From Kelsey Thalhofer in the RG: One of TV’s most notorious drug-dealing villains will be visiting Lane Community College this month to give the keynote speech at the community’s 2014 Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration. And it seems that LCC was a little more forthcoming about his contract than UO…
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The in-depth Washington Monthly article is here:
Colleges mostly see this as a win-win situation, solving budget woes and adding to the value of the school’s education at the same time. But with the impact of the boom still reverberating, pockets of dissent are emerging. In states like Washington and California, there are growing complaints that the influx of foreign students is crowding local students out of their own state schools. Meanwhile, at least some Chinese students are complaining that American universities exploit them by charging extra fees. It’s difficult to argue against the valuable opportunities for cultural exchange and public diplomacy that international education provides. But at the current scale, Chinese students have become so concentrated on some campuses that in many ways it’s as if they were attending separate schools within schools.
International students bring a lot of money into the United States, contributing roughly $22 billion to the U.S. economy in 2012, according to one estimate. Francisco Sánchez, the undersecretary for international trade at the Commerce Department, has said the U.S. has “no better export” than higher education, and Larry Summers, former secretary of the treasury and former Harvard president, lists “exporting higher education”—bringing more international students to American institutions—as a key part of his recommendations for economic growth.
I wonder where UO’s exports of undergraduate degrees would put us, on a ranking of Oregon’s most successful foreign trade industries?
And former UO professor Arif Dirlik sends this warning about the influence of Chinese money on academic studies of China, with regard to the Tianamen square demonstrations and the Chinese government sposored Confucius Institutes:
Tiananmen commemorations, June 4,1989—June 4, 2013
The Tiananmen Tragedy of June 1989 is significant not just for humanitarian but also for historical and political reasons. It is a humane obligation to recall those who lost their lives and those who continue to suffer under its shadow. Analysis of the forces that brought it about, and the forces that issued from it, requires confrontation of questions of crucial importance to understanding the PRC’s development over the last three decades–as well as of outsiders’ reaction to and entanglement with that development. A broad group of China scholars and other specialists involved in the study of the PRC is urging centers for China Studies (including the so-called Confucius Institutes) to use this occasion to discuss issues of democracy, human rights and social justice with reference to the PRC. These issues are pertinent to the contemporary world in general. They include especially issues of complicity in the perpetuation of human rights abuses of outsiders involved with oppressive regimes in some capacity or other that have been dramatized by the recent American Studies Association decision to boycott universities in Israel. Attached here are the statement, “We Will Not Forget June 4th,” with a list of signatories, and a draft copy of the letter being circulated to Confucius Institutes by Dr. Stephen Levine on their behalf. Further information may be found on the website, http://www.june4commemoration.org
Arif Dirlik, Independent scholar, Eugene, OR (Knight Professor of Social Science, UO, 2001-2006)
Diane Dietz has the story in the RG. Good to see Roger Thompson’s admissions office is doing more than organizing sham events to cover for our administrators’ bowl game junkets. Speaking of which, President Gottfredson’s office is now denying they have any public records showing which UO administrators and spouses got junkets “paid work related travel” to the San Antonio Bowl:
The university has searched for, but was unable to locate, records responsive to your request made 12/24/2013. The office considers this to be fully responsive to your request, and will now close your matter. Thank you for contacting the office with your request.
Sure. Last year’s Fiesta Bowl memo is here. I wonder why JH is so secretive about this year’s list?
1/6/2014: Ducks to lose money on Alamo Bowl after administrator junkets?
Now 3 weeks, and still no memo from the public records office. But Troy Brynelson has a great article in the ODE about our administration’s tortured efforts to justify their Alamo Bowl junkets as a worthwhile admissions recruiting trip, here.
12/30/13: More than two weeks since I made this request, and UO is still hiding the memo showing which administrators got Alamo bowl junkets.
12/27/2013 update from Lewis Kamb in the Seattle Times:
For the Alamo Bowl, which pays nearly $3.2 million to the conference, the conference pays a school $1.2 million, plus up to 500 charter seats and the ticket subsidy.
“The reimbursement usually does not cover the entire bowl game expense amount,” the UW’s Sasaki said.
True, but each university also controls the size of its travel party to a bowl game — a factor that largely determines whether it financially wins, loses or breaks even.
Then there’s the $50K bonus we have to pay Rob Mullens.
12/26/22013: Ducks cancel Alamo Bowl junkets over tax issues
Or maybe they just gave them a different name. On Dec 11 I made this public records request, after hearing rumors that President Gottfredson had cut back on the number of UO administrators and spouses getting all-expense-paid trips to this year’s bowl game:
12/11/2013: This is a public records request for a copy of any email, memos, or similar announcing which UO employees will get paid junkets to this year’s “Valero Alamo Bowl”. I ask for a fee-waiver on the basis of public interest.
These trips are a potential conflict of interest for UO administrators like VPFA Jamie Moffitt, who must make tough decisions about cutting athletics subsidies after getting a sweet free vacation from the Ducks. Just to make sure the public records office knew what I was asking for, I followed up with a link to last year’s announcement – which took a month or so to obtain, if memory serves me:
12/11/2013: if you need any clarification on this PR request about junkets, last year’s announcement from President Gottfredson is here:
Update: With the faculty hiring season well under way, I thought I’d repost this classic.
7/4/2013 AA Plan update: For the first time in living memory, Penny Daugherty’s Affirmative Action Office has managed to complete the federally required annual update to UO’s AA Plan on schedule. Last time she and Randy Geller got President Gottfredson to backdate it just as Frohnmayer regularly did, making it look like UO was in compliance when it wasn’t. The updates are here, the “Executive Order” report deals with race and gender.
Take a look at Table 3 on page 41. Using the federally specified methodology and the latest NCES data, UO’s tenure track faculty is representative of the available pool of Phd’s with respect to race/ethnicity in every single job group. For women, there is under-representation in Music, Education, CAS Humanities, and CAS Sciences:
How can this be, when a quick glance around UO reveals so few minorities? It’s because the available pool of minority PhD’s is very small. Logically, you’d think we should focus our efforts on increasing the number of minorities who get PhD’s. (Which the recent SCOTUS decision leaves some scope for.)
Nope. Instead we’ve developed a “beggar thy other universities” Under-represented Minority Recruitment Plan, paying departments $90K for every existing racial or ethnic minority TTF PhD we are able to keep another university from hiring. UO spends about $1M a year on this. And to add to the absurdity, there’s nothing in the UMRP for hiring women, and it doesn’t apply to NTTFs. And don’t get me started on SES, political, or religious diversity. UO wants faculty who look different, not faculty who think different.
When it comes to UO’s central administration , they mostly care about hiring their cronies for “special assistant” jobs without open affirmative-action compliant searches. Former Journalism Dean Tim Gleason is the latest case.
Back in 2006 I filed a complaint with the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights about the UMRP, which at the time was giving the money directly to the minority faculty, who often took it as summer salary. Unequal pay for equal work. It took a lot of public records requests, a bar ethics complaint against Melinda Grier, and a long talk with Associate AG David Leith at the Oregon DOJ, but eventually UO changed the plan to give the money to departments, and require them to ensure the funding was not distributed solely on the basis of race.
So while the UMRP may now be mostly legal (though see below for some of the stunts Russ Tomlin pulled) it’s still stupid, and there’s no sign that new VPAA Doug Blandy is going to try and fix it.
Posted on request of an anonymous reader, who writes “In a time that has been so divisive on campus – athletics vs academics, unions vs admin, etc – perhaps a bit of an inspiration from the UOM to work together to complete the hard work required to make a functioning…
Update: No word on pay and perqs or Aliotti’s buy out deal, if any. Aliotti was getting $420K, see below. “The well is dry” for external equity raises for faculty, but it’s flowing freely over at Rob Mullen’s football operations offices, thanks in no part to the millions in subsidies…
The Senate Ad Hoc Freedom Committee, chaired by Michael Dreiling (Sociology prof and faculty union president) has now met several times with President Gottfredson and his advisers. The Committee has posted its draft Academic Freedom policy on the Senate website, here, along with an explanatory memo. (Full disclosure: I am part…
Betsy Hammond has the story in the Oregonian. 40th out of 50 states, by the most optimistic measure. 50th out of 50 by another. What can a UO professor do to help fix this? Organize a summer UO SAIL camp for your department, to help low SES Oregon students learn…
From http://fieldmuseum.org/explore/dino-discovery:
PSU story here: The Faculty Senate also passed a resolution Monday demanding that the university provide faculty with a copy of the all-funds budget, which would include detailed line items. The motion passed 48 to 0 vote, with four abstentions, says Bob Liebman, presiding officer of the Senate. Their union is…
Dear Colleagues, Welcome back to campus. I hope you had an enjoyable and restful holiday break. The year 2013 was a remarkable one for our university. It was a year bracketed by the celebration of two bowl-game victories; a year of historic changes in our governance structure accompanied by steadfast…
That would be at UNC, part of what will likely be a long series of revelations: On three occasions, the records show two athlete support program counselors offered football tickets and food to Nyang’oro and his family. In one, Reynolds told Nyang’oro he would be “guest coaching,” which meant that…
US News has come with a new ranking scheme, and we’re #17. Betsy Hammond has a slightly skeptical report in the Oregonian. And sure enough, if you go to US News you get their definition of efficient: U.S. News has analyzed efficiency for a second time as both public and…
From a paper presented at the American Economic Association meetings last week: Comparing four cohorts of economics Ph.D.s by year graduated (from 1997 through 2011), the study found that while a majority of those who are employed as economists still enter academe, that share is going down. And while salaries…
That was in 2010, from their report to the Senate on the proposal to give UO an independent board: http://senate.uoregon.edu/files/SBCNewPartRep20101109.pdf 3) Transparency and accountability. If the UO achieves a new degree of autonomy from the OUS and the Oregon Legislature, we are concerned that the UO be held to high…