Posts tagged as “March 8-9 rape allegations”

UO Matters: Because of the importance of Thursday’s July 24th meeting of the Senate Task force on Sexual Violence to the UO community and beyond, I hired reporter Dash Paulson as a freelancer to cover it. Mr. Paulson wrote several excellent stories as an Emerald reporter, including the first substantive interview with President Gottfredson, in January 2013, here, and he previously reported for UO Matters on the June Trustees meetings, here and here. His summary is below, followed by a detailed report on the meeting. As usual, quotes are in quotes, otherwise it’s the gist of the discussion.

The Task Force’s Official website is here, prior UO Matters posts are here. President Gottfredson’s self-appointed “External Review Panel” is scheduled to meet Wednesday and Thursday, still no word on whether their meetings will be open or closed.

Mr. Paulson’s report:

Last Thursday, the new Task Force to Address Sexual Assault and Survivor Support, created by a motion in the faculty senate, met to elect a chair and clarify the goals and mission of the new group.

Professor Carol Stabile and Randy Sullivan volunteered to co-chair the task force. Stabile wanted to focus on facilitating the task force meetings while Sullivan leads development of a tentative new course to educate students and to some extent UO employees on sexual violence. After unanimously electing Sullivan and Stabile as co-chairs, the group had a lengthy discussion on the charge of the task force. It was widely agreed that the task force should begin by gathering as much information as possible about the UO’s process and policies on sexual assault cases. Task Force members Sandy Weintraub, director of student conduct & community standards, and Renae DeSautel, sexual violence response coordinator, volunteered to give a presentation on the UO’s policy on handling sexual assault incidents. Some members said that the procedure appeared from the outside to be “broken” in light of the March 8th incident of alleged sexual assault, and they felt part of the group’s charge would be to identify problems and recommend improvements.

The group also discussed the upcoming Campus Climate Survey. Stabile said the task force should endorse the University’s proposed survey along with others, like one conducted by Professor of Psychology, Jennifer Freyd, who has been developing a survey on campus sexual violence for two years.

Several members wanted to understand better what the panel initiated by President Gottfredson will be doing. Senate President Robert Kyr, who called in for the first half hour of the meeting, told the Task Force the President’s Chief of Staff, Gregory Rikhoff, would be contacting them. There was discussion of liaisons between the groups. By the end of the meeting, the task force agreed to meet again in two weeks and in the meantime make contact with other groups on campus that deal with sexual violence. Talking points next time will include the presentation by Weintraub and DeSautel, the role of alcohol in “party culture”, and more about a possible course on the nature of sexual violence.

The full, updated committee membership, which now includes US Attorney for Oregon Amanda Marshall, is on the committee website, here. Senate President Rob Kyr and Andrew Lubash showed up via conference call.

3:06 p.m. Introductions

Lisa Mick Shimizu: Thanks everyone for coming. Welcomes two new members, Andrew Lubash who will join via a conference call and Cheney Ryan (Law). UO Ombudsman Bruce McCalister has also joined the committee, but he’s on a plane at the moment.

3:10 Confirmation of Chair

Andy Greif of the Oregonian has a round-up of the current situation with the basketball rape allegations, here. The players haven’t found another school to take them, some disputes about the disciplinary process. Gottfredson, Altman, Mullens, and Holmes aren’t talking.

Update: John Clune, attorney for the survivor, has this response, so far:

This is a pretty poorly spun version of the night in question which noticeably omits all of the facts that incriminated their clients. The description doesn’t mention that two of the three men admitted in police recorded phone calls that what they did to the victim that night was wrong with one of the men calling their behavior “very inappropriate and not something he would want to happen to his mother or sister”. The third man who refused to give a statement is facing his second sexual assault allegation in the past year.

I can’t blame the lawyers though as they are just trying to help their clients explain some pretty ugly behavior that has gotten a lot of press.

6/24/2014: Andy Greif has the story in the Oregonian. The full text of the letter:

From Shaun McCrea, Laura Fine Moro, Greg Veralrud:

No jury would find that Dominic Artis, Brandon Austin or Damyean Dotson committed any form of sexual assault against their accuser. Some people will insist that the University’s suspension is proof that the acts occurred, but they would be wrong. This determination was carved in stone the day the University’s president, in response to a hail of local and national criticism, all but declared these young men guilty and dismissed them from the team. Good political cover, bad principle. It’s absurd to expect that his underlings in the Legal & Student Affairs Departments would deviate from that line.

6/12/2014 update: Coleen Flaherty of Insidehighered.com has a write up on this too, here. UO is getting quite a reputation in the national higher ed press, a story last year on Gottfredson’s efforts to subvert academic freedom is here.

6/10/2014 update: UO administration rejects Professor Freyd’s survey of campus sexual violence

Josephine Woolington has the story in the RG, here. VPSA Robin Holmes, who made the decision, is the person who sat on the 2011 recommendations for student conduct code revisions for three years. The UO Senate finally took charge, and wrote and passed the revisions on May 28. Gottfredson has not yet signed them, and the administration’s web site for the current policy still lists former student conduct director Carl Yeh as their point person. (Archived here.) Yeh left UO in August 2013, and Holmes didn’t replace him until this March.

Freyd is asking for $30-$40K to cover the survey costs. (You can donate via the UO Foundation’s website here. Make sure you put “Research on Trauma and Oppression, Jennifer Freyd” in the “additional gift instructions” box, or your money will probably go to Duck Athletics.) The UC system recently hired consultants to conduct a more general campus climate survey, at a reported cost of $661K, albeit for a larger sample.

The strange “external review committee” that Gottfredson, Holmes, and Mullens just appointed to review their own dilatory response to the conduct code and basketball rape allegations – three months after Gottfredson first learned of them – will now decide how to conduct their own survey. Talk about a conflict of interest! The story also quotes Holmes’s $83K “strategic communicator” Rita Radostitz, but don’t expect much in the way of frank talk from her:

The UO Senate does not trust the administration on this issue, and the Senate Task Force membership will be announced shortly. Presumably they will take charge of this matter as well.

6/6/2014 update: Gottfredson’s self-appointed “external review panel” includes old insider

Gottfredson, Mullens, and Holmes have now announced the names of the people they are appointing to the “External Review Panel” to investigate their own actions or lack of actions regarding the March 8-9 rape allegations and sexual violence prevention. Full list here.

The panel will include Bob Berdahl. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2005, in his previous job as UC-Berkeley President, Berdahl got into some trouble over his lucrative sinecure payments, but managed to avoid prosecution:

First UO President Mike Gottfredson tried to claim the Eugene Police hid their investigative report on the basketball rape allegations from him. So the police released their timeline contradicting him. Gottfredson then refused to release the documents supporting his story, claiming they were redacted because of “attorney-client privilege”. Then yesterday…

From the ODE: An open letter from a fellow Duck: The past few months have, undeniably, been the hardest and most challenging time in my life. This is such an overwhelming experience and one that I hope that no other student on campus ever has to live through. Given what…