4/3/2012: In a previous post I said that Provost Bean was being paid 60% of his administrative salary and a BMW while he was on a sabbatical to do research in his field of genetic algorithms and operations research. My statements were false. Bean is not getting a Beamer while…
UO Matters
4/3/2012: From Betsy Hammond in the Oregonian: Teachers at Reynolds Arthur Academy in Troutdale spurred the biggest gains in individual students’ reading and math scores of any elementary charter school in the nation the past two years. For that, a national charter group soon will hand each of them and…
4/2/2012: From the NYT: Reagan’s strongest margins were among the college educated, who backed him over Walter F. Mondale by a crushing 62.7-36.9 margin. Among all those with both college and advanced degrees, Reagan won 58.7 percent, a landslide margin. … By 2008, the Republican advantage of the early 1980s…
Apparently Frohnmayer’s got a conflict on this one, but I hear Melinda Grier is available. An email circulated to TTF today, 4/2/2012: Dear Colleagues, On the Friday of winter-term finals week, a group of tenure track faculty members distributed a petition that expresses some of our objections to the union’s…
4/2/2012: That’s the word from the union website update, in a post that also criticizes the petitions, here: We sincerely hope that the university administration will recognize the will of the majority of the faculty and maintain its previously public statement of neutrality. It now appears that the UO administration…
At PSU. A reader sends this, by Jennifer Schuberth, an assistant professor of religion at Portland State University: http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2012/04/psu_stakeholders_need_transpar.htmlOn the question of whether a faculty union will promote more transparency and a “better” allocation of resources by the administration: “Like many students and faculty, I have been frustrated by the…
3/31/2012: We hear rumors of high rates of staff turnover in the Registrar’s office, to the effect that apparently 11 classified staff have left over the past year. Comments welcome.
3/31/2012: A reader asks: What should an appropriate system of retention at UO look like? What is the current policy? Should the UO adopt a preemptive retention offer policy for certain categories of faculty? Does it have one now? Obviously more productive faculty with better outside options should get paid…
3/31/2012: Joe Nocera of the NYT has been posting a series of pieces on the NCAA cartel. The latest blows a hole in one of the favorite arguments of the AD and its Johnson Hall enablers – that college athletics should be praised for bringing African-Americans to colleges like UO:…
3/29/2012: I’m no economist, so I don’t like to make forecasts, but Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier are and they’ve got an interesting piece out: What Would the End of Football Look Like? … This slow death march could easily take 10 to 15 years. Imagine the timeline. A couple…
3/29/2012: Dan Dugger in math and some other faculty are organizing an online petition to the ERB, asking for a secret ballot election rather than accept the card check petition. I believe that the law requires the ERB be given written signatures, but Dan says: NOTE: ERB will *consider* the…
Will affect the debate at UO on this same issue. In the Chronicle today, here: The leaders of an effort to unionize faculty members at the University of Illinois at Chicago have abandoned the idea of forming a single collective-bargaining unit representing both tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty members, and instead…
that would be the Portland State provost. Search info here. Four finalists brought to campus, the job went to Sona Karentz Andrews, a VC at OUS and former Provost at Boise State. Meanwhile all indications are that Pres Berdahl is going to bring back Jim Bean as UO provost this…
3/26/2012: From the RG: The total legal costs — $419,000 — dwarf the $5,583 in damages that a jury awarded Schlossberg in January, after deciding unanimously that his constitutional rights were violated by Solesbee during a March 13, 2009, encounter in front of an Umpqua Bank branch in downtown Eugene.…
for VPSA job. Thanks to anon for link.