https://www.pratt.edu/news/view/pratt-institute-selects-frances-bronet-as-the-colleges-12th-president. Or maybe her dream job is RISD president. I forget. Tip to Pratt readers: Bronet is not a French name, it’s pronounced like it’s spelled with a hard t. Not that she cares. If I remember the history right, when Gottfredson got fired Provost Coltrane got promoted to Interim…
UO Matters
The UO administration is now requiring all search committee members to take a two-hour training on implicit bias. I did an abbreviated version at a BOT meeting last year, and I’m at one of the three long versions right now, with about 60 other faculty and administrators. The presenter, Erik…
The usual suspects have assured me that there is no truth to the rumors that the faculty club has been closed due to gambling accusations. See you there tomorrow: BTW, the spread has Taggart to lose by 10 points.
Here. Now maybe Institutional Research will release the latest UO and comparator salary data?
10/9/2017 update:
In what may be it’s fastest turnaround time since I asked Dave Hubin for a copy of Jim Bean’s sabbatical contract, UO’s Public Records Office says today that “there are no responsive records” to the LA Times request for federal subpoenas or search warrants involving Altman or his coaches. For comparison, here are the last 3 or so months of the public records log.
Still no Tim Gleason rhabdo docs for HBO, no new Bach docs, etc:
10/9/2017:
According to the date stamp, this report on some of Tim Gleason’s spending as the NCAA’s Faculty Athletics Representative was pulled on Sept 25th – and that was only after they’d claimed they didn’t have any BANNER records, and made me file another request. But Kevin Reed’s Public Records Office didn’t send this to me until Oct 6th:
And now they want $84.92 to explain how much more the academic side is paying to help do the NCAA cartel’s job:
10/06/2017
Dear Mr. Harbaugh:
The University of Oregon has received your public records request for “This is a public records request for records showing the expenditures of the Faculty Athletics Representative and his office, from July 1 2010 to the present” on 09/22/2017, attached. The office has at least some documents responsive to your request. With this email, the office is providing you with an estimate to respond to your requests.
Some records have been provided to you in response to your public records request 2018-PRR-072 for “…a BANNER reports showing the expenditures of the Faculty Athletic Representative and his office, from July 1 2010 to [9/13/2017]”. However, the University possesses additional records that are responsive to your current, more general, request
The office estimates the actual cost of responding to this request to be $84.92. Upon receipt of a check made payable to the University of Oregon for that amount, the office will proceed to locate, copy, and provide the records you have requested that are not exempt from disclosure. Your check may be sent to the attention of Office of Public Records, 6207 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-6207.
The university has received your request for a fee waiver for these records. The decision to waive or reduce fees is discretionary with the public body. After considering your request, the office does not consider that the totality of the circumstances you presented meets the standard for a fee waiver.
… Thank you for contacting us with your request.
Sincerely,
Office of Public Records
6207 University of Oregon | Eugene, OR 97403-6207
(541) 346-6823 | [email protected]
Meanwhile, it’s not clear where the HBO request for Gleason’s rhabdo docs is at. The PR office is way behind. Perhaps they’re busy with FBI search warrants?
9/22/2017: Apparently HBO has paid UO the $754.28 Tim Gleason wanted for the rhabdo docs, and presumably he’s now compiling them. I’m not sure if Gleason gets the money, or if it will go to his office and offset some of the cost to the academic budget of his FAR salary, and I’m still waiting for the docs showing just how much his FAR office is costing UO.
9/21/2017: On Sept 13th I made a simple public records request (at bottom of post) for an accounting report that would show how much money it’s costing the academic side for UO Journalism Prof Tim Gleason’s NCAA “Faculty Athletics Representative” office. Today I got a response denying my request on the grounds that there is no such record.
This idea has been kicking around for a few years, and was most recently presented to the Trustees at their Nebraska game home meeting. Saul Hubbard has an extensive story with many quotes in the RG here.
Inside Higher Ed: [Portland State University professor] Bruce Gilley’s eyebrow-raising essay in favor of colonialism has been scrubbed from the scholarly record, but not for any of the reasons cited by its critics. (Among them: that it was historically inaccurate, that it ignored the vast literature on colonialism and colonial-era atrocities, that…
Posted for those who, like me, would have liked to have been able to hear it delivered in person. Pre-recorded video here. The comments are open. The elevator version:
Someone made $50M, Mike Schill got them to give it to UO, and now he’s going to spend it to make the university better.
It would have been a long speech. Here are some highlights:
This fall, we welcomed the most diverse class of incoming students in our history. These amazing students from every county in Oregon, every state in the nation, and more than 100 countries cannot be defined in simple terms. Many of them are the first in their families to attend college, as was I.
We are taking steps toward helping our students be successful and graduate on-time through investments in advising and progress tracking, by working with the University Senate to revise curriculum and programming, and by enhancing student engagement opportunities through undergraduate research, academic residential communities, and freshman interest groups. With all the correct measures in place, we are keeping at risk students on track as well as supporting all students with the academic studies. We recognize that we are here to help the students and our resources can be used at their disposal.
In other instances and at other universities, students seek to disinvite or shout down speakers they don’t agree with. Faculty who ask probing questions are sometimes vilified as sexist or racist creating a chilling effect on-campus speech and robust discussion. As part of our commitment to excellence and to producing research and students who will make an impact I want to strongly reiterate the University of Oregon’s core values of protecting freedom of speech, academic freedom, and the virtues of robust discussion and debate. If someone says something we don’t like, we should not try to shut them down. That is not what we do in an open democracy. Instead—to paraphrase one of our most monumental Supreme Court justices, Louis D. Brandeis—the antidote to speech we don’t like is MORE SPEECH.
Today I am delighted and humbled to announce that this summer the University of Oregon received a $50 million gift to further excellence at the university over the next five years. … Today, I would like to announce the first five allocations from the Presidential Fund for Excellence.
First, … Like all good academic ideas, the Initiative in Data Sciences bubbled up from the faculty. I have repeatedly heard that we need to develop greater capacity to support our teaching and research in fields as disparate as literature, economics, geography, biology, business, computer science, and design. With the growth of big data comes the need for sophisticated applications and techniques to understand underlying trends and scientific, literary, economic, and social phenomena. And our students need to learn how to apply these methods. Data Science will help connect our disciplines and increase our capacity for discovery. If you would like to learn more about Data Science you may be interested in checking out this data science bootcamp for more information.
Second, I will further invest in faculty, because an excellent university is only as good as its faculty. … , I am earmarking funds from the Presidential Fund for Excellence to match gifts to create nine new faculty chairs.
For my third allocation, I will dedicate money from the Presidents Fund for Excellence to support student success programming at the Black Cultural Center. I am extremely excited about this project and can’t wait to break ground sometime in the summer of 2018.
My fourth investment … to support the School of Journalism and Communication’s plan to create a new Media Center for Science and Technology.
For my fifth allocation, I am awarding the College of Education funds to seed a new and exciting initiative that holds the promise of improving the quality of schools in our state and increasing the number of college-ready students they graduate. This program—the Oregon Research Schools Network—will place faculty members in up to 10 high schools across the state. Each faculty member will train high school teachers in the newest innovations of pedagogical practice and also teach students. The cost for each placement in this five-year pilot program will be shared jointly with local school districts. We hope that the initial set of placements will occur in schools with high proportions of first-generation and underrepresented students. We will explore the feasibility of dual credit offerings. We also hope our presence in these schools will increase the pool of high school graduates qualified to come and study here in Eugene. We will also examine providing additional institutional support to some of our most successful pipeline programs at the university including the Summer Academy to Inspire Learning and the Oregon Young Scholars program as part of this initiative.
2017 State of the University Address:
This seems weird, even by the standards of the IAAF and Oregon: The Secretary of State’s records are here: They seem to have had a little trouble settling on the name.
I’m not sure why Around the O doesn’t have this posted yet, but I snuck into the UO Fund for Faculty Excellence awards ceremony tonight, and I can report that Lokey, who has given many millions to UO’s academic side, also gave us – and the UO Foundation Board members…
The history of UO’s bizarre foray into foreign affairs and Gabonese politics has yet to be written, but it started with a UO alum and US ambassador to Gabon Eric Benjaminson seeing a chance for a retirement gig at UO, the State Department’s sophomoric remix of Kissinger’s real-politic, Richard Lariviere’s desperate effort to get…
We’re going to be busy. And in an admirable improvement in transparency from last year’s Senate president, Sinclair will hold open office hours at the Schnitzer Museum cafe, 9-11 every Wednesday, and at the Faculty Club ~5:15-6:30 after Senate meetings.
10/4/2017 Meeting:
9/27/2017 with 10/4 update:
Normally about 260 people pass the July Oregon Bar exam. This spring the Oregon Supreme Court dumbed down the pass score and made some other changes, and 360 people passed. Obviously this is good news for the 100 students who otherwise wouldn’t be licensed to practice law, and good news for the Oregon Bar, which collects an annual $470 from each. It’s bad news for those 260 students who would have passed the older, harder exam, and who now have to try and find a job in an even more flooded job market.
Oregon’s pass rate for the July exam, (all takers, not just UO students) has jumped from 58% last year to 79% this year. That’s a 21 percentage point increase or a (79-58)/58=36% increase in the success odds, in one year. In July 2016 the average pass rate for all US takers was 62%, compared to 58% for Oregon. So we were a little low, but not by much.
In July 2016, only Nebraska had a higher percentage of takers (82%) passing than Oregon’s 2017 new rate of 79%. (Kansas and Missouri were tied at 79%, Oregon’s new rate). See http://www.ncbex.org/pdfviewer/?file=%2Fdmsdocument%2F205 So, with one decision made without adequate prior public notice or discussion, and apparently with no discussion in the Oregon Supreme Court, Oregon has gone from being middle of the road to being among the four easiest states in which to get a license to practice law.
This is not what the Oregon Board of Bar Examiners intended. According to internal documents obtained with a public records request, the BBX believed these changes would increase the pass rate to about 68%. They explicitly rejected a proposal from the three deans of Oregon’s law schools for an even lower cut-score, apparently because they thought that would produce a pass rate of 78%, which they thought was too high. I wonder if the deans will now argue for raising the cut-score and lowering the pass rate?
(From the April 19 letter from BBX chair Jeffrey Howes to Oregon Chief SC Justice Thomas Balmer, at https://uomatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Official-letters-to-Court-BBX-PubRcrdsReq-Aug-17.pdf)
In short Oregon’s new test, with the new lower cut-score, is much easier to pass than the old one, and much easier than the BBX led the Supreme Court to believe. It has given Oregon what is almost the highest pass rate in the country.
It’s true that the new exam will also make it easier for Oregon law students to move to other states, assuming their score was high enough to have passed those state’s cut-rate. But why is Oregon subsidizing the tuition of out-of-state students who will take out-of state legal jobs – if they can even find them?
For comparison, last July:
Michael Tobin has a brief report about this in the Daily Emerald, here.
10/4/2017 NOTE: I’ve now received two letters from the Oregon Bar, arguing that they did not break the public meetings law, while also promising that they will now post meeting notices on the bar’s website. As you can see from their October posting, they’re still trying to figure this transparency thing out:
…
I’ve got some more public records requests into them and the Oregon Supreme Court (which has updated its website and fixed some of its public records procedures in response to my previous questions to them) and I will post what I find out.
Posted 9/27/2017 and earlier:
That would be President Brian Rosenberg of Macalester College, on the NYT op-ed page here.