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Posts tagged as “Charles Triplett”

NWCCU accreditors will keep academic freedom after AAUP-Oregon, IFS, UO Senate Pres, UO Provost, FIRE & others push back

Another 4/1/2019 update:

The influential Foundation for Individual Rights in Education also wrote to the NWCCU against their plan to remove academic freedom from their accreditation standards:

Full letter here.

4/1/2019 update:

Thanks to the AAUP-Oregon’s Michael Dreiling for alerting the UO Senate and Provost to the NWWCU’s proposed accreditation standards. His letter asking AAUP members to press the NWCCU on this is here:

We write to you with an urgent request to take action and protect academic freedom as a standard and criterion for accreditation by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU), the largest single accreditation body in the region. Inexplicably, the latest draft of accreditation standards from the NWCCU removes all references to academic freedom and to institutional bodies and practices of shared governance such as university senates, faculty vote and voice, and tenure (see the proposal and compare to current standards here). The strong emphasis on centralized authority and the implicit erasure of faculty participation in decision-taking is new and it is a threat to the integrity of higher education at hundreds of colleges and universities in the region. …

As you can see below, many issues with these proposed revisions remain unresolved, but NWCCU Pres Sonny Ramaswamy has promised to keep freedom, and give more time for input on other issues:

From: Sonny Ramaswamy <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, March 31, 2019 10:07 PM
Subject: Revision of NWCCU’s Standards

ALOs.

Over the last couple of weeks we have received emails regarding NWCCU’s draft, revised Standards from AAUP affiliates and faculty senate chairs, and provosts of a few institutions. (Those individuals are copied on this email.)

Additionally, we have received input during conversations with some individuals.

Based on the recent input received, we’ve made a decision to incorporate appropriate language in our draft Standards for Academic Freedom and Governance, along with revisions on other matters suggested by others.

We’ve extended the deadline for submission of additional comments for revisions through April 15, 2019.

The draft will be revised and sent out for further comments in May. The draft will be revised based on this round of comments.

After the Commission has provided additional comments on the near final draft, it’ll be revised as needed. Then it’ll be sent out for a vote by NWCCU’s family of institutions to approve the proposed Standards in late Summer 2019.

As I have noted previously, this is an iterative process and we appreciate the input, which continues strengthen the Standards.

Our hope is that, once approved, the new Standards will be deployed starting in January 2020.

If not already done, please connect with your relevant faculty organizations on your campuses, such as faculty senate chairs, and exhort them and other faculty to provide input regarding the draft Standards.

They may submit their comments on the current version of revised Standards available at (http://www.nwccu.org/accreditation/standards-review/) either via this link (https://www.tfaforms.com/4719938) or via email ([email protected]).

Thanks for your help.

Sonny Ramaswamy, President
Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities
8060 165th Avenue NE, Ste 100 | Redmond, WA 98052
Email: [email protected]
Tel: 425-558-4224
URL: http://www.nwccu.org
Twitter: @NWCCUSonny

The letter to the NWCCU from the UO Senate President (me) is here. The letter from UO Provost Jayanth Banavar is here. My response to the email above is:

Dear Pres Ramaswamy –

I’m glad to hear this. Thank you for responding to the concerns regarding academic freedom.

For those from other institutions considering commenting on the NWCCU’s proposed changes to our accreditation requirements, I’ve attached the letters to the NWCCU from the UO Senate and the UO Provost.

As you can see these address issues beyond academic freedom, and include such matters as shared governance, research, governing board evaluations, institutional control over transfer credits, student success metrics and their use.

I look forward to seeing how the next draft addresses these concerns.

For those interested, I’ll continue to update the posts at https://uomatters.com/tag/accreditation with new information.

Yours,

Bill Harbaugh
University of Oregon
Senate Pres & Econ Prof

3/26/2019: UO’s accreditor considers weakening academic freedom and governance standards

Sorry, long post.

co-VPAA Doug Blandy runs secret search for AVPAA

Doug Blandy needs to get with UO’s new transparency and shared governance movement. Here’s the job posting for his new Assistant VP: http://jobs.uoregon.edu/unclassified.php?id=5300: … Academic Affairs has a strong role in advising and communicating with all departments/units and colleges in the interpretation of academic practice and policy. The assistant vice provost supports…

UO puts bike violators on $1 an hour Bicycle Safety Patrol chain gang

And you thought the Code of Ethics was silly. How does this sort of thing get through Chuck Triplett’s office? I’m beginning to think that his policy realignment efforts may not be entirely reliable: Technical revisions enacted by the University Secretary on September 3, 2015: E. Bicycle Penalties, Citations, and Fines (1) Any…

UO Code of Ethics requires employees to “dedicate ourselves before God to our chosen profession”, plus civility

11/28/2015: From what I can tell $130K VP for Collaboration Chuck Triplett is actually going to bring his UO ethics policy to the Senate for debate and vote.

You must “make decisions based upon the greater good” and act in “wise, ethical, and prudent manner”, while not “shifting blame or taking improper credit”. And the administration thinks the *Senate* is wasting faculty time with pointless discussions?

I’ve already seen some pretty good suggestions for amendments, including the admirably brief

“University of Oregon Code of Ethics: All employees must follow the University of Oregon Policy on Freedom of Speech and Inquiry“.

If that fails, I’ll bring up my proposal for a Senate Unethical Activities Committee, with the power to investigate and blacklist offenders:

Meanwhile, rumor down at the Faculty Club Chapel (Episcopalian) is that there will also be questions from the faculty on how we can behave ethically without dedicating ourselves before God to our chosen profession, as VPFA Jamie Moffitt has been requiring the UO Police to do, ever since that unfortunate Bowl of Dicks incident:

Screen Shot 2015-11-28 at 8.01.40 PM

Good thing our Johnson Hall bowl game junketeers aren’t sworn officers. That part about “never accepting gratuities” would be a problem.

As for the God business, sorry, but a higher authority disagrees: “… no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

11/13/2015: UO ethics policy requires “civil, respectful, and nurturing environment”

And if you fail to “make decisions based upon the greater good” or don’t act in “a wise, ethical, and prudent manner” or if you engage in “shifting blame or taking improper credit”, you have violated UO policy, and you are subject to university discipline.

That’s according to UO’s newly revised “Code of Ethics” policy, posted on VP for Collaboration Chuck Triplett’s website, and open for comment here.

UO Senate meeting, Wed in 128 CHILES

That’s Chiles. Part of the B-School. Across Kincaid from the “Duckstore”, behind the hotdog stand. AVP for Collaboration Chuck Triplett will be taking attendance, so don’t ditch this one. I did a little live-blogging below. Senate Meeting Agenda – October 21, 2015. Agenda  |  Watch Live [Not working] Rm 128, Chiles; 3:00-5:00 pm 3:00 pm    Introductory…

Triplett and Coltrane reject Senate legislation wholesale

The letters are nominally from Scott Coltrane, but the metadata says they were written by AVP for Collaboration Chuck Triplett, complete with some interesting grammatical errors. I’ll post more on these in the next few days. From the president.uoregon.edu website: Presidential responses to Senate actions Interim President Scott Coltrane issued the following responses…

Chuck Triplett’s previous hire at OUS also skipped affirmative action procedures

Try hiring a new professor without scrupulously following the affirmative action hiring procedures: a public job posting, an open search, and diverse finalists. Break those rules and AAEO Director Penny Daugherty will tell you sorry, no hire this year. Of course the rules are a little different for Johnson Hall. Last summer Mike Gottfredson…

Triplett hire triggers OFCCP audit of UO’s affirmative action compliance?

That’s the latest rumor. Chuck Triplett is Pernsteiner’s former OUS Board secretary, hired by Gottfredson last summer to the new $130K position of “Assistant VP for Collaboration”, without an affirmative action compliant search or public notice. The OFCCP website says: The purpose of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs is…

Will Library Dean Lim and Coltrane deliver on transparency?

3/17/2014 update: I went to the Library Committee’s meeting today. Dean Adriene Lim was adamant that she was not trying to avoid Senate review of the new library privacy policy, and that as far as she was concerned the Library Committee was the Senate, since it’s a Senate committee, but that she was fully willing to go through the regular Senate policy on policies.

She said had been told that AVP Chuck Triplett was the “guru” for UO policies, and so she asked him how to proceed. As you can see below, Triplett thought that there was no need for this privacy policy to go through the Senate process. Given that the administration’s motivation for this policy arose out of LibraryGate, or as they now call it, “the incident”, Triplett should have known better than to advise Lim to try and slip this through on the side.

This is from the OSU library’s privacy policy:

Patron information is strictly confidential. It is for the use of library staff only; it can, of course, be divulged to the patron. Patron information is not to be given to non-library individuals, including parents, friends, professors, university administrators, police, FBI, university security staff, or the CIA. Only a court order can require the disclosure of patron records. The university librarian is responsible for compliance with such orders.

Needless to say UO’s proposed new policy (in full below) is a lot weaker:

When a violation of law or established policy is suspected, the Libraries reserves the right to electronically monitor its public computers and network, and/or reveal a user’s identity to institutional authorities and/or law enforcement.

Frankly, it reads as a post-hoc justification for Lim’s decision to disclose my circulation records to the administration. I told Lim I thought this would be problematic, and that she should at least consider having something concrete to take to the Senate about implementing the promises that were made to the Senate about general review of UO’s public records problems, or perhaps something about the documents that were *not* in UO’s Presidential Archives – e.g. athletics money deals – and therefore were lost to history (yes, I did mention Hillary Clinton).

FWIW, the RegisterGuard report on that Senate meeting is here.

… The UO’s new dean of libraries, Adriene Lim, told the gathered faculty on Wednesday that she considers an individual’s right to privacy to be a universal human right.

But she also said that Oregon public records laws “spell out types of records that should be public and available for scrutiny. I’d be the first one to advocate for that openness and ­transparency.”

Coltrane and Lim said the issue of transparency will be reviewed by university officials after Hershner Hunter completes its investigation. [UO M: I’ve made a public records request to Dave Hubin’s Public Records Office for the contract showing what UO’s Interim General Counsel Doug Park has asked HH to do. No response yet.]

The university will “try to increase openness and transparency as much as we can,” Lim said. Coltrane said he’d bring the university’s Office of Public Records to the table.

Harbaugh said Wednesday that that’s what he had in mind when he sought the presidential documents at the archive – after being thwarted by the public records office.

He said he had no intention of violating student privacy laws or damaging the university.

“I’m trying to make a point about the university’s obsessive secrecy, about how it functions, makes decisions and operates as a public agency,” Harbaugh said.

3/12/2014: AVP Chuck Triplett advises Library Dean Adriene Lim that new Library privacy policy can bypass Senate review

Thanks to several people for leaking this email and proposed policy to UO Matters. Page down to see how it evolves as it gets exposed to the light of day. It’s now circulating on the Senate listserv, and we will be taking steps to

a) ensure Dean Lim does not implement this policy without Senate approval, and
b) ensure Chuck Triplett is monitored, to prevent future attempts to subvert the Policy on Policies.

Still no information on how Lim will deal with public records that were removed from the Presidential Archives by Johnson Hall.

The UO Board reaffirmed the PonP just last week. Triplett didn’t waste any time breaking it:

Date: March 11, 2015 at 9:20:07 AM PDT
To: Adriene Lim , …
Subject: Library privacy policy draft – latest version

Dear ULC members,

I’ve heard back from Chuck Triplett and he advises me that he doesn’t think our new Privacy Policy rises to the level of an “institutional policy.” This means that the draft would not need to go through more layers of review in the way that other institutional policies are reviewed. He thinks that, after we go through our library-level review, the policy can just be posted on our website.

Library faculty still have until March 16, 2015, to provide input and comments, but I wanted to share with you the latest version of the draft because it contains two new sections that were added last week: 1.) a section was added to address the security cameras we have in our Special Collections & University Archives area. These cameras are not new — they’ve been in place for a while, but the Libraries had not finalized a policy regarding them yet); 2.) a few sentences were added to address the privacy audit and compliance concerns that were raised at our last ULC meeting. When the policy is finalized, the Libraries will conduct an audit of systems and services to make sure that we are complying with our own policy.

If you have any final comments about this latest draft, please let me know by March 16, 2015. Thank you for your help with this.

Best regards,
Adriene

Adriene Lim, Ph.D., MLIS
Dean of Libraries
Philip H. Knight Chair
University of Oregon Libraries
1299 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1299
Phone: 541-346-1892
Email: [email protected]

Note: After I sent this email to Lim and cced the Senate listserv, she sent out an email changing her mind and deciding to ignore Triplett, and send this policy through the regular PAC process, which will bring it to the Senate.

Here’s the policy in dispute:

GradGate: Senate to investigate graduate fellowship cuts, missing $11M

2/5/2015 update: A reader passes along this Brad Shelton powerpoint, which among other things documents the $1.5M Moffitt to Moffitt transfer: The bottom line though, is that there’s plenty of water in the well. Or at least that’s what Brad Shelton was telling UO’s academic deans in September: I wonder…