Jennifer Fleck also contributed to this report.

Update:

The man who was found at Alton Baker Park Wednesday morning and later died at a Springfield hospital has been identified as 25-year-old Alexander Delon Davenport.

The death is being investigated as “suspicious” by the Eugene Police Department, spokesperson Melinda McLaughlin said.

Original:

An injured man found at Alton Baker Park early this morning later died at Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend, according to McLaughlin.

He was discovered at 6:03 a.m. and taken to the Springfield hospital on a “full trauma activation,” McLaughlin said. Police have not yet revealed who the man is or the circumstances of his injuries.

For a few hours after the man was discovered, police closed off a section of the park, including the entrance by Day Island Road as the Violent Crimes Unit investigated. Afternoon classes at Network Charter School have cancelled due to police activity.

The entrance to the park has been reopened as the investigation continues. A few park bathrooms and the areas around them remain closed.

The number of deans yet to be announced has been reduced by one this morning.

Dr. W. Andrew Marcus was named the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences by Provost Scott Coltrane in an email this morning.

Marcus has served at the UO for the past 15 years and has been the interim Tykeson Dean of Arts and Sciences since 2013. From 2008-11 he served as the head of the Department of Geography.

While in his new role, Marcus will continue his research, “focusing on the human impacts on rivers and the use of remote sensing technology to map and understand rivers,” according to Coltrane’s email.

Last month, Marcus earned the Career Development Champion of the Year award for his “collaboration, support and contribution to the career development of UO students and alumni.”

Coltrane says Marcus’ dedicated team will allow him to “devote more and more time to advancing the visibility of CAS, especially among alumni and donors.”

The University of Oregon is facing a budget crisis. Faculty members are being let go, tuition prices are rising and no one appears to have a solution.

At a recent speech and Q&A session, President Michael Schill personally expressed his frustration over students and faculty decrying tuition hikes and staff cuts but not offering any alternative solutions. However, that narrative is now being questioned.

“The faculty and the three unions have been making alternative suggestions for literally years,” Gina Psaki, an Italian language professor, said in an email. “The senate, which has representation of UO students as well, should be actively involved in advance when changes are made to institutional priorities and resource allocations.”

The frustration that Psaki and others feel was exacerbated when the university community received a memo in January announcing that administration had made a decision about faculty cuts. Schill was focusing on cutting non-tenure track faculty and hiring research oriented tenure track professors in their place.

“The senate as a body wasn’t consulted in advance or asked for alternative solutions,” Psaki said.

Administration contends that it has been open with faculty members; however, timetables have presented a problem with implementing solutions that lie outside of faculty cuts.

“We weren’t trying to hide things,” Provost Scott Coltrane said, “but we didn’t know how many cuts would be necessary.”

Henry Alley, an emeritus professor of literature in the honors college, believes these kinds of top-down decisions being made without faculty consultation are the heart of the problem.

“The major consideration for me is not the financial challenge that we face right now,” Alley said. “The main consideration for me is how to treat the people we already have. The president needed to assess the present system and consult with the faculty before he and his supervisors made the cuts to make way for more tenure-track faculty. It was all too hasty.”

The decision by Schill to acquire more tenure-track faculty is one that is expensive, but ultimately useful in boosting the university’s national image. As Oregon’s status as a member of the Association of American Universities is on tenterhooks, faculty members focused on research add value to the institution.

“The state needs to have a research university,” Bill Harbaugh, a professor of economics, said. “If we increase the portion of research faculty, then there will be some spillover benefits to the rest of the state. So this is a good plan that he’s got.”

Other faculty and students have pointed fingers at “the wasteful proliferation of six-figure administrative positions,” as Alley termed them. Schill has drawn flack from faculty and classified workers’ unions for his almost $800,000-per-year salary. Alley’s plea is that the university will “review — with faculty participation, that’s key — these costly positions.”

There may be several reasons for budget concerns, but as the College of Arts and Sciences found out, the non-tenure track faculty that Schill cut were in fact hemorrhaging money. The school was employing increasingly more non-tenure faculty, even as enrollment in the department fell.

Coltrane explained that when the state cut funding to higher education, the University of Oregon did not make proper adjustments. “We didn’t lay anyone off,” he said. “We just enrolled more students.”

As administration continues to troubleshoot the university’s funding problems, Alley and other faculty members have expressed hope that they will be involved in the decision. According to Alley, the university needs “cooperative work with the faculty to come up with creative solutions to shared problems.”

A memo from Provost Scott Coltrane announced the newest addition to University of Oregon administration this morning.

David Conover has accepted the position of vice president of research and innovation.

Conover has served as the vice president of research at Stony Brook University for the last year. He concurrently held his position as professor of marine science. With over 25 years of experience in higher education, his “background as a scholar and strong record of successfully attracting and managing funded research made him the clear choice for Oregon,” the memo says.

Under his leadership, Stony Brook thrived despite minimal federal funding — a similar problem to the one UO is facing.

In January, UO President Michael Schill announced that in addition to adding 80-100 tenure-track faculty over the next five years, he would “also need to build the research infrastructure necessary to allow us to produce more knowledge, make more of an impact and rise in national preeminence.”

Conover will arrive on campus August 15.

Earth Week 2016 is here, and it offers a full slate of activities for anyone wishing to learn more about the hottest environmental issues of the day.

The University of Oregon has hosted an Earth Day event every year since 1970, the year that Earth Day was instituted. This year, a handful of volunteers coordinated 42 different groups to host 23 events starting Monday April 18 and concluding with Earth Day on Friday and a day of service opportunities on Saturday April 23.

“It’s something we should be really proud of,” Amber Erkan, an Earth Week coordinator, said. “We have been celebrating it since Earth Day started. It’s a deeply rooted tradition.”

While the environmental movement has picked up considerable momentum in recent years, its roots in the American culture are much deeper.

On April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans and thousands of colleges expressed bipartisan support for Earth Day, a movement that placed a higher value on the environment as a whole. That spirit of care for the world and support to preserve the environment continues today.

“Sustainability is important to every human on this planet,” Erkan said, “and that’s why Earth Week is really important. Bringing together the UO community and the greater Eugene community is how we can play our part.”

The goal of the week is to educate and bring awareness to students who have not taken an active role in environmental groups. Workshops, crafts, film screenings, lectures and freebies are all on tap for anyone interested in attending this week.

Tackling the role that the agriculture industry has on climate change, the UO Cultural Forum, Eugene Veg Education Network and the student sustainability center will be holding a discussion about decreasing meat and dairy consumption.

The Divest UO group has been battling with administration recently. The group’s Johnson Hall sit-in will conclude with a political theater event on Thursday afternoon. Joey Ng is organizing a “wedding” that brings together major fossil fuel players and the university, spreading the love and shedding light on the relationships that flood academic financial agenda.

“We want to use this type of guerilla theater to bring the community together,” Ng said in an email. The team organizing the wedding is small, only about 10 members of the Climate Justice League. Other student groups will play important roles in the “ceremony.”

Viewer interaction will be encouraged because, “Students and staff are essentially one of the families involved in the marriage, so their expressions of favor or disapproval is welcome during the event.”

The gloom and doom normally associated with environmental issues is being rejected and will be replaced with a celebration of the planet.

“Students are learning about these issues in a negative context,” Erkan explained. “And this [event] will get them to have fun learning about them.”

The speech is protected; the banner is not.

That’s the line that University of Oregon administration is holding regarding to the Divest UO banner that campus operations removed from Johnson Hall last week.

Divest UO members find the timing suspicious, considering the sign had been in place since February without any incident. According to Maddie Cheek, a Divest member, campus operations was reluctant to answer questions about the timing of the removal, saying that the question sounded “like a political one.”

Phil Carroll was the representative that Cheek spoke to at the time. He said in an email Wednesday afternoon that he and his crew “commonly remove signs, flyers, chalk and other postings on campus when they are not in locations that have been approved.”

The divest movement has recruited the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to assess if its first amendment rights are indeed being suppressed. Marieke Tuthill Beck-Coon is the FIRE representative working with Divest.

“We are closely monitoring the situation and are in contact with students from the Divest group to learn more about their interactions with the administration regarding the banner,” Beck-Coon said via email.

This is not the first time that Oregon has caught the attention of FIRE. Last year, a request for funding by Young Americans for Liberty to host a “Liberty Poker Night” was denied because ASUO members argued that they and other students felt “unsafe.” YAL was going to give away firearms as Poker Night prizes. In response, FIRE reminded the university that “funding to student organizations must be distributed in a viewpoint-neutral manner.” However, a second request by YAL was denied a week later.

This and other events have marred the university’s image in the eyes of FIRE. According to the organization, Oregon has a speech code rating “Red,” meaning that they have “at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.”

University spokesman Tobin Klinger maintains that the group’s right to express its concerns is valid and welcomed; however, the unmanned sign is not. Citing the historical practice of revolving signs and banners on campus as well as campus-provided free speech zones, Klinger insisted that the administration has no issue with the protesters message.

The Divest group will continue its campaign, though it will come in a reformed fashion. The sit-in of Johnson Hall will come to an end during next week’s Earth Week celebration. Divest UO is capping its protest with a political theater event in the afternoon on April 21.

In addition, the group has banded together with several other universities to create a divestment fund. According to Cheek, this fund will “allow donors to put money into a fund that will ultimately go to the UO if they commit to divest from fossil fuel extraction companies.”

University of Oregon administration ordered campus operations to remove a large sign Wednesday morning that the Divest UO campaign has kept outside Johnson Hall in recent weeks.

The sign, which said, “Off Fossil Fuels: We call on President [Michael] Schill to urge the UO foundation to divest from fossil fuels,” had adorned the administration’s lawn for 28 days.

Selena Blick, a member of the Divest UO movement, spoke with campus operations workers as they removed the sign on Wednesday.

“They were clearly just told to do their job,” Blick said. “They didn’t know what policies we were breaking.”

According to Blick, the policies in question had to do with advertising and signs that were propped against structural elements of buildings.

“I think it’s pretty clear that the administration just wants the sign gone, and they’re trying to find ways to prove that we’re not allowed to have it there,” she said.

Administration officials disagree.

University spokesperson Tobin Klinger said the removal of the sign was a matter of consistency and practice and had nothing to do with content.

“We routinely remove signs across campus,” Klinger said. “The university has a lot of locations where students are able to share their message and we [have] provided ample opportunity for the Divest students’ message to be heard.”

The sit-in is still taking place in the Johnson Hall lobby and is entering its fifth week. Discussion and debate about whether the UO should take steps to divest from fossil fuels continues.

Divest UO has responded to the removal by reaching out to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to research its free speech rights in this case.

Klinger, on the other hand, praised the university for creating an environment that fosters discussion and debate about the issues of the day.

“It comes down to the concept of an active protest,” Klinger said. “This is not an issue that relates to any kind of specific messaging. It has everything to do with facilities use.”