3/4/2014 update: I received an email from UO Trustee and ASUO President Sam Dotters-Katz, asking me to correct this post. Here is the relevant part of his message. Professor Harbaugh, I am writing to ask you to correct your factually inaccurate blog post, “UO Trustee Sam Dotters-Katz blames…”. Below are…
Posts tagged as “UO Trustees”
1/24/2014 update: The UO Board has elected Chuck Lillis as chair, and Ginevra Ralph as vice-chair. RG report here.
Disclaimer: This is my opinion of what people said, meant, or should have said. Nothing is a quote unless in quotes.
1/23/2014: Cocktail party version from day one, caveat being I missed the last two hours, including Coltrane on “academic plan”, Andreassen on fundraising, Moffitt on finances. Sorry, I was unable to attend day 2. Presumably the minutes will be posted soon.
- Low turnout, as in me and 2 or 3 others, probably because UO was unclear about the fact this was a public meeting. Good work Tim, you’re earning that $218K.
- Gottfredson wasted a lot of time on vague generalities and mission statement. Avoided AAU issues, etc.
- Brad Shelton was generally forthright about UO’s academic and financial weaknesses, but did not explain where the money was going.
- Randy Geller was unusually in control of himself, and generally lucid for a guy who is no longer allowed to update his website or email the faculty.
- Trustees: Chuck Lillis and Kurt Willcox were the most engaged and informed. Allyn Ford is no dummy, Connie Ballmer, Ginevra Ralph, and Mary Wilcox had some good questions. Most of them hadn’t done the reading.
- Elephants in the room: How much debt will Gottfredson take on to expand undergrad capacity and get more out-of-state and Chinese students? What strings will be attached to Phil Knight’s $1B donation? Are we trying to stay in the AAU or will we fold and concentrate on sports product design?
- Jamie Moffitt said that there are economies of scale in administration. I think she means in theory, not in practice.
- Bylaws set up so that board will be dependent on UO administration for information. No independent legal counsel or access to information about UO finances or academic issues. Gottfredson controls Counsel, Treasurer, Auditor, etc. No discussion of how the Board – which includes only one PhD and no one with experience at a research university – can possibly execute its responsibilities while being spoon-fed by Johnson Hall administrators with every incentive to make themselves look good.
From our Corvallis branch office: Outgoing Senate President Kevin Gable spoke eloquently about the role of Faculty Senate in a shared governance setting. That would be at Oregon State University: http://media.oregonstate.edu/media/OSU+Faculty+Senate+January+9%2C+2014+part+1+of+7/0_tkg0wb61 Nice little profile in the Gazette-Times, as well: http://www.gazettetimes.com/news/local/osu-faculty-senate-president-kevin-gable-notes-importance-of-shared/article_d7d0d012-7a74-11e3-ba4f-0019bb2963f4.html Then Gable ticks off the pieces of the OSU puzzle in…
12/10/2013 update: All in all, this meeting was a refreshing effort by Scott Coltrane and Brad Shelton to tell the faculty a little about what’s going on at UO and get some feedback about where to go w.r.t. future priorities. About 30 faculty risked frostbite and ostracism by the administration to show up and ask some skeptical questions.
The presentation on enrollment patterns was well done, and led to a good discussion about tradeoffs. No big surprises: UO students are well below our comparators in SATs and in graduation rates.
The information about faculty output and research, on the other hand, was pretty amateurish. We got the same basic story discussed in my November analysis of Coltrane’s benchmarking report, here. UO’s faculty is extremely productive when it comes to graduating undergraduates – twice the number of the other AAU publics. Not so much and falling when it comes to PhDs. There was no effort to control for med school / engineering school effects. Shelton and Coltrane got called out on this many times, and asked how they expected us to meaningfully contribute to discussion about academic priorities without good data. UO has these data, but for whatever reason they decided not to show them to the faculty. After the complaints, they promised to do so at a future meeting. This response was also a welcome improvement in transparency.
The most disappointing part to me, and judging by the questions, also to others, was the near total absence of financial data. It’s hard to talk about priorities when you don’t know the constraints. Shelton insisted that the only reliable data was that UO’s budget, per undergraduate, is about half the AAU average. The meeting concluded with a discussion of whether or not we could stay in the AAU, and whether or not we should try, given the opportunity cost.
As it happens, Johnson Hall has been much more forthcoming with the new UO Board than it ever has been with the faculty, and I’ve been able to get the documents from the first Board meeting. I haven’t had time to look them over yet, but the comments are open:
- 01 Overview.pdf
- 02 Diversity.pdf
- 03 Academic.pdf
- 04 Faculty and Staff.pdf
- 05 Research.pdf
- 06 Students.pdf
- 07 Finance.pdf
- 08 Athletics.pdf
- 09 University Advancement.pdf
- 10 Benchmarking.pdf
- Admissions viewbook 2014 resident.pdf
- Letter from the President.pdf
- Notice of Meeting 11 11 13_0.pdf
- Notice of Meeting 102413.pdf
- Orientation Meeting Agenda 102913.pdf
- Orientation Meeting Agenda 111113_0.pdf
- Powering the State’s Economy 2013.pdf
- UO OEM Annual Report 2012.pdf
- UO Snapshot 2013 FINAL 02-05-13 rev 10-15-13.pdf
12/2/2013: Coltrane on benchmarking and priorities
Dear Campus Community,
As the President described in remarks to the Senate at its last meeting, I invite you to
That would be the Oregon State University Board of Trustees. Betsy Hammond has the story in the Oregonian here. The link to the OSU Trustees page with notice of the public meeting is here. They also issued a press release telling everyone the meeting would be public. The UO Trustees met…
11/24/2013: In an op-ed in the RG, here: To enhance student participation with the board, the selection of student members should be determined by their peers. At Portland State University and Oregon State University student leaders allowed their colleagues to apply for the position, an opportunity all Ducks should be…
10/29/2013: Dear Colleagues, This week, nominees to the University of Oregon’s new Board of Trustees—the institutional governing board recently established by the Oregon Legislature—will visit our campus for an orientation workshop. It is one of many opportunities our new trustees will have to become broadly knowledgeable about the university and…
9/19/2013: Wow. That “watershed moment in UO’s history” is looking a bit like Katrina. Diane Dietz has a report in the RG, and Nigel Jaquiss has one in WWeek: Amid all the wheeling and dealing in Salem toward the “grand bargain” Gov. John Kitzhaber and legislative leaders hashed out this week,…
9/9/2013: An adamant state judge sternly warned the Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors on Monday that it faces possible imprisonment if it does not immediately comply with her more than four-month-old order to make public the records of its secret presidential search…. Clark ruled Aug. 14 that the board…
9/4/2013: Excellent report in Insidehigered.com, from former ODE reporter Allie Grasgreen, on the latest effort to pressure university presidents to take control back from athletics departments. Also check out the Ry Rivard story on lack of confidence by presidents in their boards: Only 20 percent of public four-year college presidents…
8/20/2013: This man gets a t-shirt! Fortunately it looks like Kitzhaber responded to Knight by appointing a pretty reasonable UO Board. From today’s Op-Ed in the Oregonian: … When we deal with public funds, we debate trade-offs and opportunity costs. But we tend to ignore these issues when we deal with private…
8/19/2013: Gov Kitzhaber’s press release here. President Gottfredson’s “Dear Colleagues” email here. Info from the UO nomination page (in italics) or other sources. Editorial comments at the bottom. See Betsy Hammond in the Oregonian for info on the HECC, PSU, and OSU boards. In the ODE, Craig Garcia has better…
8/16/2013 update: The good governor’s nominations are due Monday. Jonathan Cooper has the story for the AP, in the RG. The official version is that they decided to withdraw their names from Gottfredson’s bizarre 50 person list of nominees. We are supposed to believe that President Gottfredson neglected to get their permission…
8/3/2013: From the comments, a petition to keep Frohnmayer and Knight off the UO Board: http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/keep-phil-knight-and.fb28?source=s.icn.fb&r_by=18742128/2/2013: Sounds like he got chewed out by Kitzhaber’s office, over the process UO used to select nominees for the board. Other than that his email is the usual drivel. If you want substance watch Ed…