Sort of. Economists’ opinions about increasing the minimum wage are mixed. The celebration is about the data that we’ll eventually get on the change in employment. This will improves estimates of the elasticity of demand for low-skilled labor, which is the crucial variable for calculating how much unemployment increased minimum wages…
Posts published in “Uncategorized”
2/18/2016: There are some good people on the UO board. You know they’re hoping the day will come when they can announce they’ve done something important for UO’s academic side. But that day is not today. Today Diane Dietz has yet another story on the effort and expense that UO’s leaders…
2/18/2016: Ouch. From the Oregon Supreme Court opinion, here: With regard to the amount of costs and disbursements on review, defendant filed a statement of those costs and disbursements seeking the total sum of $561,816.84, plus $638 per day from July 1, 2010, until the letter of credit procured by defendant…
The well-named Vermont Cynic has the report here.
2/17/2016 update: From the Lund Report, here:
Partisan animosity broke down in Salem on Presidents’ Day, as Republicans frustrated by the Democratic agenda turned to D.C.-style delaying tactics, forcing House and Senate clerks to read, verbatim, dozens of pages of legalese in each bill before it could come to a vote.
But the Senate still managed to unanimously pass a bipartisan bill that closes a critical gap in medical privacy — forcing university-based health providers to abide by the same confidentiality rules as off-campus providers.
… The demand for the bill was spurred by a notorious case involving the University of Oregon and a student who alleged she’d been raped by members of the basketball team. The woman sued the school, and the university ordered the school’s counseling center to turn over her therapy records to try to disprove her case of emotional distress.
I should note that UO lawyers Doug Park and Sam Hill dispute the claim that UO planned to use Jane Doe’s therapy records to try and disprove her case. They say that they were securing them on request of Jane Doe’s lawyers. However they have never explained why they scanned them into the GC’s computer system, or what procedures they had in place to monitor who then accessed them, or why Counseling Center Director Shelly Kerr would tell Karen Stokes not to stamp the file and keep the GC’s request a secret:
2/4/2016 update: Oregon legislature considers bill making it illegal for university lawyers to do what Park and Hill did
Legislation and testimony etc. here:
This isn’t a hard one:
Meanwhile, UO’s lawyers are getting nasty in their attacks on Stokes and Morlok, the UO Counseling Center employees who blew the whistle and brought the whole matter to state and national attention, and who have alleged that UO responded by retaliating against them:
1/26/2016: UO lawyers use Stokes and Morlok’s OA award against them. Updated below
On Facebook, and in Johnson Hall: Our students have been trying to get Paul Weinhold and Jay Namyet of the UO Foundation to divest from fossil fuel stocks since 2013, when Peabody Coal was at $350 or so. The UO Senate voted unanimously for divestment on Jan 14 2015, when it…
2/15/2016: In Around the O, here.
11/2/2015: UO’s Chief Auditor Brenda Muirhead leaves UO after 18 months
This is really bad news for trust and transparency at UO. Muirhead was a professional with an impeccable record. Her job was to set up procedures to enhance UO’s minimal internal controls and conduct internal audits. For example, her office confirmed that UO had never done an open affirmative action compatible search for $130K VP for Collaboration Chuck Triplett. They are currently conducting a regularly scheduled audit of the athletics department, etc.
Troy Shinn has an excellent report in the Daily Emerald, here. Some snippets: Freshman Jacob Armas was valedictorian of his Medford, Oregon, high school and received a Pathway Oregon scholarship to cover his tuition at the University of Oregon. The only catch: he was required to live on campus his…
Another year, another data point.
Or is it? At yesterday’s 3PM Senate meeting Provost Coltrane said all units would be asked to plan for a 2% cut, even athletics. At the 1:30PM IAC meeting AAD for Finance Eric Roedl said that President Schill had not asked athletics to make a cut. Meanwhile the headline above is…
Wednesday, February 10, 2016 Browsing Room, Knight Library Agenda | Watch Live Old business note: Last meeting the Senate spent a lot of time on IT policies, over concerns that there was no clear campus policy governing when administrators could access faculty and staff email. The GCO has now approved…
Scott Jaschik of Insidehighered.com has the report here: The president of Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland on Monday fired two faculty members without any faculty review of his action or advance notice. One was a tenured professor who had recently criticized some of the president’s policies. The other was the…
You be the judge. For background on the Bowl and the verdict read this. The arguments on UO’s plea for remittitur will be in Portland on Friday. Here’s Andrea Coit, the $290 an hour HLGR lawyer whom Randy Geller put in charge of defending UO against former UOPD officer James Cleavenger’s “Bowl of Dicks” lawsuit, on…
Award winning investigative reporter Lee Van der Voo has the report, here: … The proposal now before the Oregon State Bar seeks to change that, however. The proposal comes from the bar’s Disciplinary System Review Committee, which looked at what works and what doesn’t and also considered the findings of…
Updated with a letter in the ODE from a variety of student groups raising questions about the administration’s seriousness in consulting them about the tuition increases, here: University of Oregon campus community, On Jan. 4, a new term began for most students at the UO, and with that began another round…