UO Matters

Say it aint so, Chip!

2012-02-24T16:49:00.002-08:00

2/24/2012: From Rob Moseley in the RG:

An NCAA investigation suggests that the Oregon football team did not conform to NCAA regulations relating to recruiting over the last four years, according to documents released Friday by the university. A draft statement of “proposed findings of violations” submitted by the NCAA to the athletic department notes that the Ducks used three scouting services in ways that did not conform with NCAA rules, and to exceeding the permissible number of coaches involved in recruiting at any one time. Further, and potentially most serious, the NCAA and Oregon “agreed that from 2008 through 2011, the scope and nature of the violations ... demonstrate that the athletics department failed to adequately monitor the football program’s use of recruiting or scouting services.”

Getting close to that dreaded "loss of institutional control". This is going to cost another big bundle of UO student tuition money. Rob Mullens's letter to UO here, NCAA proposed findings of violations here. Ken Goe story from the Oregonian here. Chip Kelly's contract, here, specifically allows UO to dock his pay for the cost of this crap.

So, Rob Mullens could indeed fine Kelly for NCAA violations, etc. A day's pay would be about $20,000, but there's no upper limit and Kelly would not seem to have much recourse. But I'm guessing it's more likely the UO administration will stick the academic side with the consequences. They've already got us paying for the Jock Box, parking, overhead, and of course for 50% of Glazier's bill for handling the NCAA: contract here, Here's one of the docs, approved by Jamie Moffitt:

Randy Geller and former Public Records Officer Liz Denecke spent almost 3 months stalling the release of the records that showed that the academic side was stuck with half the cost. We pay, but when we ask what's going on, we get this:

December's entire bill is $15,441.41. UO is still sitting on the January bill.

Faculty salaries compared

2012-02-24T13:20:00.002-08:00

2/24/2012: Sent to me by an anonymous prof:

Also see this, from UO's AAUP website:

union forum slides

2012-02-23T21:21:00.002-08:00

2/23/2012: I've had requests for Michael Raymer's slides from the union forum. He sent them along, 4 pages, here, with this explanation:

My Conclusions from the Data:

There is an undeniable inverse correlation between tenure-track faculty (TTF) unionization and average school quality. (Presence of union correlates to lower ranking.)

Of course, causality is not indicated. Does low quality lead to unions, or do unions lead to low quality, or neither?

The question we should ask ourselves:

If UO wants to strive to increase its quality, should it associate itself with the top schools, the vast majority of which are not TTF unionized? Or with the lower-tier schools, where nearly all of the unions exist?

I'm happy to post more figures/links/data if people send them to me. Slide 1:

Rely on merit, not race

2012-02-23T19:47:00.001-08:00

2/23/2012: That's the title of the lead post by UO physics professor Stephen Hsu, in a NYT sponsored discussion of racial preferences in college admissions, prompted by the SCOTUS decision to revisit their constitutionality.

Education bill stalls

2012-02-23T08:23:00.001-08:00

2/23/2012: according to the Oregonian. Two weeks ago they were very optimistic. The bill would mean Oregon would have a Chief Education Officer with authority over Pernsteiner and it would give the governor authority to ~~fire~~ control Pernsteiner. Pernsteiner fired Lariviere, and now he seems to be stopping Kitzhaber. Legislative website for the higher ed bill is here:

Identifies positions that will be under direction and control
of Chief Education Officer for matters related to design and
organization of state's education system.
  Requires  { + governing bodies of + } education entities to
enter into achievement compact with Oregon Education Investment
Board.  Describes terms that must be included in achievement
compact.   { +  Directs education entities to form achievement
compact advisory committees to develop and implement achievement
compact. + }
  Declares emergency, effective on passage.
 
                        A BILL FOR AN ACT
Relating to education; creating new provisions; amending ORS
  326.300, 326.375, 351.075 and 351.725 and sections 1, 2 and 4,
  chapter 519, Oregon Laws 2011; and declaring an emergency.
Be It Enacted by the People of the State of Oregon:
  SECTION 1. Section 2, chapter 519, Oregon Laws 2011, is amended
to read:
   { +  Sec. 2. + } (1) The Oregon Education Investment Board
established by section 1   { - of this 2011 Act - }  { + ,
chapter 519, Oregon Laws 2011, + } shall appoint a Chief
Education Officer who shall serve at the pleasure of the board.
  (2) The Chief Education Officer shall be a person who, by
training and experience, is well qualified to:
  (a) Perform the duties of the office, as determined by the
board; and
  (b) Assist in carrying out the functions of the board, as
described in section 1   { - of this 2011 Act - }  { + , chapter
519, Oregon Laws 2011 + }.
   { +  (3)(a) For the purpose of furthering the mission of the
Oregon Education Investment Board to oversee a unified public
education system, the Chief Education Officer shall have
direction and control over the positions identified in paragraph
(b) of this subsection for matters related to the design and
organization of the state's education system, including early
childhood services provided by the state.
  (b) The positions over which the Chief Education Officer shall
have direction and control are:
  (A) The Commissioner for Community College Services.
  (B) The Chancellor of the Oregon University System.
  (C) The executive director of the Oregon Student Access
Commission.
  (D) The Early Childhood System Director.
  (E) The executive director of the Higher Education Coordinating
Commission.
  (F) The Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction.
  (c) The authority of the Chief Education Officer granted under
paragraph (a) of this subsection does not include the authority
to appoint or remove a person from a position identified in
paragraph (b) of this subsection.
  (d) If a person in a position identified in paragraph (b) of
this subsection is appointed by an entity other than the
Governor, the Governor shall resolve any dispute between the
Chief Education Officer and the appointing authority of the
person. The Governor's decision is final. + }

Is UO Matters bad for UO?

2012-02-22T12:11:00.000-08:00

2/22/2012: That's the line I've been getting from UO administrators lately: UO Matters is a primary reason that there is so little trust between the faculty and the administration. If you have any thoughts on this, pro or con, please comment.

Jocks put squeeze on Eckstein for still more cash

2012-02-21T22:52:00.001-08:00

Update: ODE editorial here.OC post here.

2/22/2012: ODE story here. I like that quip about how much money Randy Geller is already making the students pay for Chip Kelly's lawyer. Secret video of negotiations here.

Faculty Union Forum

2012-02-21T22:23:00.000-08:00

2/21/2012: I caught the last half. The panel was well balanced pro and con. Maybe 100 faculty in the audience, notably pro. That's all I've got to say. If you have more, the comments are open.

Blandy and Altman to both replace Tomlin

2012-02-21T20:34:00.001-08:00

2/21/2012: Not what was expected:

Dear colleagues,

I am pleased to announce that two highly respected University of Oregon faculty members have been selected to oversee the institution’s extensive academic affairs portfolio. Doug Blandy has been appointed senior vice provost for academic affairs, and Barbara Altman will serve as vice provost for academic affairs on a half-time basis. Both roles are two-year, renewable positions.

The Office of Academic Affairs is responsible for a broad range of the UO’s academic appointments, programs and initiatives including all faculty personnel matters, curriculum coordination and assessment and program review. Promotion and tenure as well as the non-tenure track faculty are also important parts of the portfolio. In addition, the office oversees a variety of reporting units including the Museum of Natural and Cultural History, Academic Extension, the Labor Education and Resource Center and the Morse Center for Law and Politics.

Given the breadth of this portfolio and the complementary strengths Barbara and Doug each bring to these positions, the University of Oregon will be extremely well served by these two appointments.

Doug has extensive administrative experience at the University of Oregon. He is currently director of the Arts and Administration Program and a faculty member in the UO’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts (AAA). He is also associate dean for academic affairs for AAA. In 2005, he served as acting dean for the school.

Doug has made significant contributions to the university through service on a variety of committees including the UO Senate, Senate Budget Committee, Faculty Personnel Committee and the Center on Diversity and Community.

Doug has said that his priorities as senior vice provost will be to “encourage dialogue and collaboration; reinforce vision, risk taking and creativity; and promote excellence among faculty and staff colleagues.”

Barbara is director of the Oregon Humanities Center and a professor of French in the Romance Languages Department. Her half-time appointment in academic affairs will allow Barbara to continue as the Oregon Humanities Center director, a post she has held since 2008.

Barbara is the recipient of several teaching awards including the University of Oregon’s Ersted Teaching Award in 1997 and the Thomas E. Herman Teaching award in 2011. She also served as department head of the Romance Languages Department from 2005 to 2008 and was recently elected to the executive council of the Modern Language Association. Barbara has contributed to the University of Oregon through service on committees such as the Faculty Advisory Council, the International Affairs Advisory Council, University Senate, the Senate Budget Committee and the Women’s Studies Committee.

Barbara has said, “The position is a great opportunity to provide leadership in this time of change and transition. I look forward to assisting in the coordination of the broad sweep of programs, schools, interests and agendas of the Office of Academic Affairs. I strongly support the well being of the UO faculty and the integrity of our academic programs.”

Doug will transition into his new role on a half-time basis from March 15 to June 15. He will work along side Russ Tomlin who will retire as senior vice provost in June. After that point, Doug will assume the senior vice provost position full-time. Barbara will start her half-time appointment as vice provost for academic affairs on July 1.

Please join me in congratulating Doug and Barbara as they begin new chapters in their service to the University of Oregon.

Lorraine Davis
Acting Senior Vice President and Provost

I wonder what sort of retirement gig they will find for Tomlin.

Kilkenny Towers

2012-02-21T08:00:00.002-08:00

2/21/2012: ODE reporter Deborah Bloom teams up with investigative reporter Jeff Manning from the Oregonian to produce a fascinating story on how UO's former Athletic Director Pat Kilkenny developed the Courtside and Skybox apartments next to Matt Court, while he was on the UO payroll. He started working on the deal summer of 2009, and didn't tell Lariviere until construction was well underway, summer of 2010. ODE link here, Oregonian here:

Cody and Kilkenny's 2009 gamble now seems ahead of its time. Both Courtside and the larger, adjacent Skybox complex are 100 percent occupied, marketing themselves as "anchors of the up-and-coming Arena District." Rents range from $625 to $1,250 per bedroom per month, making them some of the more expensive student housing units in the city. As 50 percent owner, Kilkenny figures that he could eventually earn $7 million to $10 million.

There's nothing wrong or illegal about a public employee making a profitable investment, even a hugely profitable one. Ron Bersin, executive director of the Oregon Ethics Commission, said state law allows public employees to participate in private ventures. What would constitute a violation is if Kilkenny made decisions in his public role from which he benefited. Kilkenny was no longer athletic director when the buildings were erected. But he remained employed until March 2011 as special assistant to the athletic director.

Kilkenny stepped down as AD in July 2009, when Frohnmayer left. But then the string of new AD's - Mike Belotti, Lorraine Davis, and Rob Mullens, all kept him on the payroll at 0.50 FTE. This let him get UO health insurance. Guy with a private jet gets the state to pay for his health insurance? Too bad UO won't give that same deal to the 0.49 FTE NTTF's getting paid $25,000. (By very rough count, about 100 NTTF's are at exactly 49%, so no benefits.)

Meanwhile the athletic department is still stuck with a $10 million ten year balloon loan on the baseball park Kilkenny built for us. And we're still stuck subsidizing athletics's overhead, thanks to the secret deal Kilkenny cut with Frohnmayer.

We should note that the Courtside scandal was first brought to light by Camilla Mortensen in the Eugene Weekly last year, here. UO finally took Kilkenny off the payroll 2 months later. At the time we wrote a little bit about how Kilkenny came to be hired by Frohnmayer as AD, here. Apparently this is the first in a series of investigative stories that the Oregonian and Emerald will cooperate on. Great idea. Obviously there is plenty of material to work with.

Even Frohnmayer wants Mullens to give back to UO

2012-02-20T23:17:00.002-08:00

2/20/2012: But it ain't never gonna happen. Sam Stites has the story in the ODE.

student faculty ratio

2012-02-20T20:26:00.003-08:00

2/20/2012: There's a lot of misinformation about student-faculty ratios floating around. If you look at the number of students per tenure track faculty, you get this:

All the data from UO institutional research. It's ugly, so Jim Bean has been counting NTTFs, which makes us look much prettier. I've got nothing but respect for NTTFs. But while denial may work for US News - where UO reports a student-faculty ratio of 20 - it is probably not the way to stay in the AAU.

Faculty research productivity and pay

2012-02-20T19:36:00.000-08:00

2/20/2012: The figure and email below are from an anonymous correspondent. At UO there is a tiny correlation between a department's average pay relative to their discipline and their research productivity relative to their discipline. You'd expect better ranking departments would be closer to AAU comparator pay. Nope, mostly it's random noise.

Half of UO department's are above average w.r.s.t. research according to the NRC. We are all behind on pay. Boost pay by 3% or so to account for the Lariviere raises and an adjustment for raises at our comparators. We are still way behind.

Thanks for this interesting post, anonymous! I'm guessing you're no computer science professor. Comparative literature?

Email:

There has been some discussion on your blog and elsewhere about market-based salary differences between fields (e.g., economists make more money than musicians), and whether a union would or would not try to flatten those differences. That got me wondering about a separate issue. Over and above those market differences, I wondered if there already are -- and if there would be under a union -- merit-based differences between departments. In particular, if your department is at the top (or bottom) of its respective field, is that reflected in the department's salaries?

To look into that question, I started with the list of NRC percentiles by department that you calculated for the blog post. Against that I plotted each department's average UO salary as a percentage of its AAU comparators (to account for the market differences between disciplines). I used the "all ranks weighted" values which should adjust for departments that are tilted toward more junior or senior faculty. (Data from here: http://ir.uoregon.edu/sites/ir/files/UO with OUS Peers by Dept_2011.pdf).

The answer seems to be that there is almost no correlation (r=.12) between NRC rank and a department's salary differential relative to its comparators. The scatterplot is [above]. (Minor note: I reversed the percentiles you posted so that higher means better.)

One conclusion you could draw is that, at a departmental level, it makes a big difference what discipline you are in, but almost no difference in whether you are good or bad in your discipline. I wonder why there isn't more of a relationship, and whether that would change for better or worse under a union contract.

Or maybe there are obvious problems with this analysis that I'm not seeing?

Tuesday Faculty Unionization Forum

2012-02-20T19:00:00.000-08:00

CAMPUS FORUM: OPEN DIALOGUE ON FACULTY UNIONIZATION

Hosted by the University Senate (see senate.uoregon.edu/ for additional information)
TUESDAY, FEB. 21, 2012
4 to 6 p.m. in the EMU Ballroom

All members of the statutory faculty, which includes all tenure-track faculty (TTF) and non tenure-track faculty (NTTF), are strongly urged to attend this important forum.

Panel discussion and question-and-answer session will feature a wide range of perspectives. Panel members are:

Tina Boscha, Career Instructor
Jeff Hurwit, Professor, Art History
Alec Murphy, Professor, Geography
Scott Pratt, Professor, Philosophy
Gina Psaki, Professor, Romance Languages
Michael Raymer, Professor, Physics
Robert Kyr, Moderator (President, University Senate)

The following topics will be the focus of discussion:
• Working Conditions including Facilities
• Benefits: Health and Retirement (Pension)
• Salaries
• Bargaining Unit--Definition & Configuration
• Card Check Process & Collective Bargaining
• Governance Structure of the University

Remembering University professor Svitlana Kravchenko

2012-02-19T23:44:00.000-08:00

2/20/2011: UO news here. UO law here. Daily Emerald story here. From the Law School facebook:

Memorial Tribute to Honor Professor Svitlana Kravchenko

Please join us to honor the late Professor Svitlana Kravchenko of the University of Oregon School of Law on Friday, February 24.

Svitlana's husband, Professor John Bonine and his niece from Ukraine, Lena Kravchenko, ask you to join him for this occasion in order to honor Svitlana's memory and inspire us and others to carry forward Svitlana's vision, professional work, and love and decency toward others.

The tribute to Prof. Kravchenko will be at 3:00 pm, in room 175 of the School of Law, 1515 Agate Street, Eugene. You may arrive any time after 2:30 pm for seating and to talk quietly with others.

In lieu of any gifts of flowers, the family will encourage contributions in Svitlana's memory to one or more funds that are being established. More information on that will come later.

My apologies for the earlier incorrect Monday date.

"Student-Athletes" skip 2 weeks of 10 week term

2012-02-19T15:55:00.000-08:00

2/19/2012: I tend to focus on what Pat Kilkenny's weird baseball obsession is costing UO in dollars. Kilkenny got the UO Foundation to loan athletics millions to build "PK Park" on a 6.25% ten year balloon loan, pledging future media revenues as collateral.

But as Richard Sundt notes, the corruption is not just about the money:

17 February 2012

Dear Athletic Director Mullens, Coach Horton, UO President Berdahl, Interim Provost Davis, Senate President Kyr, ASUO President Eckstein:

I read in today’s RG a headline about UO baseball: “Ducks roll up frequent-flier miles to open.” In this report Adam Jude writes that the “unranked” team will be going to Honolulu to open a series of games that will require Duck players to travel 9000 miles in 12 days. These student-athletes will be accumulating more than frequent class absences (normally about 2-3 days per week during the season); they will accumulate a complete absence from classes for one week and five days. If this is not a travesty of education, I don’t know what is. More to the point: It is sham education.

This university and all others in the country that allow sports programs to thrive on missing classes for twelve straight days —let alone for 2-3 days a week— should ask if they are not corrupting higher education. The persons complicit in downgrading academics are many, not only Athletic Directors and Coaches, but also Administration officials who wink at this, Faculty who do not speak up against the destruction of the University’s teaching mission (if it still exists, read Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift), and Faculty in the Intercollegiate Athletic who over the years, and most especially when the baseball program was re-instituted (even when I pointed out the sport’s frequent absence program), have not cared to address head-on the issues relating to the draining of classrooms for the benefit of athletics. When is this going to end?

Faculty, are your classes so unimportant, so devoid of content and originality that students can miss nearly two weeks and this doesn’t matter? What’s the deal? Or, can everything in your courses be done on-line, and if so, then let’s not waste time and money building more classrooms; we can even outsource teaching, and cut any number of positions (even yours) in the process. Or, just let the Jacqua Center do the teaching —what, in the hope that its staff possesses the same level of competency in your area of expertise as you do?

Richard Sundt
Art History

Where is UO's Faculty Athletics Representative, Jim O'Fallon on this issue? UO is paying him $187,729 at a 0.5 FTE, plus expenses to protect our "student-athletes" from exploitation. But according to the NY Times columnist Joe Nocera, O'Fallon's busy working for the NCAA infractions committee, making sure the "student-athletes" don't get free textbooks. Because that would be an impermissible benefit. But it's OK for UO to pay *him* to do the NCAA's dirty work. Can anyone make sense of any of this?

Oregonian mocks Kitzhaber's 40-40-20 plan

2012-02-19T15:32:00.000-08:00

2/19/2012: Columnist David Sarasohn:

In the middle of the 1990s, when Oregon K-12 funding was a question of whether programs would be thrown overboard right away or the following year, Portland school superintendent Jack Bierwirth was asked why he had ever decided to come here.

He explained that he'd been very excited about the school reform plan the Legislature passed in 1991, guaranteeing preschool to every Oregon student, and thought with that basis, schools could do impressive things.

Delicately, he was asked whether he hadn't noticed that there was no actual funding for the policy.

Bierwirth replied, still sounding bewildered years after his decision, "I couldn't believe they'd pass it without some way to pay for it."

At the time, he hadn't seen much of Oregon.

Bierwirth's bewilderment comes to mind as the state sets out another lofty goal, 40-40-20 -- having 40 percent of the state's adults with four-year college degrees, 40 percent with two-year degrees or the equivalent, and the remaining 20 percent with high school degrees. It would be an impressive advance, since the four-year number is now closer to 30 percent and the two-year degree number way lower than that. The state is so proud of the goal that the last legislature made it law.

Just like the 1991 school reform bill.

Oregon's not going to get to 40-40-20 by just getting people to sign compacts saying they'll do better. It will take considerable new money for both university resources and financial aid support, a sharp U-turn from the direction the state has followed for the last 20 years. ...

Lariviere had a plan that would have allowed UO to do its part, complete with financing. Kitzhaber let Pernsteiner fire him - and hasn't come up with anything better. At some point politician's "aspirational goals" become part of the problem.

UO's finances

2012-02-17T13:14:00.000-08:00

2/17/2012: I wish that UO's CFO would give the faculty a honest talk about UO's current spending and that our Provost would give a consult with the faculty about UO's future budgeting priorities. But Jim Bean and Frances Dyke have never given us a clear data-based presentation of where they are spending our money, and what they think UO's future spending priorities should be. It's almost like they've got something to hide.

Information abhors a vacuum. So yesterday Howard Bunsis of the AAUP came and did our administration's job for them. His slides are here. Here's one particularly damning one.

I assume the faculty union organizers will post a video of this presentation soon. Howard Bunsis's talk is the best argument I've seen for signing the union card, aside from the pandering nonsense Jim Bean delivers, here.

Update: A commenter posts a link to the 2008 Senate Budget Committee report on faculty salaries, here, with this figure:

UO needs more PhD students

2012-02-17T08:08:00.000-08:00

2/17/2012: UO needs to boost the number of grad students to stay in the AAU. But what disciplines? Not much point if they can't get work in their field. Insidehighered reports on the job market for social science PhDs:

... Using the same data (which may be incomplete as many jobs are not posted with the disciplinary associations), the study also calculated a ratio of new Ph.D.s to open rank faculty positions for the four fields. Economics appears in this comparison to have the most favorable job market for new Ph.D.s, with 0.7 Ph.D.s per open rank position. The figures are 1.1 to 1 for political science, 1.3 to 1 for sociology, and 2.1 to 1 for history.

You can also get a crude measure of the research rank of UO departments from the NRC data. If you use the numerical ratings alone (i.e. ignore the reputational survey) and use the midpoint of their confidence range, then divide by the number of programs evaluated in that discipline, you get a crude percentile rank. Here's that data for UO. So our Psych department is doing the best of all UO departments, at 16%. 11 of our 21 programs are at or above the 50th percentile in their field.

Note that the NRC only bothers to evaluate a subset of the best PhD granting programs, and these percentiles are relative to that subset, so showing up on the list at all is not too shabby an accomplishment.

Update: An anon commenter has posted an analysis of my "not too shabby" comment above, and I think they are right: the NRC list of PhD programs is a pretty comprehensive list, for the disciplines they track. More corrections on this are welcome. FWIW, the NRC ranking process was very controversial, and the data used in these rankings is now some 7 years old.

Percentile	Department
16%	Psychology
24%	Geography
26%	Anthropology
26%	Biology
36%	Mathematics
36%	Geological Sciences
37%	History
38%	Physics
43%	Comparative Literature
44%	Economics
50%	Political Science
57%	Communication and Society
57%	Chemistry
64%	Philosophy
65%	Linguistics
71%	Music
75%	English
77%	Computer and Information Sciences
77%	Human Physiology
91%	Theatre Arts
94%	Sociology

Which side are you on?

2012-02-15T23:28:00.000-08:00

2/16/2012: From the union organizer's website here:

How can faculty have a real voice in setting priorities?

Thursday, February 16th
4:00-5:30pm
115 Lawrence

Hear speakers address these critical areas:

Howard Bunsis, a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan University and Secretary-Treasurer of the AAUP

Dr. Bunsis, an expert in the analysis of university budgets, previously presented his analysis of the UO’s financial condition in February 2011 (http://uauoregon.org). This new presentation extends his analysis to budgetary developments during 2011-2012, some of which may have implications for the current legislative session. ...

Or you can listen to our once and future beamer driving Provost Jim Bean brag about how UO spends only 38% of what our peers do on administration, here:

But don't ask to see the public records - he'll make you pay.

UO Police go with Glock

2012-02-15T17:51:00.000-08:00

2/15/2012: It's a popular choice, though the stopping power of the .45 caliber round may strike some students and faculty as overkill for on-campus use.

Invoice here, looks like a nice discount for buying 10 with 3 ~~clips~~ magazines each. No ammo or training yet.

Advisory group on athletic's financial sustainability appointed

2012-02-15T17:25:00.000-08:00

That would be at UC-Berkeley:

The Chancellor’s Advisory Council on Intercollegiate Athletics Financial Sustainability has been asked to:

develop an understanding of the recent and current financial and competitive state of the Intercollegiate Athletics program;

assess alternative approaches to promptly putting the IA program on a financially sustainable course;

assess possible impacts of changes in the scope of the department on philanthropy to academic programs;

develop a short list of promising alternatives, including the pros and cons of each.

While the University Athletics Board and the Academic Senate’s “Task Force on Intercollegiate Athletics” are exploring similar issues, the chancellor identified an opportunity to generate fresh perspectives through focused interaction between two of the campus’s most important constituencies.

Here at UO, our administration is still in denial about the true costs of the academic subsidies of our athletics programs.

UO Foundation hides athletic giving data

2012-02-15T07:41:00.000-08:00

2/15/2012: The Council for Aid to Education announced the results of its authoritative Voluntary Support of Education survey today. Chronicle story here. On average, giving to higher ed is up 8.2%. Giving to the UO Foundation is down from $121 million for the 2009-10 FY to $93 million for 2010-11 FY. (Official total using PV). These amounts include deferred gifts, unrealized bequests, and so on. Not sure how things like the Jock Box get counted.

I'm still parsing the data, but this jumps out: UO Foundation CEO Paul Weinhold and compliance officer Erika Funk have once again refused to complete the section of the survey giving details on donations to athletics. The RHS column shows what a group of our comparator universities report on average. Those Beavers at Oregon State have nothing to hide, but UO does:

I wrote in October about how the Foundation cut contributions to academic scholarships by $1.6 million last year, while increasing their own administrative spending $2 million. And here is the data we do have on where donation money is going. No real growth for academics, more and more goes to athletics:

Data source here. And the academic side has to pay the tab for the skybox seats for these people.

Sandusky scandal's costs approach Bellotti's

2012-02-14T07:31:00.000-08:00

2/14/2012: From the Philadelphia Inquirer. Penn State has now begun to post documents about the scandal and about university operations in general (budgets, contracts) at http://openness.psu.edu/

Meanwhile here at UO we still don't know what the Kelly/Lyles scandal will cost - just that the jocks have convinced Randy Geller that the academic side must pay half the costs so far. And NYT columnist Joe Nocera continues spelunking the sewer that is the NCAA:

The N.C.A.A. despises sports agents — hates them so much so that it once helped promulgate an anti-agent law. As of January 2010, according to the N.C.A.A.’s Web site, that law had been passed by 40 states. A player who takes an “improper benefit” from a sports agent loses his eligibility. A player who gets drafted out of high school — this happens in baseball as well as hockey — and engages an agent to talk to the pro team that drafted him loses his eligibility. Indeed, the mere act of signing with an agent is enough for a player to lose his eligibility. N.C.A.A. “scandals” involving agents and athletes are almost as common as recruiting scandals.

The N.C.A.A. claims — as it always does — that it is acting to protect its athletes “from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.” But this is classic N.C.A.A. Orwellian spin. Its true purpose in preventing athletes from engaging with agents while in college is to exacerbate their exploitation. The professional and commercial enterprise doing the exploiting, of course, is college sports itself.

“It’s all about control,” says Don Jackson, a lawyer who specializes in representing athletes who have run afoul of the N.C.A.A. Teenage athletes with agents are far more likely to make informed decisions about their lives than athletes acting on their own. Instead, athletes have to rely on coaches and athletic administrators, whose primary interest is the school, not the player.

I'd have written "athletes have to rely on coaches and athletic administrators, whose primary interest is themselves, not the player." These exploiters will leave UO in a heartbeat for a better offer - but if an athlete tries that, the NCAA enforcers will take away their eligibility!

UO sports and integration

2012-02-13T10:35:00.000-08:00

2/13/2012: I mostly agree that college sports has become "The New Plantation" and that it often seems that rule #1 for the NCAA is that "no black person can make money off college football". Certainly not someone like Willie Lyles!

But it wasn't always like that - once college sports was at the forefront of integration. Fishduck.com has a great piece on the history from Oregon. By Kurt Liedtke. This is a must read:

It was not without its difficulties though, as both Robinson and Williams were initially barred from living in campus dorms, having to find housing in off-campus apartments during their freshman year. Their white teammates signed a petition and submitted it to the school under protest demanding that their fellow players be allowed to live on campus in the dormitories alongside their peers. By their sophomore year the university relented, allowing Robinson and Williams to reside in Friendly Hall, albeit separated from others and permitted to enter the building only through their own designated entrance.

Read it all. This was 1926. What drove the coach to integrate? He wanted to win. The key is to harness that powerful motive and make it do something good. Is Oregon still doing that?