Last year’s retreat was quite informative. The live-blog is here, highlights: when Provost Coltrane and his VP for Finance Jamie Moffitt reveal that UO’s well is far from dry, so long as you’re talking bond sales or administrative pork rather than faculty raises, and when VP for Development Mike Andreassen makes…
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9/3/2014 update: Apparently the administration tried to keep this year’s list secret too – even from faculty serving the on relevant tenure committees. Bizarre. Keep these “secret” documents coming, I’m happy to post them. 9/2/2014: Curious about who got tenure and promotions this year? Here’s the list. In the past…
Diane Dietz has the story in the RG. UO currently spends about $1.2M subsidizing the men’s and women’s golf teams. I thought the idea to build them a special golf course had died, but it’s back, still without any faculty review of the budget etc. Presumably the developers’ business model…
9/1/2014: Diane Dietz has the report in the RG:
The university is floating a proposal to hire a “cluster” of three new professors to rebuild the classical genetics and genomics program at the University of Oregon and to launch a Center for Genome Function. … “You could think of it as re-establishing our eminence in this field,” said Eric Selker, whose work in epigenetics mirrors fundamental genetics research.
Researchers are likely to find out beginning this fall whether donors are ready to help with their cluster proposals.
The UO’s success in genetics in the 1960s and ’70s was built on just such a “cluster hire” as the university now contemplates, [Frank] Stahl said.
8/24/2014: Systems biology cluster hire proposal
Diane Dietz has the report on a real cluster of excellence proposal:
Last year Mullens paid Nicholls State $450K for the same job, Sam Stites report in the RG here.
That would be at Chicago State University. Apparently the president fired a university attorney who refused to go along with an attempt to hide public records. This would never happen at the University of Oregon. A new judge has just affirmed the verdict against the president and board of trustees,…
Provost (now Interim President) Scott Coltrane objecting in April to still pending Senate legislation to eliminate hidden athletic subsidies and enforce the 2004 agreement to make athletics contribute to UO’s academic mission: An End to Subsidies for the UO Athletic Department Number: US13/14-12 Date of Notice: Wed, 11/13/2013 Legislation, Resolution,…
As we know from the snowball fight, PR flacks desperate for a feel-good story will do stupid things. Yahoo sports has the latest from USC. As the LA Times notes about the trend for ADs to hire ex-reporters, as UO did with the RG’s Rob Moseley: “There’s obviously a self-serving interest…
10-11 AM, 8/27/2014, Ford Alumni Center. As usual, nothing is a quote unless in quotes. About 35 in the audience, 7 panelists. Short version: Very strange session, basically a bunch of UO staff pitching the effectiveness of their various programs, no comments or questions from panel. Chair Diets starts with…
Sorry to be so blunt, but it’s hard to see how else to interpret this. Cocktail party version: I was trying to get some info about Gottfredson’s sexual assault review panel. Dave Hubin tried to charge me $508 for the public records, so I made requests to the universities where the…
Update: (Posts on prostitute warning, public records, and panel history here.) Two weeks after my public records request, UO has finally disclosed what it is paying the panelists Gottfredson, Mullens, and Holmes appointed to review their response to the rape allegations and UO policies. $10K each, plus expenses: Honorarium The…
Josephine Wollington has the story in the RG about this very unusual mid-negotiation change and the positive response from the union leadership. This is great news, Rudnick and Matthews have been an expensive disaster for UO. It seems that the new leadership wants a less confrontational approach, and isn’t going…
Update: The official UO post on the mission statement mentioned below is now getting some comments, here. As President, Dave Frohnmayer would trot out UO’s AAU membership as a way of silencing faculty who criticized him for shifting priorities, administrative effort, and money towards his goal of running a big-time…
The UO faculty union and the Senate fought hard with President Gottfredson over academic freedom. Gottfredson and his negotiators Tim Gleason, Doug Blandy, Randy Geller and Sharon Rudnick wanted the union contract to include rules requiring civility and proper respect, and they didn’t want the university to give explicit protection for…
7/7/2014: I’m no law professor, but this complaint against UOPD Chief Carolyn McDermed and others raises plenty of questions about UO’s new sworn and armed police department: The court docket is here (courtesy of the RECAP program that Aaron Swartz and Carl Malamud helped create). The complaint, well worth reading…