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12/10/2013 update: All in all, this meeting was a refreshing effort by Scott Coltrane and Brad Shelton to tell the faculty a little about what’s going on at UO and get some feedback about where to go w.r.t. future priorities. About 30 faculty risked frostbite and ostracism by the administration to show up and ask some skeptical questions.

The presentation on enrollment patterns was well done, and led to a good discussion about tradeoffs. No big surprises: UO students are well below our comparators in SATs and in graduation rates.

The information about faculty output and research, on the other hand, was pretty amateurish. We got the same basic story discussed in my November analysis of Coltrane’s benchmarking report, here. UO’s faculty is extremely productive when it comes to graduating undergraduates – twice the number of the other AAU publics. Not so much and falling when it comes to PhDs. There was no effort to control for med school / engineering school effects. Shelton and Coltrane got called out on this many times, and asked how they expected us to meaningfully contribute to discussion about academic priorities without good data. UO has these data, but for whatever reason they decided not to show them to the faculty. After the complaints, they promised to do so at a future meeting. This response was also a welcome improvement in transparency.

The most disappointing part to me, and judging by the questions, also to others, was the near total absence of financial data. It’s hard to talk about priorities when you don’t know the constraints. Shelton insisted that the only reliable data was that UO’s budget, per undergraduate, is about half the AAU average.  The meeting concluded with a discussion of whether or not we could stay in the AAU, and whether or not we should try, given the opportunity cost.

As it happens, Johnson Hall has been much more forthcoming with the new UO Board than it ever has been with the faculty, and I’ve been able to get the documents from the first Board meeting. I haven’t had time to look them over yet, but the comments are open:

• 01 Overview.pdf
• 02 Diversity.pdf
• 03 Academic.pdf
• 04 Faculty and Staff.pdf
• 05 Research.pdf
• 06 Students.pdf
• 07 Finance.pdf
• 08 Athletics.pdf
• 09 University Advancement.pdf
• 10 Benchmarking.pdf
• Admissions viewbook 2014 resident.pdf
• Letter from the President.pdf
• Notice of Meeting 11 11 13_0.pdf
• Notice of Meeting 102413.pdf
• Orientation Meeting Agenda 102913.pdf
• Orientation Meeting Agenda 111113_0.pdf
• Powering the State’s Economy 2013.pdf
• UO OEM Annual Report 2012.pdf
• UO Snapshot 2013 FINAL 02-05-13 rev 10-15-13.pdf

12/2/2013: Coltrane on benchmarking and priorities

Dear Campus Community,

As the President described in remarks to the Senate at its last meeting, I invite you to

That would be the Oregon State University Board of Trustees. Betsy Hammond has the story in the Oregonian here. The link to the OSU Trustees page with notice of the public meeting is here. They also issued a press release telling everyone the meeting would be public. The UO Trustees met…