Award winning investigative reporter Lee Van der Voo has the report, here: … The proposal now before the Oregon State Bar seeks to change that, however. The proposal comes from the bar’s Disciplinary System Review Committee, which looked at what works and what doesn’t and also considered the findings of…
UO Matters
Updated with a letter in the ODE from a variety of student groups raising questions about the administration’s seriousness in consulting them about the tuition increases, here: University of Oregon campus community, On Jan. 4, a new term began for most students at the UO, and with that began another round…
8 PM this Saturday, in Aasen-Hull Hall in the Frohnmayer Music Building. $10 cover, byob.
2/5/2016: Kilkenny Towers sold for $30M. Elon Glucklich has the story in the RG here. 2/21/2012: ODE reporter Deborah Bloom teams up with investigative reporter Jeff Manning from the Oregonian to produce a fascinating story on how UO’s former Athletic Director Pat Kilkenny developed the Courtside and Skybox apartments next…
Plenty of buzzwords though. The deadline to comment on UO’s “strategic framework” is today. In Around the O, here. The document is meant to complement the UO’s mission statement and the 2009 Academic Plan, not replace either. Further, the framework is not written to be a “plan”—it does not contain metrics or specific tactics—and…
Duck basketball coach Dana Altman isn’t the only employer who’s willing to look the other way for someone with a checkered past, if they’ll bring in some revenue. The NYT reports on the University of Chicago’s decision to hire a well-funded professor from UNC without asking too many questions about his history. It…
Don’t blame the physicians. Interim CAS Dean Andrew Marcus sent this blunt and prescient letter to then President Gottfredson and Provost Coltrane two years ago. I can’t remember where I got it – probably from my stash of presidential archives. PDF here. In it Marcus lays out the budget problems that…
2/2/2016: I’ve pasted the only actual budget information that was in the budget memo at the bottom. Where are the numbers showing the trends in the CAS budget, and where is the info showing where the money taken out of CAS has been going and where it will go? The $4M CAS…
Very interesting story, here: … A significant gift from Aisha Almana, a UO graduate, hospital executive and prominent feminist, will create new international opportunities in education and global health at the University of Oregon. The Aisha Almana Global Health Program will provide scholarships for Saudi women to study global health…
2/1/2016: Scott Greenstone has the report in the ODE, here: “I was really impressed,” Lusby said after Heroy’s appointment last week. Lusby has organized many protests against the administration in the past. “It is a really strong start to getting students involved in taking a role in administration.” The university is…
The Chronicle of Higher Ed has the good news here: Part of that money has gone to support the operations of the [Library]. It has also been used to establish faculty chairs in various colleges and to pay for art acquisitions and construction costs of an arts building. The athletic department…
FINAL REMINDER: Blackboard access ends January 31, 2016 As you should be aware from earlier direct e-mail messages and notices on the Blackboard and Canvas home pages, Blackboard access ends after Sunday, January 31, 2016. All instructional course content from Fall 2012 to present has been successfully migrated to Canvas.…
Jim Bean’s Five Big Ideas, Gottfredson’s clusters-of-excellence, interdisciplinary super-modularity, etc. UO’s administration has a long history of buzzword inspired efforts to take control of faculty hiring away from the faculty and academic departments. They get these ideas from the same bullshit conference powerpoint presentations and “talent management consultants” as every other university…
1/31/2016:
Here’s the story on the $400K in well-timed Nike and UO donations, by Saul Hubbard in the RG:
Phil Knight, Nike poured cash into Gov. Kitzhaber’s campaign coffers as he weighed request for state money for Eugene world track championship
Knight, Nike, UO officials gave nearly $400,000 to Kitzhaber in six-week period; UO says no “quid pro quo”
The 2016 session of the Oregon Legislature starts Monday. Given the news about Putin’s hush money and brown envelopes, UO lobbyist Hans Bernard has dropped UO’s plan to ask for $40M to pay for the “IAAF Family’s” hotel rooms and meals – #3 on the list of legislative priorities Bernard showed to the UO Board in December:
Instead he’s found some legislators willing to replace it with a stealth increase in the hotel tax that doesn’t mention the 2021 IAAF track meet. How’s that for transparency?
Meanwhile, the Swedes are calling out the IAAF’s Lord Sebastian Coe for refusing to fess up to the possibility that there was anything corrupt about awarding the 2021 championships to Eugene. Ian Herbert has the report in the British paper The Independent, here, complete with an interview with Camilla Nyman, chief executive of the Gothenburg tourism board:
Sebastian Coe will tell you, in that articulate and erudite way of his, that it was perfectly acceptable to award the 2021 World Athletics Championships – his organisation’s blue riband event – to Eugene: the town synonymous with the sportswear company which until recently paid him £100,000 a year for a “social engagement” role which he has not been terribly specific about.
A new cache of emails made available through Freedom of Information legislation reveal what a catastrophe the decision was, though, and nowhere is the lack of rigour more visible than in the letter sent by the Oregon state Governor, Kate Brown, to the then International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) president, Lamine Diack, in advance of Eugene, home of Nike, getting the nod. “I give you my personal commitment to apply all my powers and means to obtain the financial and legislative support in order to provide the funding necessary for the championships’ success in Oregon,” she writes.
… So Gothenburg carried on working and planning and waited on news from an IAAF conference for national federations. It was from there, “at just before midnight” on the eve of the event, as Nyman recalls it, that she received an email from a Swedish Athletic Federation representative to say that “something is going on,” that “the rules have changed” and Eugene may be gifted it. No one at the Swedish end knows whether money or personal connections brought the sudden change in the picture. None of the Swedes we have spoken to were asked to provide brown envelopes, though the bidding process had not even started at that stage.
Within 24 hours it was being announced that Eugene had been awarded the 2021 event and that there would, indeed, be no bidding process. Gothenburg were advised by some of their associates to find lawyers to prove that the IAAF’s actions had been constitutionally illegal but they decided against it, for fear of “making enemies everywhere”, as Nyman puts it. Ironic, in the light of what we now know about Diack.
The story notes that it was this email that broke open the 2021 scandal, obtained by the RG’s Diane Dietz from UO, but only after the Lane County DA ordered UO’s Public Records Office to release it:
I’m guessing UO and the UO Foundation and Track Town have a lot more of this on their servers, and perhaps those emails will come to light eventually.
Meanwhile, although Gothenburg’s politicians seem relieved to wash their hands of the IAAF, the British press and Parliament are going after IAAF President and House of Lords member Seb Coe like a hound-dog goes after a tick. Reuters reports that Coe has put out a half-assed denial of reports that he knew about the cash filled envelopes used in the bidding for the 2017 championships.
“Sebastian Coe had no actual knowledge of bribes being offered or received linked to the 2017 World Championship,” the spokesman told Reuters.
Parliament may call him back to explain what he means by “actual knowledge”.
While organizing committee for the London 2017 games is reportedly considering taking the IAAF logo off all the publicity material, fearing that guilt by association with the IAAF and Putin will cut into ticket sales, here in Oregon the politicians are saying this will be “good for our brand”. Sure.
1/24/2016: IAAF too dirty for Adidas
In the RG here: For one day next week, a group of rich and powerful people will surrender their dignity and pander shamelessly to those on whom their professional lives depend. … Connor Murphy, a four-star defensive end also recruited by Oregon, received one of Harbaugh’s late-night visits. “He got to…