Bargaining session XVI is Friday at 9AM, Knight Library Collaboration Room. For a live-blog check the faculty union’s facebook page, here. (Link fixed.) The faculty union has made a 3-year economic proposal: FY16: ATB 2%. FY17:ATB 1.5%, Equity 1.5%. FY18:ATB 1%, Merit 4%. Previous bargaining posts are here. VPFA Jamie Moffitt has plenty…
Posts published in “Uncategorized”
7/15/2015: 7/13/2015: New UO President Mike Schill is “wading through honey” Daily Emerald reporters Lauren Garetto and Eder Campuzano have the story on Schill’s first 13 days as UO president. Great stuff, read it all here.
Austin Meek, here: Oregon’s gamble on Adams might pay off in time. Right now, all the Ducks have is a graduate transfer who hasn’t graduated and distraction simmering in the background. If you’re wondering how we got here, this is the short version. Sometime in the past week, Eastern Washington posted…
7/14/2015, in The New Yorker:
… we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long—long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line—and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.
… By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.” In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, …
OSSPAC estimates that in the I-5 corridor it will take between one and three months after the earthquake to restore electricity, a month to a year to restore drinking water and sewer service, six months to a year to restore major highways, and eighteen months to restore health-care facilities.
7/4/2015: UO has no public records on earthquake certifications of buildings?
No, I’m not talking about spare changers like UO’s Jim O’Fallon and Mike Glazier, the lawyer UO’s academic side paid to defend Chip Kelly. There’s real money out there for real lawyers who take on the cartel. Steve Berkowitz of USA Today has the $46M story.
Wow, that’s almost as much as Commissioner Larry Scott makes every 4 hours. Former reporter Rob Moseley has the Duck press release here. In another demonstration of the NCAA’s prime directive that no black man should make money off college sports, it looks like almost none of this money goes to the revenue…
7/12/2015 update: AAUP press release here: The hearing committee, reporting on March 20, was unanimous in its findings. It found that removal with cause should not be considered. As to the ADA, it found that the charge was not substantiated by testimony. As to sexual harassment as defined at LSU,…
Rich Read has the story in the Oregonian, here: In Oregon, the main beef with Hass’s plan is that it could give more money to middle-income students than to the state’s most needy high-school graduates. … “If you’re a middle-income student that does not receive Pell, this program will cover…
Jeff Manning has the report in the Oregonian, here.
7/11/2015 update: Matt Prehm has an interview with Duck spokesperson Craig Pintens on basketball tickets, here:
The Ducks averaged just 6,209 fans per home game during the 2014-15 season, ranking seventh in the Pac-12. It was the lowest figure since 1992 when an average of 5,819 fans attended games at McArthur Court.
… The Athletic Department operates on zero funding from the University of Oregon [Yeah, sure it does], and so every penny can sometimes count. That’s why when Oregon decided to slash prices across the board – a 34-percent slash on average – was such a difficult decision.
The Athletic Department is reporting a near 90-percent season ticket renewal rate from last season, and while that’s well above the 80-percent renewal norm for the basketball team, it’s still a huge financial hit with the slashed prices.
… With a better marketing plan of the program, ticket costs slashed, and a better non-conference schedule Oregon is seeing early returns pay off.
No, actually this isn’t paying off. I’m no economist, but if you cut prices 34% and sales only increase by 10 points on a base of 80 – lets call that 13% – total revenue will drop. As it did. And as explained below the basketball program is now losing millions – even if you ignore the sunk costs of the $13.5M Knight Arena bond payments.
And it seems that they are prepared to lose more millions to avoid the embarrassment of having the country’s most expensive college arena sit half empty. Meanwhile, the millions in hidden subsidies from the academic continue – including the $450K we pay athletics each year for the Knight Arena land.
Meanwhile Coach Altman has also succeeded in driving away the UO student fans:
… Based on numbers given to me by [Duck PR flack Craig Pintens], the average student attendance for this season was 989 per game. Last season, they were 1,539. In 2012, it was 1,541. In 2011, it was 1,574.
5/15/2015: UO could save $3M a year by shutting down basketball, mothballing Knight Arena
Jake New has the InsideHigherEd story here: Last month, New York became the second state to require colleges to note on a transcript if a student was suspended or dismissed for sexual assault. Though the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act is sometimes erroneously cited by colleges as preventing them…
Trip report here. In unrelated news, the UO administration sends out a helpful reminder to the faculty: Dear UO colleagues, With the change in state law related to marijuana use, the purpose of this memo is to ensure that our campus community is aware that federal law and UO policy will continue…