“Around the O” is the official UO blog that Bob Berdahl, Scott Coltrane, and Jim Bean paid former Journalism Dean Tim Gleason to start, to counteract the baleful influence of UO Matters: Gleason took the money, but he didn’t deliver: But now it’s all good. Instead of Gleason, UO has a new…
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Elizabeth Hayes has the news in the Portland Business Journal, here. Just kidding about the stadium, they want the money for research and teaching. This comes just after OHSU matched Phil Knight’s $500M gift for cancer research with private money plus $200M from the state legislature. The last time UO got…
10/26/2015: Noah McGraw has the news in the Emerald, here. The process was considerably more open than that which led to the appointment and reappointment of the faculty trustee, Susan Gary. Good for ASUO. Not sure if the legislature has confirmed this yet.
9/25/2015: UO Student Trustee Helena Schlegel resigns from Board on principle
10/26/2015: UVA, UBC, and now UNC. InsideHigherEd has the latest here: Fennebresque, a lawyer who has been on the board since 2011 and became its chair last year, was seen as largely responsible for pushing out the previous president, Thomas W. Ross, for reasons that were never quite clear. He led the search for…
Last spring Professors Kim Sheehan (Advertising and PAGIA Chair) and Tim Gleason (Journalism and Faculty Athletics Representative) refused to let me attend a meeting of the Presidential Advisory Group on Intercollegiate Athletics, as explained in detail here.
President Mike Gottfredson had set up the PAGIA – with handpicked members – to replace the UO Senate’s elected Intercollegiate Athletics Committee, in the midst of the basketball rape allegations cover-up. The IAC is known for asking tough questions about athletics at UO and keeping the Senate informed. The PAGIA, on the other hand is still meeting in secret, and the administration is still letting athletic director Rob Mullens skip IAC meetings and avoid IAC questions.
UO Matters has now obtained a secret video of what seems to be a PAGIA meeting. It shows some disturbing conversations between the president and his advisors, about a plan to subvert academic standards so that the football coach can recruit the kinds of “student-athlete” transfers needed to get the team back to winning. They lay this all out in explicit detail. Much of the plan is not just a violation of NCAA rules, it is blatantly illegal, as the meeting participants openly acknowledge.
We all know this sort of thing has been going on for a long time, and we all know the administration and the NCAA winks and chuckles at it. I don’t think it’s funny. I think it’s an outrageous effort to subvert higher education and the proud academic tradition that universities like ours once stood for.
I’m against it. Therefore I felt I had no choice but to post the video below, despite the inevitable retaliation that will follow:
Rich Read has the report in the Oregonian, here. The record enrollments are at Lewis and Clark in Portland (UO’s should be out next week), and I’m kidding about their winning football season: Hmm, maybe there are some students out there who don’t really want to go to a football factory…
10/24/2015 update: From the Ornstein stories in the Chronicle and ProPublica:
“I don’t blame the University of Oregon for a rape,” she said. “It’s not their fault. I blame them for how they responded to it. I found out months later that every single meeting I had with a therapist, she took detailed notes on, and the University of Oregon had read these notes before I had even seen them.”
And now there’s a Slate op-ed about the reports, here:
Viewing medical records for medical reasons could help a university protect a student at risk of harm. But the University of Oregon’s meddling into Hanson’s private account of her rape would have only helped the university protect itself. The value of therapy lies in the patient’s expectation of confidentiality; if a student thinks her private exchanges with a doctor could resurface in the office of a university administrator, helping her heal will be much harder. A therapist’s office can be one of the only safe spaces available to a rape survivor on a college campus. Exploiting that trust to try to avoid paying a legal settlement is a cynical maneuver that can only exacerbate an already-low rape reporting rate.
The Jane Doe records seizure happened on Doug Park and Sam Hill’s watch. The Hanson incident apparently took place while Randy Geller was GC. I think the correct phrase here is “institutional betrayal”.
10/23/2015: Chronicle and ProPublica report on UO counseling record confidentiality
Reporting by Charles Ornstein, here. He picks up on the report first made in the Eugene Weekly in May by Camilla Mortensen, below. (Without citing her – wow is that bad form.)
Ornstein gets Doug Park to offer a complete and utter apology for the UO General Counsel Office’s behavior in these two cases:
A bold claim? I’ve yet to meet the parent that could out-bargain a crying baby. Alison Gopnik, author of “The Scientist in the Crib“, will explain this Friday at 7PM in 100 Willamette Hall. Not into crying, or infants? Read her detective work on Buddhism and Hume in the Atlantic, here.
10/22/2015: The one time I try blogging about something that couldn’t possibly involve a public records scandal, it turns out it involves a public records scandal. Mark Baker has the report in the RG here. 10/19/2015: EUG Flying People to depart for LCC? Bob Keefer has the rumor in Eugene Art Talk, here.…
10/22/2015: Just got back from this. It was the usual, with a large helping of self-congratulation on the side. I wonder how much the event cost, who paid for it, and how intelligent people can sit through this pablum. Oh, right, free lunch and an all-expense paid trip to Oregon. As my PhD…
Over the summer former Interim President Coltrane enacted three emergency IT policies. The administration is now looking to make them permanent, and is asking for feedback. My own initial reaction, as someone that Coltrane’s administration tried to fire over the UO Presidential Archives release (and he did fire two others) is…
That’s Chiles. Part of the B-School. Across Kincaid from the “Duckstore”, behind the hotdog stand. AVP for Collaboration Chuck Triplett will be taking attendance, so don’t ditch this one. I did a little live-blogging below. Senate Meeting Agenda – October 21, 2015. Agenda | Watch Live [Not working] Rm 128, Chiles; 3:00-5:00 pm 3:00 pm Introductory…
SAIL is UO’s faculty volunteer led program to encourage low-SES first generation students to go to college, by bringing them to campus for free summer day-camps on different academic subjects. They meet a lot of faculty and undergraduate mentors, and come back every summer during HS for a different camp, so by…
Darren Rovell from ESPN has the news here: Cleveland Browns cornerback Ifo Ekpre-Olomu collected a $3 million insurance policy on Monday for slipping in the NFL draft, a source confirmed to ESPN.com. It’s the most a college player has ever collected on a loss of value policy, which insures the…
Normally they post this by the quarter, but, in my opinion, UO didn’t want to reveal the administrative and athletics spending during SEIU and faculty union bargaining (UAUO’s Unfair Labor Practices complaint is here) so this time it’s all in one pdf for the 2014-15 AY. Handy reverse-engineered excel spreadsheets, courtesy of a…