Just kidding, I don’t know why our provost didn’t give United Academics any credit for these raises in this email, sent round today. One of the more unexpected aspects of both this and the 2014 bargaining was that it was the *union* that kept pushing for merit increases, while the administration wanted…
UO Matters
In the RG here: “Ask for consent — sober consent — and respect the answer you get,” he said. “And if after hearing what I just said you’re chuckling to yourself or to your neighbor, the door is over there. You don’t belong with us.” The room erupted in applause. It…
Rumor down at the faculty club is that the “timeline updates” for this “renovation”, as Duck Advocate Tobin Klinger puts it, are needed because the Mariota Sports Performance Center has depleted the world’s supply of Duck crap and neon-yellow paint:
The Student Press Law Center has the latest news here (from Kentucky, not Oregon): But even the university has taken issue with the foundation’s records-request compliance practices. In a 14-1 vote earlier this month, UL’s Board of Trustees decided that it may sue the foundation if it does not turn over financial…
InsideHigherEd has the report on a new meta-analysis, here: A number of studies suggest that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable due to various kinds of biases against instructors. (Here’s one addressing gender.) Yet conventional wisdom remains that students learn best from highly rated instructors; tenure cases have even hinged…
Andrew Theen has the story in the Oregonian here. For most students community college is a dead end.
Judging from my recent junk mail, the UO Foundation is selling the addresses of academic donors to some class acts:
Dear Campus Community, By now everyone knows that I am focused on three pillars for achieving excellence and preeminence at the University of Oregon—building academic quality and research, improving access and success, and enhancing the student experience. So it should come as no surprise that these priorities are driving my…
Around the O has the good news here: Thanks to a $16 million estate gift for scholarships, scores of high-achieving UO students on the path to becoming public school teachers will be spending less time worrying about debt and more time focused on becoming outstanding educators. The R.H. and Jane…
From his “Open Mike” emails: Dear Colleagues, As I look at my calendar, I am excited about the start of the new academic year and eager to welcome our students back to campus. While every fall brings a fresh opportunity for us to build upon our high aspirations for the…
Bloomberg has the comparatively good news here.
Insidehighered has the report here: Increased faculty diversity has long been a goal of many colleges and universities. But a number of institutions have recently put their money where their mouths are, so to speak, launching expensive initiatives aimed at making their faculties more representative of their respective student bodies…
Interesting story in the AAUP’s Academe, here: With so much technology emerging in recent decades, it can be hard to work out what’s going to be a fad and what’s there to stay. The TrueDialog text messaging software? That’s here for the long run thanks to its amazing results. Rejecting…
Today at Ford Alumni Center, https://academicaffairs.uoregon.edu/content/fall-leadership-retreat. President Schill’s speech focuses on improving academic research and undergraduate retention and graduation. The New New Budget Model will not mindlessly allocate money on the basis of how many easy on-line gen-ed/MC credit-hours departments can churn out, but instead it will allocate at least some money on…
Or is it vice-versa. The 538 website has an interesting post on explanations for tuition increases, here: All of those trends add to the cost of college, but not by that much. At most, about a quarter of the increase in college tuition since 2000 can be attributed to rising…