The University, the Oregonian reports, is seeking to basically get the next 30 years’ worth of state funding in one lump sum. This, it believes, will increase independence and so forth.
Financial details, albiet unconfirmed, on Grier
UO Matters is attributing to “rumor control” information about Grier’s transfer to the School of Law. The gist of what the site says is that Grier will be paid her current salary out of Law’s budget. Here is the site administrator’s opinion on it:
Seriously, if you add up UO’s obvious administrative deadwood we are now over $1 million a year just in salary. It’s going to be hard to justify a tuition increase without some cuts.
Looks like another round of interviews for me tomorrow. A full story on Grier’s situation is set for tomorrow’s Emerald.
Oregonian says Melinda Grier is gone.
Melinda Grier (Photo by Oregon Daily Emerald)
The Oregonian reports that it has it from four sources that University General Counsel Melinda Grier is being pushed out of her position. One of the sources is state Board of Higher Ed president Paul Kelly, Jr. The University’s spokesperson Phil Weiler, when I asked him whether the rumor was true, said a statement would be coming out “late this afternoon.”
- Here’s the Oregonian’s first blog post about the subject.
- Here’s their fuller article.
- Here’s sports writer Ken Goe’s two cents.
- Here’s what UO Matters, so far the only outlet I’ve seen with the story, has to say.
- Other blogs with the story: Football Rumor Mill and Big Education Ape.
Beyond that, when I get the statement, I’ll post it.
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ASUO Senate agenda
Here’s the agenda for the Apr. 14 Senate meeting in the EMU Walnut Room. The most interesting part will certainly be the grilling some senators may give Robin Holmes over the Crisis Center. Also controversial may be the Coalition Against Environmental Racism’s request for more than $2,000 to attend an off-campus conference.
1. Call to order
2. Approval of the agenda
3. Special requests
a. Coalition Against Environmental Racism — $2,033 from surplus
b. Executive — $310 in line-item transfers
4. New Business
a. Robin Holms Presentation and Q&A on Crisis Center
5. Announcements
6. Approval of the Minutes
a. 4/07/10
a. Robin Holms Presentation and Q&A on Crisis Center
5. Announcements
6. Approval of the Minutes
a. 4/07/10
7. Officer Updates
a. Academic
b. Treasurer
c. Ombudsperson
d. Vice President
e. President
f. Executive
8. Committee Updates
a. ACFC
b. EMU Board
c. Ethics & Efficiency
d. Personnel
e. Finance
f. Rules
g. Outreach
9. Adjourn
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Wherefore Campus Recycling?
To answer the above question, probably just where it is right now.
Moving Campus Recycling off of the incidental fee was one of Alex McCafferty’s less-cited but, I think, more interesting campaign planks. It’s of a strain of old-timey ASUO conservatism that’s no longer so pronounced. That is, it’s seemingly rooted in the idea, articulated to me most recently by ASUO Sen. Demic Tipitino when I interviewed him on the radio, that students, mercurial and distracted as they are, are a worse fit for allocating the ASUO’s $12 million budget than the University administration.
You can read McCafferty’s opinion on Campus Recycling in his interview with the Oregon Commentator’s page or in a letter he wrote to the Emerald in March.
With McCafferty’s Reality Check campaign taking a majority on the DFC, I thought I’d ask president-elect Amelie Rousseau what her opinion on the idea was following her election as president. I expected her to say it would likely not happen. Surprise: “It’s trending more toward a kind of Facilities Service that we have (on the ASUO’s budget), as opposed to something for students.”
In light of that, I expected this to be a consensus issue, something everyone in the ASUO was agreed upon, including those at Campus Recycling. So I called Karyn Kaplan today to ask her about it. Wrong again.
“Nobody’s talked to me about it,” she said. She said it would be difficult to convince the University to go along with it anyway. Campus Recycling gets funding from six different sources, including the ASUO, but the parts the ASUO pays for are only the student-aligned ones; jobs, recycling in the EMU, the composting program created by a popular movement among students, etc. Even if Campus Recycling went off the incidental fee, it’s probable that the ASUO would have to pay much of what it already pays through assessments.
Figuring I must have misinterpreted something, I called Rousseau again. She said she’d changed her mind on the idea after talking to Nick Schultz. “I think that it won’t actually save students money,” she said, since it would still fall under tuition. And students, she said, would also get less say in the creation of programs like composting.
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More about whether results are known.
So I’m still looking into how Campus Change Coalition and its volunteer might have gotten some sort of knowledge of the voting results. People from other campaigns, privately, have been raising a stink about the link that CCC has posted to Duckweb on Facebook, which produces a Duckweb page with a frame with instructions from CCC and Rousseau’s campaign on it.
I got Ivar Vong, the Emerald’s resident Web expert, over to analyze the HTML encoding on the page and he said it was probably not capable of spying on DuckWeb votes, although “Jeremy Blanchard’s a really good Web developer.”
For anyone curious, here’s the code.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"> <head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"> <title>Vote for Campus Change Coalition on DuckWeb</title> <link rel="icon" href="http://www.vote3c.com/favicon.png" type="image/x-icon" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.vote3c.com/favicon.png" type="image/x-icon" /> </head> <frameset cols="250px,*"> <frame src="voteduckweb_sidebar.php" noresize="noresize" frameborder="0" name="sidebarframe" marginwidth="0" /><frame src="https://duckweb.uoregon.edu/" frameborder="0" name="duckwebframe" marginwidth="0" /> </frameset> </html>
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Do candidates know the vote count? Probably not.
I got a mass text message from someone working for one of the ASUO election campaigns. It said:
“We’re 100 votes behind! Can you get 5 votes for Amelie & Maneesh & Campus Change Coalition before voting ends on DuckWeb at 5pm?”
Which is a weensy bit fishy because, of course, none of the candidates are supposed to know the vote count until it’s revealed publicly at 5:30-ish today. In fact, for candidates to know is supposed to be impossible. Case in point: after I got the message, I called the University techie who’s running the computer.
“There’s no way for them to get that information,” he said. The only person with access to it: him, and he said, as of when the text message went out “I have actually not checked it recently.”
So then I responded to the text, asking the volunteer where the knowledge came from. The response: “Oh i know these things tomchak” …
I guess we’ll see when the results come out.
A few points about campaigns and money
There appears to have been some confusion in the comments section of the article I wrote, while I also felt compelled to write more information than I was able to fit in 15 column inches about campaign finance numbers, so here we go.
- To be more explicit than I was in my article, which the comments suggest I should have been: It has never been proven that raising money in ASUO elections leads to receiving more votes. That is merely the trend suggested by the results in relation to fundraising totals in the most recent election. Certain changes made to my article throughout the copy-editing process appear to have made this less clear, most specifically the insertion of a line break between the first two sentences, but equally, I can see how reading it could produce the impression I was suggesting otherwise, which is effectively the same as my having said otherwise, so let’s be explicit again: It is far from certain that raising more money absolutely gets you more votes.
- That is especially true with sums as relatively minuscule as the ones in this election. By all campaigns, a little less than 50 cents was spent per University of Oregon student in the primary. Less than $3 was spent per voter in the election. Put in those terms, the spending doesn’t seem that massive. Contrast that to the 2008 presidential election: just in 2007, the Democratic Party alone raised more than $1 per American and about $8 per voter in the actual primaries.
- The bulk of campaigns’ money was spent on t-shirts. More money probably equals more t-shirts as far as campaigns are concerned.
- The only ASUO election in recent memory where I don’t think it would be at all controversial to infer that money influenced victory was the 2008 election. Then, Sam Dotters-Katz reported fundraising of nearly $10,000, nearly triple what his opponent Kari Herinckx reported, and used that money to do things like sell students extremely cheap slices of pizza. That’s a campaign tactic nobody has had the budget for this year.
- Perhaps I’ll post more if the fancy strikes me later.
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