If you’re a UO professor, the only path to a significant pay increase is to get an outside offer in writing and then use it to convince your dean to give you a 10% raise to stay at UO. For most of us, this requires that we lie to colleagues…
UO Matters
8/23/2017: The RG’s Austin Meek’s report on this porkfest is unusually incurious. In fact this new contract is not a pay cut as Meek suggests, it’s a $50K raise for Horton to $500K a year, plus some new and remarkable bonuses. Although the old contract did guarantee him $90K for…
8/21/2017: 1970 eclipse “Will Be Seen Only in Florida”, from the NYT in 1932:
By 1970 the astronomists were using a few more significant digits and they’d changed their prediction for the path of totality to include good chunks of Georgia, the Carolinas, and SE Virginia. So my Mother drove me and some Boy Scout friends down to Virginia Beach in her new Datsun 510. Sorry professor, it was total.
This time NASA seems to have nailed it. Lebanon Oregon had perfect weather, maybe 50 people in the park, plus the kid across the street yelling “Mom, you’ve got 5 minutes, come out here!” At totality we used some binoculars and could see the corona, beads, and 3 orange solar flares erupting at between 30 and 80 degrees. Of course no trip to Lebanon is complete without a stop at Research Mannikins, Came home the back way, no traffic to speak of.
8/29/2016: Duck physicists lose bidding war to Beavers for lucrative 2017 Solar Eclipse
It’s a bitter night down at the UO Faculty Club after NASA’s announcement that Corvallis – not Eugene – will have a place in the lucrative Path of Totality for the August 21 2017 Solar Eclipse. The official map is below.
NASA is still refusing to respond to my public records request for “all documents showing how the eclipse’s path was determined”, but the physics profs seem pretty sure the fix has been in for years. I’m guessing Corvallis took a page from the UO Foundation’s IAAF championship playbook and promised the NASA bosses free tickets and luxury hotel rooms, subsidized with their cut of the state’s lodging tax.
That’s the conclusion of David Card, based on results from a new paper by Alice Wu, analyzing messages on the econ job rumors website. The NYT story, with links, is here.
Joan Robinson – The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a ready-made set of answers to economic questions, but to avoid being deceived by economists. Can any other academic disciplines make the same argument? Law comes to mind, and of course Political Science. Other subjects? Other arguments?
8/16/2017: Just kidding, Altman got a fat raise and contract extension, despite telling his players to stop protesting racism during the national anthem. However Duck radio station KXTG has now fired DJ Dino Costa for telling people to run over anti-racist protestors, according to today’s WWeek report. 8/15/2017: Duck’s KXTG…
DIY video on youtube here. I’m no sculptor, but I’m thinking the yankee who sold this thing to Durham would have used a little more bronze if he’d wanted it to be permanent.
UO’s labor relations AVP Bill Brady is leaving UO, apparently for a better job back east, just as the faculty union and the administration are negotiating an extension of the second contract, as explained in this post from July. Extrapolating from the salary data meticulously documented on UO’s IR website…
Dear University of Oregon Community, Over this past weekend we witnessed a tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia. White supremacists and neo-Nazis, many of whom were armed and dressed in military uniforms, marched on the University of Virginia’s campus and took to the streets to spew venomous hatred. When they were confronted…
That would be Athletic Director Shawn Eichorst at the University of Nebraska: Nebraska Athletics will provide $5 million in scholarships to nonathletes, potentially providing additional aid to hundreds of students each year at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. … “We’ve worked very hard and very strategically over the course of the last…
Dean of the School of Music and Dance. Job announcement here.
Thanks to the Emerald for sharing this with UOM. So far as I am aware previous UO administrations have never been willing to share this sort of information with the Senate – but maybe that will change, and the day will come when shared governance will no longer have to…
Use a cutesy cartoon figure to remind them of your bloated, scandal ridden big-time athletic program:
8/9/2017: Three years ago yesterday the UO Board of Trustees paid President Mike Gottfredson $940K to leave town immediately. Half up front, the rest within two weeks. In exchange, Gottfredson released UO from all liability related to his brief and disastrous employment as UO President and agreed to pay his own attorney costs, etc:
I’m no Harvard law professor, but I think it’s the $940K that makes that a legally enforceable contract, not just a promise:
But will UO enforce it?
As reported in this Jack Moran story in the RegisterGuard last month, after winning dismissal of the federal court case by the three former Dana Altman basketball players and alleged rapists who had argued that UO and Gottfredson had illegally ruined their basketball careers by kicking them off the team and campus without due process, the UO General Counsel’s office announced that they would sue the players for legal costs:
The University of Oregon is seeking reimbursement of nearly $53,000 in attorney fees and court costs from three former Ducks basketball players who sued the UO after being kicked out of school following a rape investigation in 2014.
The university on Friday filed a motion for fees and costs in U.S. District Court. The move comes nearly two months after a federal judge dismissed civil lawsuits brought by the players, who were banned from campus for up to 10 years but did not face criminal charges after a female student accused them of sexual assault.
In the request for reimbursement, lawyers for the UO characterize the lawsuits — filed by Brandon Austin, Dominic Artis and Damyean Dotson — as frivolous and unreasonable.
“The university rarely seeks prevailing party fees,” the motion states. “But in this case, plaintiffs pursued claims that lacked any reasonable basis in law or fact, which forced the university to waste considerable public resources.” …
Seems iffy, unless of course you’re one of the Miller Nash Graham & Dunn attorneys that UO is paying by the hour at $350 per. In contrast the contract with Gottfredson is pretty clear cut. So why won’t the UO General Counsel’s office unleash Miller Nash et al to take Mike Gottfredson to court over his share of the Austin et al legal fees?
I don’t know, but there are many more details in the court docket here, including plenty of expensive conversations with “Dr. Gottfredson” in the detailed billing records:
8/8/2016: UO to mark 2nd Gottfredson Day with traditional appearance in Federal Court
[Remember the Hat Day is November 21].
Ryan Thorburn has the data on pathetic Duck ticket sales in the RG here; According to data provided by the athletic department, the average renewal price of a season ticket is down by 3.9 percent, with 65 percent of seats decreasing in price and the other 35 percent remaining flat at…