With some good quotes from VP for enrollment Roger Thompson. Win-win.
UO Matters
1/29/2016: Diane Dietz has the report in the RG here. CoE Dean Randy Kamphaus:
Kamphaus wrote that he shares the alumni’s desire to see SEP continue and flourish, and he pledged to work for a smooth transition.
“The dialogue surrounding this decision has been thought-provoking, respectful, and focused on the future,” he wrote.
It’s true, the Keep SEP Alive Facebook page has been very respectful – in notable contrast to the behavior of Kamphaus, who tried to kill SEP program without any discussion with the parents, students, and teachers whose lives he was messing with, and who then made his Associate Dean take the heat in the press for a week. He did show up to announce he’s giving the program a reprieve, however. Classy.
Meanwhile there’s still no explanation for why he made this decision in the first place, or for how the collaboration with Oak Hill will work in practice, or how it will maintain the high quality of SEP.
1/28/2016: Revenge of the Nerds? Maybe, but so far the Jocks are winning
Rumor down at the faculty club tonight is that the money to restore UO’s Summer Enrichment Program will come from cutting the stipends of the assistant coaches who run Dana Altman’s summer basketball camp, as Diane Dietz of the RG reports that UO leaders are reconsidering the decision to kill its academic Summer Enrichment Program for high school students:
High-level University of Oregon leaders are discussing the fate of the UO’s 35-year-old summer “nerd camp” for gifted teen-agers.
The College of Education announced about a week ago that it would no longer offer the two-week residential Summer Enrichment Program (SEP) that provided intellectual and social enrichment.
The closure sparked a protest from some of the 7,000 or 8,000 alumni of SEP, who are now spread across the United States, including some of them at elite colleges and universities.
A Facebook page titled “Keep SEP Alive” picked up 653 members in one week; members say they are conducting a letter writing campaign, producing videos with personal stories and politicking with officials they hope will help them preserve the program.
Earlier this week, Lauren Lindstrom, UO associate dean of research and outreach at the College of Education, said the university made the decision to close SEP for economic and noneconomic reasons.
The Register-Guard requested financial information that would show the size of the shortfall, but the numbers may not be available until early next week, a UO spokesman said Thursday. …
They closed SEP because of a budget shortfall, but they need time to put together the budget numbers. You don’t have to be a nerdy economist to be skeptical of that claim.
1/24/2016: New Ed School Dean Randy Kamphaus ends UO’s SEP pipeline program
Dear Colleagues, It is my duty today to announce that Michael Moffitt, dean, Philip H. Knight chair and professor of law, has chosen to step down as dean effective July 1, 2017. Michael will return to his faculty role, which he has held since joining the University of Oregon School…
An interesting column from UO student Negina Pirzad in the Daily Emerald, with quotes from other UO students who are and aren’t using Americanized first names. I’ve always enjoyed seeing new students try this out. My ancestor Jost Herbach was all for switching, although he appears to have been misinformed about how easy a time…
Dréos is a Celtic music ensemble of performing composers who invent and arrange new and old music using a traditional vocabulary. Following the October 2015 release of their debut recording, you’re invited to join with this exciting trio as they light up the dance music of Ireland and Scotland. Dréos…
of the effectiveness of Governor Brown’s modest effort to reform Oregon’s public records law. The legislative proposals sound solid though. Gordon Friedman has the report in the Salem Statesman-Journal, here.
The agenda is below, I’ll try and live-blog some. Video here. The IDEAL framework is UO’s latest attempt at a diversity plan. Read it. In other diversity news, UO’s former Diversity Director Charles Martinez will be at the Eugene City Club on Friday, with a panel of UO minority student leaders.…
Update: Diane Dietz has more in the RG here: … Schill noted the earning gap between those with a college degree and those with only a high school diploma. Over a lifetime, the college graduate earns 1.6 times more money. “That’s $1 million on average, (compared with) those with only a…
UO’s decision to terminate the 160over90 branders makes the Times Higher Education (UK), here.
After a long fight with the usual backward-thinking Johnson Hall admins, Prof. Emmett Brown (Physics) and the UO Senate’s Radiation and Skateboard Safety Committee have succeeded in exempting cold-fusion powered hoverboards from the new Emergency Electronic Skateboard Ban Policy: In related news, the UOPD is confiscating the spontaneously combustible electronic skateboards from students and shipping…
As published in Nature, here. Oh, wait, that’s 9PM Jan 26th *1700*, as estimated from Japanese tsunami records: But just in case I don’t think I’ll be working late in PLC on Tuesday night.
While Google’s targeting algorithm knows enough from mining my gmail account and web searches to correctly deduce the importance of “Security v. Privacy” to my everyday drama, they apparently don’t know I completed my B.S. degree a while back. I wonder what the law school is paying per click-through: Not a bad idea though. The law…
Cocktail party version: In a new paper in eLife UO biochemist Ken Prehoda and co-authors show that a simple mutation was all it took to allow single-celled organisms to evolve into the cooperative assemblies that formed the multi-cellular choanoflagellate slime-molds that you and I are descended from. While one co-author on the paper…