I think this would prevent many helpful conversations between faculty colleagues. On the other hand it might inhibit serial perpetrators.
I’m not sure yet how this changes my opinion on the policy as a whole. I hope people will read the exchange below and use it to inform their own views.
Question to GC Kevin Reed:
Here’s hoping they don’t try a giant white tent again: From: Parking.DL.Parking < [email protected]> Subject: PARKING LOT 6A RESERVED FOR EVENT MAY 4TH Date: May 2, 2016 12:10:29 PM PDT To: Parking.DL.Parking <[email protected]> Good afternoon, In support of a University sponsored event, the Department of Parking and Transportation will be reserving…
5/1/2016: Text and video here: http://chronicle.com/article/Video-A-Call-to-Replace/236224. This is a brief follow up to Stripling’s “An Academic Reputation at Risk” report on UO, from September. That story is still gated if you are off campus, but here are some extracts below.
The re-interview touches on realignment and fundraising, and there’s a surprising amount on Schill’s decision to dump our 160over90 branders. Apparently UO’s academic side, and Schill, are still getting good publicity from our new “No branding crap” brand. Thank you Diane Dietz!
Which prompted me to look at UO’s home page for the first time in months. Some of the 160over90 damage has been reversed – I didn’t see any mention of What the If? or whatever it was – but it’s still hard to navigate. Which explains why the UO Matters “Crap-Free UO homepage” (TM) is still so popular.
9/14/2015: Chronicle’s Jack Stripling profiles UO and President Schill
Long article, well worth reading it all. Posted today, here: (Gated if you are off campus).
An Academic Reputation at Risk: The U. of Oregon’s big brand masks its fragile standing
The duck is always up in everybody’s face. He shoves. He body-slams. He demands to be noticed.
The University of Oregon’s mascot, a Donald Duck knockoff in yellow and green, is a pure distillation of the university’s iconic brand. This is a place, the duck assures us, of unapologetically splashy sports and irrepressible good times. The image sells remarkably well to undergraduates, whose numbers have increased by 25 percent in the past decade alone.
… On a recent summer afternoon here, an admissions official asked a group of prospective students and their parents what they had already heard about the university.
Toward the back row, a young man said, “Big football team.” “Nike,” another chimed in, citing the university’s longstanding affiliation with the company’s co-founder, Phil Knight. “Track,” another said.
That’s to be expected, given how we recruit these students – UO’s administrators use football bowl games as undergraduate admissions events, so they can get the university to pay for their own junkets, family included.
Of course, there are other ways to attract students. Here’s the report from UC-Boulder admissions, where they emphasized academic rigor, instead of big-time sports (they’re currently #78 in the football rankings). Seems to be working:
A total of 3,083 Colorado residents enrolled as new freshmen in the fall class, as well as 2,786 from out of state and a record 386 freshman international students, a 41 percent increase from last year. …
“Our efforts in recent years to improve the academic rigor at CU-Boulder are paying off with the most academically qualified class we’ve ever seen,” said CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. “Our Esteemed Scholar program, and our other scholarship and academic programs, continue to attract Colorado’s best and brightest to CU-Boulder, along with outstanding students from around the nation and the world.”
This year’s freshman class includes a total of 898 Colorado freshmen who were awarded Esteemed Scholarships, based on high school grades and SAT/ACT scores, up from 789 last year. For out-of-state students, 425 were awarded the Chancellor’s Achievement Scholarships, 77 more than in 2013, and 102 were awarded Presidential Scholarships, up 18 from last year.
Stripling’s story continues with some information on the tensions that UO’s emphasis on big-time athletics at the expense of academics have created between the faculty and the administration, and President Schill’s plans to deal with them.
In Mr. Schill’s view, the university needs to break down barriers between professors and administrators. On the symbolic front, he has invited faculty members into his home, and asked them to stock his office library with their books. He has portrayed himself as a faculty member first, insisting that the title of “professor” appear alongside “president” on his business cards.
More substantively, Mr. Schill has signed off on a new contract with the faculty union, and he has agreed to settle a contentious lawsuit with the Oregon student who accused three basketball players of raping her.
“We need to end the circular firing squad,” Mr. Schill says, “and I think we’ve started that.”
If Oregon can avoid turning on itself, Mr. Schill says, the university can reverse the trends that have held it back.
Every promise Mr. Schill has made hinges on the success of a $2-billion capital campaign. The money will be used in part to hire 80 to 100 new tenured or tenure-track professors over the next four to five years.
… “I don’t want to sound too egotistic or narcissistic, but what was missing here was leadership,” says Mr. Schill, who is 56. “The last piece of the puzzle wasn’t here yet, which was a president who was going to stay and build a great university. I’d like to think I’m the person. History will look back and say whether I was.”
10/15/2015: Jefferson Public Radio interviews Jack Stripling
Max Thornberry has the story and some good quotes from faculty, here.
InsidehigherEd has the story here: This is not a trivial decision, but it’s the right decision,” Chuck Staben, the University of Idaho’s president, said in an interview Wednesday. “What attracts students to our institution is the quality of academic programs, the great outcomes and the preparation for life after college.…
The first response of the University of North Dakota administration to the need for budget realignment was to cut sports, not academics. Story here. The faculty had just demanded more transparency about sports subsidies, here. Cutting these mens sports at UO would save about $4M a year, depending on how you…
Chicago has some good public relations people, and a smart President and/or Board of Trustees. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has the press release here, on their free speech efforts: University of Chicago Reforms All Speech Codes, Earns FIRE’s Highest Free Speech Rating CHICAGO, April 26, 2016—The Foundation for Individual…
The link is here, courtesy of an anonymous correspondent. Duck athletics used to contribute $50K a year to the library. With football revenue increasing so quickly it’s getting hard to spend it all on coach’s salaries, now seems like a good time for Library Dean Adriene Lim to hit up Athletic Director Rob…
A few years back VPFA Jamie Moffitt set up a “Budget Advisory Group” (BAG) to help her sort through the proposals for millions in dollars of urgently needed new funding – stuff like giving the library enough money to keep its book-buying budget from shrinking, upgrade the wifi, retention money…
Sports Illustrated has the details on the ~$11M a year deal here. Meanwhile the Ducks get only $600K a year from Nike, plus free shoes and clothes for UO administrators, of course. Frances Dyke renewed this contract in 2009, and it expires November 30, 2017. This deal is so bad. Unfortunately the Nike contract renegotiation will likely be…
Sent out this afternoon: Dear campus community, One of the hallmarks of a great university is that it does not shy away from tough questions or difficult topics, be they cultural, theoretical, or scientific. Rather, a great university embraces challenges and applies intellectual, academic, and research rigor to delivering solutions…
The UO Board paid him $940K to leave, so let’s get our money’s worth.
The UO Senate spent a fair amount amount of time at its 4/20/2016 meeting discussing the proposed Responsible Reporting Policy for sexual assaults and sexual and racial harassment, brought to the Senate by its Committee on Sexual and Gender-Based Violence, chaired by Carol Stabile (Journalism). The committee minutes show that this proposal was thoroughly discussed, and carefully crafted.
This is the policy formerly known as Mandatory Reporting. The proposal is here. The gist is that faculty and most other UO employees must tell the UO administration whenever a student tells them about sexual and racial harassment and sexual violence:
Responsible Employees [i.e. faculty, OAs, staff and some others, with exceptions for crisis counselors etc.] who receive Credible Evidence of Prohibited Discrimination, Harassment or Sexual Harassment are required to promptly report that information as follows:
A. If the Credible Evidence relates to Sex Discrimination [which includes sexual assault] of a Student, Responsible Employees should report any information received to the Title IX Coordinator or to the Office of Crisis Intervention and Sexual Violence Support Services. …
The Senate’s involvement came out of one of the many failures of Mike Gottfredson’s administration that were revealed after sports reporters foiled his administration’s attempts to keep the basketball rape allegations quite. Gottfredson had sent the university community a letter announcing that we were all mandatory reporters, and that AAEO had set up a silly web-based training on what this meant. But Gottfredson and his leadership team failed to follow through with an actual university policy – 4 years after the DoE’s Office of Civil Rights recommended one to VPFA Robin Holmes’s office.
The Senate stepped into the gap and put the Committee on GSBV on the job, with input from new GC Kevin Reed and some other new Schill hires. This policy is the result. Not everyone agrees with the idea that the definition of mandatory reporters should be this broad. (See below for Jennifer Freyd’s arguments against.) On the one hand students might be reluctant to talk to faculty if they know their names and the details will be reported to the administration and the perpetrator might learn that they’d talked, if their report results in action. On the other hand the policy cuts our famously incompetent AAEO director Penny Daugherty out of sexual assault matters, and mandatory reporting gives Schill’s new Title IX Coordinator specific information about serial perpetrators. Knowing this might make students more likely to report. I’m sure there are other arguments on both sides as well.
I’m no expert on this, but given all the uncertainty I think the CGSBV proposal falls well within the 95% confidence interval around the optimal policy, whatever that is, and it is certainly an improvement over the current Gottfredson non-policy policy.
But dissent and diversity of thought generally make things better, and as the video of Stabile’s presentation and the ensuing productive discussion shows, the UO Senate is the place for both. (Or, if you’re the administrator in the lower right corner, a good place to catch up on your sleep.)
The policy will likely have some revisions after this meeting, and come back for a vote at the May 5 meeting, or early this fall. Video of the Senate discussion here:
4/25/2015: Prof. Jennifer Freyd objects to mandatory reporting rules for sexual assaults.
The Portland Business Journal has put up a series of interesting stories in advance of the release of Knight’s Shoe Dog autobiography: Nike’s Knight: I’ll give my $25B fortune away On eve of publication of Phil Knight’s memoir, welcome to the Knight Files 10 business lessons from the lawsuit that gave birth to…
I’m no expert on the use of charitable contributions to buy prestige, but this case out of UO sure has some interesting twists, and might even displace the Avery Fisher Hall naming rights buy-back and the Central Park Zoo story on my syllabus. The Securities and Exchange Commission alleges that UO accounting alumnus and…