Dear Colleagues, It is my duty today to announce that Michael Moffitt, dean, Philip H. Knight chair and professor of law, has chosen to step down as dean effective July 1, 2017. Michael will return to his faculty role, which he has held since joining the University of Oregon School…
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An interesting column from UO student Negina Pirzad in the Daily Emerald, with quotes from other UO students who are and aren’t using Americanized first names. I’ve always enjoyed seeing new students try this out. My ancestor Jost Herbach was all for switching, although he appears to have been misinformed about how easy a time…
Dréos is a Celtic music ensemble of performing composers who invent and arrange new and old music using a traditional vocabulary. Following the October 2015 release of their debut recording, you’re invited to join with this exciting trio as they light up the dance music of Ireland and Scotland. Dréos…
of the effectiveness of Governor Brown’s modest effort to reform Oregon’s public records law. The legislative proposals sound solid though. Gordon Friedman has the report in the Salem Statesman-Journal, here.
The agenda is below, I’ll try and live-blog some. Video here. The IDEAL framework is UO’s latest attempt at a diversity plan. Read it. In other diversity news, UO’s former Diversity Director Charles Martinez will be at the Eugene City Club on Friday, with a panel of UO minority student leaders.…
Update: Diane Dietz has more in the RG here: … Schill noted the earning gap between those with a college degree and those with only a high school diploma. Over a lifetime, the college graduate earns 1.6 times more money. “That’s $1 million on average, (compared with) those with only a…
UO’s decision to terminate the 160over90 branders makes the Times Higher Education (UK), here.
After a long fight with the usual backward-thinking Johnson Hall admins, Prof. Emmett Brown (Physics) and the UO Senate’s Radiation and Skateboard Safety Committee have succeeded in exempting cold-fusion powered hoverboards from the new Emergency Electronic Skateboard Ban Policy: In related news, the UOPD is confiscating the spontaneously combustible electronic skateboards from students and shipping…
As published in Nature, here. Oh, wait, that’s 9PM Jan 26th *1700*, as estimated from Japanese tsunami records: But just in case I don’t think I’ll be working late in PLC on Tuesday night.
While Google’s targeting algorithm knows enough from mining my gmail account and web searches to correctly deduce the importance of “Security v. Privacy” to my everyday drama, they apparently don’t know I completed my B.S. degree a while back. I wonder what the law school is paying per click-through: Not a bad idea though. The law…
Cocktail party version: In a new paper in eLife UO biochemist Ken Prehoda and co-authors show that a simple mutation was all it took to allow single-celled organisms to evolve into the cooperative assemblies that formed the multi-cellular choanoflagellate slime-molds that you and I are descended from. While one co-author on the paper…
UO Professor Naomi Zack (Philosophy) is talking today at 12:00 at the ceremony in the Ford Alumni Center. She asked me to post this Eric Kelderman report on her thoughts about the award, in the Chronicle here: … Ms. Zack said she was skeptical of some of the measures underway at…
1/19/2016: The NY Times has the report here:
The University of Cincinnati has agreed to pay $4.85 million to the family of an unarmed black man who was shot to death in July by one of its police officers, a settlement that also requires the college to provide an undergraduate education to his 12 children, create a memorial to him on campus and include his family in discussions on police reform.
… Mr. DuBose, 43, was shot and killed on July 19 by Officer Ray Tensing, who pulled him over in a Cincinnati neighborhood adjacent to the campus because his car lacked a front license plate. The shooting was captured on a body camera, and Officer Tensing, who was fired from the department, faces trial on a charge of murder.
Here at UO, there’s still no formal announcement of when UOPD Chief McDermed will be replaced by new Assistant Chief of Police Chou Her. Presumably UO is delaying the announcement so as not to damage its efforts to convince the judge in the Bowl of Dicks trial to cancel the jury’s $755K award to former UOPD officer James Cleavenger. That hearing is Feb 12th.
The federal jury agreed that McDermed and other UOPD officers had violated the First Amendment by retaliating against Cleavenger for his opposition to arming the UOPD with Tazers. On which note the NYT adds:
Mr. DuBose is not the first black man to die as a result of an encounter with the University of Cincinnati police, and he will not be the first to have a memorial on campus. Kelly Brinson, 45, a psychiatric patient, and Everette Howard, 18, a student, died in 2010 and 2011 after campus officers fired stun guns at them, according to lawsuits filed by their families.
Of course campus police can be victims of shootings as well as perpetrators. It’s not clear if armed police are safer, even for themselves. One particularly sad story comes from the University of Central Florida, where a university cop was shot and killed by another officer, who was trying to control drinking at football game tailgate parties.
The green-shirted man with the gun is an undercover UCF police officer, pointing his pistol at a drunk UCF student. The student apparently grabbed the gun, it went off, and a uniformed police officer who hadn’t been told of the operation then shot and killed the undercover officer.
What happened to Richard Turkiewicz, the UCF police chief who set up this botched operation? Frances Dyke, former UO VPFA, hired him as UO’s interim Director of Public Safety. No kidding. Dyke then went on to persuade the Oregon legislature to allow UO to set up its own armed police force.
What sort of oversight does UO have for its police?
7/29/2015: Prosecutor and Trustee says university police force should be disbanded