Longtime readers may remember that my public records obsession started back in 2006, after former UO General Counsel Melinda Grier and AAEO Penny Daugherty (still) tried to hide UO’s affirmative action plans, and the fact that Daugherty had failed to do them for several years. Grier stonewalled my PR requests for months, and then…
UO Matters
And they may get it. In the Daily Californian, here: The Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate held a special meeting Tuesday on the campus’s financial deficit and the faculty’s role in progress with academic restructuring. … The administration came under fire in February for considering the dissolution of the…
Posted 3/30/2016, updated 4/14/2016 with UO’s new $50K payment to Cleavenger’s lawyers. In February 2014 UO’s lawyers from Harrang, Long, Gary and Rudnick lost the arbitration case against former UOPD officer James Cleavenger. UO had to pay Cleavenger $30K in back wages, $6K for arbitration costs, and an unknown amount to HLGR,…
The videos from the finalists for the CAS, Business, AAA, and Journalism dean searches are now posted. Links below the break go to the videos and the evaluation surveys, which must be completed by 5PM Wed.
If you have a strong opinion, I recommend also checking the list of people on the search committees and emailing your comments to people you know on the committee. Here are the lists:
CAS Dean Search Committee:
- Elizabeth Bohls, Professor, English, College of Arts & Sciences, [email protected]
- Josh Buetow, Fiscal Coordinator, English, College of Arts & Sciences, [email protected]
- Dan Dugger, Associate Professor, Math, College of Arts & Sciences, [email protected]
- Meaghan Emery, Graduate Teaching Fellow, Geological Sciences, College of Arts & Sciences,[email protected]
- Nancy Fish, Committee Staff, Special Projects Manager, Office of the Provost and Academic Affairs,[email protected]
- Marina Guenza, Professor, Chemistry, College of Arts & Sciences, [email protected]
- Terry Hunt, Committee Chair, Dean, Clark Honors College, [email protected]
- Thomas Janzen, CAS Advisory Board, [email protected]
- Lauren Lindstrom, Associate Dean, Education, College of Education, [email protected]
- Teri Rowe, Department Manger, Economics, College of Arts & Sciences, [email protected]
- Dan Tichenor, Professor, Political Science, College of Arts & Sciences, [email protected]
- Jessica Vasquez, Associate Professor, Sociology, College of Arts & Sciences, [email protected]
- Hailin Wang, Professor, Physics, College of Arts & Sciences, [email protected]
- Melanie Williams, Senior Instructor, Romance Languages, College of Arts & Sciences,[email protected]
LCB Dean Search Committee:
- Mike Andreasen, Vice President, University Advancement, [email protected]
- Bruce Blonigen, Committee Chair, Associate Dean, College of Arts & Sciences, [email protected]
- Heather Bottorff, Director, Academic Advising, Lundquist College of Business, [email protected]
- John Chalmers, Professor, Finance, Lundquist College of Business, [email protected]
- Bettina Cornwell, Professor, Marketing, Lundquist College of Business, [email protected]
- Angela Davis, Associate Professor, Accounting, Lundquist College of Business, [email protected]
- Michele Henney, Program Manager/Senior Lecturer I, Accounting, Lundquist College of Business,[email protected]
- John Hull, Assistant Dean, Centers of Excellence, Lundquist College of Business, [email protected]
- Chuck Kalnbach, Senior Instructor I, Management, Lundquist College of Business,[email protected]
- Gwen Lillis, Advisory Board Chair, Board of Advisors, Lundquist College of Business,[email protected]
- Nagesh Murthy, Associate Professor, Decision Science, Lundquist College of Business,[email protected]
- Shari Powell, Director, Operations, College of Arts & Sciences, [email protected]
- Mike Russo, Professor, Management, Lundquist College of Business, [email protected]
AAA Dean Search Committee:
- Chris Bell, Instructor, Historic Preservation, School of Architecture & Allied Arts, [email protected]
- Tiffany Benefiel, Office Specialist 2, School of Architecture & Allied Arts, [email protected]
- Trygve Faste, Assistant Professor, Product Design, School of Architecture & Allied Arts,[email protected]
- John Fenn, Associate Professor, Arts and Administration, School of Architecture & Allied Arts,[email protected]
- Michael Fifield, Professor, Architecture School of Architecture & Allied Arts, [email protected]
- Alyssa Franco, Graduate Student, Architecture School of Architecture & Allied Arts,[email protected]
- David Hulse, Knight Professor, Landscape Architecture School of Architecture & Allied Arts,[email protected]
- Karen Johnson, Assistant Dean, External Relations & Communications, School of Architecture & Allied Arts, [email protected]
- Rich Margerum, Professor, Planning, Public Policy & Management, School of Architecture & Allied Arts,[email protected]
- Kate Mondloch, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture, School of Architecture & Allied Arts,[email protected]
- Scott Pratt, Committee Chair, Dean, Graduate School, [email protected]
- Don Prohaska, Advisory Board, School of Architecture & Allied Arts, [email protected]
- Daniel Rosenberg, Professor, Clark Honors College, [email protected]
- Julie Stott, Advisory Board, School of Architecture & Allied Arts, [email protected]
- Laura Vandenburgh, Associate Professor, Art, School of Architecture & Allied Arts,[email protected]
- Marcia Walker, Committee Staff, Assistant to the Dean, Graduate School, [email protected]
School of Journalism and Communication Dean Search Committee:
Diane Dietz’s report on Schill’s campus conversation is here.
Some extracts, carefully selected to support my spin:
“The fact is, we have not carefully watched our central budget over the years. We should have done that. Resources shrank and we weren’t watching. We have been digging a hole for many years, and if we don’t act now, the hole will get bigger and the decisions we have to make will be more painful.”
VPBP Brad Shelton and VPFA Jamie Moffitt have been in charge of UO’s central budget for years, along with Scott Coltrane off and on. They still are – but for how much longer?
“What university in one year is really turning over all its senior leadership? We’re going to be doing that. We’re going to get great deans into their positions and a vice president for research. We’ve already changed a lot of my office. Instead of the gang that can’t shoot straight, we’re going to be the gang that really can transform a university.”
These aren’t the only optimistic quotes in Dietz’s story. Read it all. Here’s one on athletics:
“Instead of demonizing athletics and saying, ‘you know, athletics are getting all of the resources,’ and being envious of athletics, we actually want to model ourselves on athletics in that a wonderful investment of resources and careful, strong execution can lead to excellence.
One UO M commenter has some followup questions on that:
What does he mean by we should model ourselves after pursing the efficiency of the athletics department model?
Does he mean that we need to get tentpole programs that attract nation attention and donations, and that we will use revenues from those programs (football) to subsidize everything else?
Or does he mean that we need to find slave labor, that churns in and out of the university and is quickly forgotten, that will work in essence for free while we pay high salaries to a few people who supervise the work of the slave labor?
Actually, the preferred nomenclature for the NCAA’s labor model is “unpaid student internships, but with brain damage” although there is no denying the racial element in a scheme that is run for the amusement of rich white boosters, nets millions for the overwhelmingly white coaches and athletic directors, gives the mostly white and privileged “student-athletes” in the safe non-revenue sports full-ride scholarships and free travel and coaching, while the mostly black football players take the hits. The general rule of big-time college sports is that “no black man shall make money off college football”
UO’s Official Organ has their spin on the meeting here. It’s by Greg Bolt, so it’s much more accurate than the usual Tobin Klinger PR flack piece.
Liveblog of Pres Schill’s 4/12/2016 campus conversation on realignment.
President Schill’s conversation will followed by a Senate organized Town Hall on realignment, currently scheduled for 3:30PM Wednesday April 27 in the new ginormous Straub Hall classroom.
(The livestreaming link is now down, I’ll post the archived video when it’s ready).
Here’s a little live-blogging. Usual disclaimer, nothing is a quote unless in quotes.
I got here a little late, Pres Schill was addressing the need to make budget realignment now, not later. Makes sense, we’ve seen what happened in CAS when Coltrane let things slide.
Talks about the importance of on-time graduation and new initiatives to increase this via better advising and retention grants. (Interestingly it turns out these are not UO ideas, they are mandates from the state, which has also provided all the publics with funding to implement them.)
Refreshingly honest about UO’s failure in fumbling the basketball rape allegations, and his resolve to set up procedures that will encourage students to report sexual assaults and build confidence that UO will handle them well.
Shout out to the UO Board: obviously I think they are good, they hired me.
Thinks we should stop demonizing athletics and being jealous, and instead use them as a model for how to use money to buy excellence. (Great – when are faculty going to get the same bonuses the coaches get for graduation rates?)
Claims that UO has become more transparent. (Certainly he’s far more open than recent past presidents and interims, but the Public Records Office has, if anything, become a blacker black hole – more on this in a future post. The VPFA has become more transparent because of the need to report to the board, but the VPBP and the latest budget reform process is not very open.)
Q&A:
Classified employee: Specific complaint about income inequality in the athletics department and the many contingent staff there. How can you call this inequity a good model for UO?
Schill: Don’t know what the term equitable means (me neither). Athletics uses their budget well, tremendous focus, spirit, commitment to excellence.
Faculty: What specific programs to increase undergraduate engagement in research?
Schill: We have two new funded programs. Josh Snodgrass in CAS and another in VPRI.
NTTF faculty – Director of Composition: I appreciate your candor. We run a large award winning program serving thousands of students, with initiatives to help international students, etc. I support your efforts to increase the number of TTF. But where are we, the excellent NTTF, in your vision for UO?
Schill: In a healthy university many educational decisions are made by the Deans. I shouldn’t be making decisions about whether or not we should spend money on more econ profs or on the composition programs. This realignment process will empower the deans – with constraints regarding overall goals of more grad students and TTFs. Regarding the Q of where NTTF’s fit in, under previous presidents and provosts UO increased NTTF numbers without thinking about where they fit in. But we will never be in a situation where we do not value or use NTTFs. But the priority is to increase the numbers of TTFs. Shout-out to UAUO: We’ve established much more job security here than at other universities. (Boy has he learned a lot in the past 6 months!)
Student: Lots of recent conversation on race, but not much focus on how tuition increases effect graduation rates of minorities who are disproportionately affected?
Schill: Do you have an alternative? Student: Cut spending. Schill: We are cutting spending. You just heard an NTTF worrying about that. Student: Cut research, athletics. Schill: You’re being honest with me, I’ll be honest with you. The answer is not as simple as “just cut spending”. Look to the state legislature to increase their support. (Again, what a difference from when he arrived, and thought the boosters would provide money for academics.) We have the Pathway Oregon program for low income students, fully funds 10% of our students – 20% of our in-state students. The state just cut funding for this, UO is making up with internal funding and philanthropy. (Yeah Connie Ballmer!)
Psaki: We all agree with the lofty goals you have articulated. UO has run for a long time on a skeleton crew when it comes to teaching and research. Possible because of a shared commitment and solidarity – an excellent way of getting extra work from people. But we were struck by the way the CAS cuts were done. I know you don’t want to get into the weeds, but that’s were the devil is. The process was demoralizing – perhaps the most yucky experience I’ve gone through in 20 years here. This kind of instability hurt or ability to work for our common goals.
Schill: I am responsible for what happens at UO. You are not quite being fair to Dean Andrew Marcus and his process for managing the cuts. Marcus restructured the cuts in response to some of the concerns you raised. Any university that is not constantly rethinking how to reallocate resources so as to equate the marginal cost and marginal value product. I can’t tell you that we will not go through this again. I hope and pray that the legislature will provide more funds – we’ve requested $100M more for the next biennium. (I think it’s good to hear that Schill is expressing his willingness to work with the legislature, despite the UO Board’s efforts to hold it at arm’s length.)
Gina: I just sound sarcastic because I’m Greek. Schill: And I just sound whiny because I’m, well you know. Gina: An Attorney? (Both laugh.)
Gina: We need to fix Shelton’s Budget Model.
Schill: Yes. We are going to make the budget model about promoting academic excellence, not about rewarding Doug Blandy for online AAD 250 courses that pass out A’s like candy and suck students away from CAS Humanities. (OK, he didn’t really say that last bit, but plenty of people are thinking it.)
Meeting ends. My quick take is that Schill dealt very well with some serious questions, and that the faculty left the meeting with a sense that he’s quickly learning about UO’s problems and strengths and that there is broad support for him and his goals – and worry about how they wil be implemented.
4/12/2016: In the Washington Post, here:
The San Diego Union-Tribune (Debbi Baker) reports on a controversy about pro-Donald Trump sidewalk chalking at the University of California at San Diego, which drew this response from Prof. Ivan Evans, the provost of one of the six UC-San Diego undergraduate colleges (Eleanor Roosevelt College):
ERC Condemns Vandalism On Campus
It is with dismay that the ERC community and the campus at large learned that vandals, as yet unknown, defaced university property on Friday by chalking offensive comments on the sidewalks close to the Raza Resource Centro and on Library Walk. … Whoever furtively inflicted this incident on campus does not deserve the attention they cannot receive through rational discourse and open debate. In condemning the incident, ERC expects that any violation of UCSD’s Code of Conduct will be treated with the greatest seriousness and draw the fullest sanctions that may apply.
In 2010 former UO GC Randy Geller tried to get the UO Senate to include a ban on chalk in the facilities use policy, except when authorized by the president:
We rejected this proposal. But what would Eleanor Roosevelt say? I’m not sure. While the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights that she negotiated with the Soviets does include free speech, it doesn’t specifically address furtive water-soluble chalking.
4/8/2016: President joins student protest for free speech right to chalk
Updated below with info from Marie Vitulli (Math Emerita).
The 2015-16 AAUP salary survey is now out, and I’ve posted it below after the 2014-15 IPEDS data from the Chronicle. These data are self-reported by universities to the DoE or the AAUP, and not always accurately or consistently across universities. The definitions also vary across the two surveys, as do the comparison groups they provide.
I was surprised to see that the gender gap at UO shrinks with faculty rank both in dollars and percentages, and almost disappears in the AAUP data. In contrast, for both sets of comparison universities the gap is pretty constant in percentages.
I wondered how much the gender gap varies across departments. For UO, you can get average pay by department and rank (but not gender) for 2014-15 from Institutional Research here. Or you can really drill down in the individual salaries – Feb 2016 is here. (When I looked for my department, I found some large errors in the IR summary data.) IR has also posted a “Faculty Equity & Inclusion Report” here, but it does not have any salary data. How odd.
For 2014-15, from the Chronicle (IPEDS):
For 2015-16, from the AAUP:
UO’s AAUP numbers are basically unchanged from last year, because during bargaining the administration insisted on delaying the raises until after the survey due date. Marie Vitulli (Math Emerita) has sent in this, comparing UO to our 8 AAU comparators. There is more on her website here.
By gender:
Overall, we’re dead last in pay, except we edge out Iowa for assistants. Because they know Uncle Bernie will ask, the AAUP also reports total compensation numbers, i.e. pay plus benefits. The ratio of benefits to salary for UO is higher than average, although the AAUP is careful to point out that total compensation measures the cost of benefits to the institution, not the value of the benefits to the faculty. I’m not getting a lot of benefit from Mike Bellotti’s $500K PERS deal, but it’s sure costing UO and other state employers a lot. For health insurance, UO pays the same rate as all state employers, even though UO workers are healthier than average.
And for a comparison, overall in 2013-14:
I don’t know why the salary numbers UO reports to the feds are so different from the numbers they report to the AAUP. Note that the AAU also uses a very different comparison group: public universities that grant a certain numbers of doctoral degrees. PSU, for example, is in the AAUP comparator group but not the Chronicle one. (The data on instructor/lecturer/NTTF/contingent pay is not very comprehensive, so I’ve omitted it.)
For non-academic employees, the Chronicle reports that average UO pay for those classified as Management for 2014-15 was $124,406 vs. $114,465 for all VHR universities. UO pay for Office/admin support was $41,417 vs. the VHR average of $44,090. I don’t think these cross-university comparisons are very reliable because of differences n the definitions, but the time trends for UO should be, and the pay increases for Management at UO have been remarkable:
2012-13:
2013-14:
2014-15:
Faculty pay by rank, gender time-trends 2004-2014 (2014 means the 2014-15 AY):
Wednesday, April 13, 2016 at 2:30 pm HEDCO Education Building, Room 240. It’s a telephonic meeting, but apparently there will be a phone there to listen in. The full draft of the proposal is here. From what I can tell this is the first specific reference to the administration’s use of the confidential Academic…
An admirable bit of transparency from the VPR Office, here. Many interesting projects: And yet UO’s Public Records Office thinks faculty records are exempt from disclosure ;) They even redacted all the faculty names from the search committee that gave Scott Coltrane Jim Bean’s job:
The Daily Emerald has the latest on the administration’s removal of the Divest UO banner, from reporter Max Thornberry here: … [UO Strategic Communicator Tobin Klinger], on the other hand, praised the university for creating an environment that fosters discussion and debate about the issues of the day. “It comes down…
Tyler Kinkgade of the Huffington has a new report that compares what Gottfredson did when faced with Jane Doe’s allegation that she’d been gang-raped by three of Dana Altman’s basketball players, with the inspiring response from OSU President Ed Ray to Brenda Tracy after he learned 2014 about her gang rape by OSU football…
MEMORANDUM Date: April 6, 2016 To: All UO Colleges, Schools, and Departments From: Adriene Lim, Dean of Libraries Subject: Collections Reduction Review, 2016-2017 The UO Libraries must prepare for cuts to our collections budget of approximately $565,000 in FY 2016/2017. This figure represents an actual cut of $115,000 in our…
Senate Meeting – April 6, 2016. Browsing Room, Knight Library; 3:00-5:00 pm. 2015-2016, Agendas, Watch Live. Synopsis: Ethics passed eventually. Online input policy passed. At the last minute VP for Student Life Robin Holmes bailed on the student-led discussion of the Mandatory Live-In Policy non-policy, probably preventing any substantive discussion before it goes into…
No one who watched Kyr orchestrate the Faculty Assembly meetings during the Lariviere firing, or the cathartic Senate meetings during the basketball rape allegation cover-up, should be surprised to learn that he’s a famous composer. Around the O has the announcement here: Arts and Letters Awards in Music Four composers will each receive a $10,000 Arts…
Back in 1987 the OUS Board established several policies establishing their control over intercollegiate athletics. These became UO policies in 2014. Tomorrow at 10AM in the JH Conference room, UO Board of Trustees Secretary Angela Wilhelms is going to try and persuade the Policy Advisory Committee to recommend that two of the three policies…