Monday morning, three students found and tried to erase white nationalist graffiti, reading “white pride,” written in chalk between the Knight Library and Gerlinger Hall. The graffiti was later removed by university groundskeepers.

“It was spotted, reported and removed by the grounds folks,” said UO spokesperson Tobin Klinger. “This is a pretty standard practice when dealing with any kind of hate speech graffiti.”

According to a tip received by the Daily Emerald, the Bias Education and Response Team (BERT) received notice of the graffiti.

The purpose of BERT, a subset of the Dean of Students office, is “to respond to situations that affect the larger University of Oregon community through education about current and historical issues surrounding bias.”

The Emerald could not reach BERT for a comment.

This act is just the latest incident of racist graffiti in Eugene. On Sept. 15, anti-semitic graffiti was discovered at North Eugene High School. Police are currently looking into the incident.

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On Friday, the Trump administration released new temporary guidelines for universities that are investigating sexual assault. But President Schill’s response on Saturday indicated he doesn’t expect much to change.

“We believe that new guidance will have very little, if any, impact on our current policies and procedures related to Title IX…” Schill wrote in an email to UO students. “We will continue to treat sexual misconduct cases with fair, impartial and timely investigations that are free from conflict of interest or bias.”

The changes come after Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ announcement earlier this month that Obama-era recommendations on investigating sexual assault would be rolled back.

Given the earlier lack of clarification on which parts of the statute would be altered, Title IX coordinators across the country expressed concern and skepticism.

Secretary DeVos formally rescinded President Obama’s “Dear Colleague” letter, which forced colleges that received federal funds to use the lowest standard of proof for prosecuting sexual misconduct cases. The letter also did not endorse the use of tactics such as cross-examination when interviewing accusers in sexual assault cases.

Critics of the “Dear Colleague” letter argue that the guidelines employed by the Obama administration unfairly target male students due to a lack of due process.

The guidelines provided by the Department of Education are temporary until a period of public comment ends, which is yet to be announced.

This is not the first time the Trump administration made changes to non-discrimination policies in education. In February, the administration revoked Obama-era recommendations for protecting transgender students in public schools.

Despite changes coming from federal agencies, institutions at the state level are taking a stand.

In the past, UO President Michael Schill and his administration took a stand against the Trump administration’s policies. Almost two weeks ago, President Schill reaffirmed his support for DACA and undocumented students on campus via email.

In President Schill’s response, sent via email to students, he said that he was pleased about the possibility of alternative resolutions to situations involving sexual misconduct. Alternative resolutions such as mediation are agreed to by both parties and require students to reach an agreement together.

One recent change to the Title IX policy enacted by the university is the addition of Board of Trustee members as mandatory reporters. Members of the board are now required to report incidents of sexual misconduct and Title IX violations.

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While many decisions seem to be out of the hands of students, the Associated Students of the University of Oregon (ASUO) provides a way for members of the student body to influence policy. According to their website, “ASUO provides for the social, cultural, educational and physical development of its members, and for the advancement of their individual and collective interests both within and without the University.”

Like the federal and state governments, ASUO is split into three branches: executive, legislative and judicial. The executive branch consists of the student body president, external and internal vice presidents and a cabinet of up to 24 staff members. ASUO’s legislative body, the Senate, consists of 23 senators from every academic major. The judicial branch, known as the Constitution Court, rules on any question regarding ASUO’s constitution.  

While all of ASUO’s bodies play a crucial role in the organization’s success, the legislative branch makes all financial and policy decisions. Each year, the ASUO controls a budget of $14 million.

This money is provided through a $238.50 fee that students pay each term with tuition, known as the Incidental Fee (I-Fee). Through the delegation of the Senate, ASUO is able to facilitate events and allocate funds to different groups on campus.

For this reason, Schenk says it’s crucial for members of the student body to pay attention to ASUO or participate.

“If they want to ensure their money is going to good programming and benefiting students, they then should pay attention to ASUO and the financial season, or even get involved in the process” she says. “They should care about the ASUO because most importantly we allocate the money they pay into the UO.”

ASUO provides a way for students to advocate for change within the school through dialogue with various departments in the university’s administration. Schenk says that this relationship allows student’s voices and concerns to be heard in the decision making process

“ASUO has connections with certain offices such as the Office of the University President, Dean of Students, and UO Housing, and can foster a relationship with each of these how they want… ASUO is regularly the one to be notified about these things and works with administration or other folks on whatever they are thinking about, representing the voice of students to the best of ASUO’s ability”

As ASUO president, Schenk is working to address issues on campus that she sees as important, such as tuition and food security. She says that past efforts to address these situations have been lackluster

“I want to make the tuition process as transparent as possible. Ideally I’d like to just stop tuition increases, but recognizing the financial budget of the school and working to just mitigate those factors causing large increases, and making that process transparent for all students and include the student input. The issue of food security on campus hasn’t really been addressed and we want to accelerate it”

Although it may seem that the three legislative bodies make the decisions in ASUO, there are other ways for students to get involved with process such as joining a campus task force or committee or join a student organization.

The post What is ASUO? appeared first on Emerald Media.

Expecting news of President Trump making changes to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy this week, UO president Michael Schill expressed the university’s support of undocumented students on campus via an email to campus.

“Regardless of what happens in our nation’s capital, I want to again make very clear that the University of Oregon supports every student, regardless of immigration status. Every person on our campus is valued and welcomed because of and not despite their diversity of thought, race, culture, background, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, and birthplace.”

The policy, approved by President Obama in 2012, concerns the status of children of undocumented immigrants. Students protected under DACA are often referred to as “dreamers,” must have arrived in the United States before the age of 16 and lived in the country continuously since June 2007.

Schill said that the UO will not facilitate immigration enforcement on campus without legal compulsion (such as a warrant), act on behalf of federal officials enforcing immigration laws or share information on the immigration status of the UO’s students.

The university is reaching out to students who may be directly affected by the expected changes, and Schill offered a list of resources for students who may have concerns and questions.

Resources listed by Schill in his email to students (DuckWeb/Emerald Media)

“In the coming weeks and months, I urge everyone in our community to reach out and embrace those students who now face the uncertainty of knowing whether they will be able to remain in the United States. As I have repeated on many occasions—we are a family. Families take care of each other, and we will do everything in our power to ensure that all of our students are supported.”

The post President Schill expresses support for DACA and undocumented students on campus appeared first on Emerald Media.

Expecting news of President Trump making changes to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy this week, UO president Michael Schill expressed the university’s support of undocumented students on campus via an email to campus.

“Regardless of what happens in our nation’s capital, I want to again make very clear that the University of Oregon supports every student, regardless of immigration status. Every person on our campus is valued and welcomed because of and not despite their diversity of thought, race, culture, background, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, and birthplace.”

The policy, approved by President Obama in 2012, concerns the status of children of undocumented immigrants. Students protected under DACA are often referred to as “dreamers,” must have arrived in the United States before the age of 16 and lived in the country continuously since June 2007.

Schill said that the UO will not facilitate immigration enforcement on campus without legal compulsion (such as a warrant), act on behalf of federal officials enforcing immigration laws or share information on the immigration status of the UO’s students.

The university is reaching out to students who may be directly affected by the expected changes, and Schill offered a list of resources for students who may have concerns and questions.

Resources listed by Schill in his email to students (DuckWeb/Emerald Media)

“In the coming weeks and months, I urge everyone in our community to reach out and embrace those students who now face the uncertainty of knowing whether they will be able to remain in the United States. As I have repeated on many occasions—we are a family. Families take care of each other, and we will do everything in our power to ensure that all of our students are supported.”

The post President Schill expresses support for DACA and undocumented students on campus appeared first on Emerald Media.

The University of Oregon ranked in the top 25 LGBTQ+ friendly schools across the country, according to a national organization which seeks to provide an inclusive and welcoming learning environment.

The organization, College Pride, considers a  number of factors when making the list, including LGBTQ policy inclusion, student life, and access to mental health and counseling services. The group did not individually rank its top-25 schools.

College Choice, a website that publishes a variety of lists ranking colleges using academic and social criteria, ranked UO 28 out of 50 LGBTQ+ friendly universities in the nation. This is an improvement from last year’s ranking of 42 out of 50.

Portland State University and Southern Oregon University were also ranked in College Pride’s list of top 25 LGBTQ+ schools.

UO’s high ranking is due to its high number of gender-inclusive bathrooms, LGBTQ+ organizations and clubs and the university’s mental health and counseling services.

Despite the UO’s spot on the list, a member of the LGBTQ+ community on campus has concerns about how the administration and faculty respond to incidents of discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals.

“I’ve had an instance a in class in which a teacher didn’t step in when a student was insulting me for bringing up a personal experience about my queer identity,” said Cressa Perloff, the 2016-2017 events coordinator for the LGBTQA3 (QA) student union on campus.

Perloff says that this is not the only area in which the university fails to meet the needs of LGBTQ+ community, there are also many financial needs which go unaddressed.

“I’ll say that for years, QA staff have been taken advantage of by the university by paying them despicably low stipends,” Perloff says. “From personal experience, I’ll say that UO is absolutely failing its LGBTQ+ student leaders by taking advantage of them, and in turn failing the rest of the LGBTQ+ student population by ensuring the QA is often barely functional because its staff are overworked and underpaid.” she says. “This is not a problem unique to LGBTQ+ communities on campus — all ASUO student union staff are paid tiny stipends, and most of them are marginalized-identity-based groups.”

Perloff says that the $120 per month stipend she received worked out to just $1.50 to $3 an hour and she often worked 15-20 hours a week.
“In the meantime, barely-paid student employees will continue to do the work that salaried employees should be doing — work UO refuses to invest in,” Perloff said. “If this is what a top-25 LGBT-friendly school looks like, I’d hate to know what the bottom 25 look like.”

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The Oregon Supreme Court recently lowered the required score to pass the state’s bar exam  — the test required for all law graduates to pass in order to become practicing attorneys.

Documents show that in March the deans of Oregon’s three law schools sent a letter to the Board of Bar Examiners (BBX) encouraging them to lower the minimum passing score, citing Oregon’s high standards compared to other states. At the time the letter was sent, Oregon had the third highest minimum score (284) in the country behind Delaware and California.

The deans of Oregon’s three law schools proposed that the score be lowered to 266, but the BBX decided to settle on 276. Vice President of the Faculty Senate Bill Harbaugh says that lowering the requirement will have a significant impact on student’s futures.

“This turns out to be a very big change,” Harbaugh said. “It would have increased the pass rate for July 2016 from the 58 percent it was to 68 percent — meaning 49 people who failed under the old score would have passed had the new score been in place. A score of 266 would have meant 90 extra students passing, raising the pass rate to 78 percent.”

While lowering the score may be advantageous to students taking the exam, some law students are critical of the decision to lower the score. One law student, who wished to remain anonymous given the internal politics of the law school, said that the fundamental issue is that the law school doesn’t prepare students to pass the bar, instead choosing to try to lower the score.

The student cites the lack of access to bar prep classes which are offered after graduation and thus keep students from working in order to attend.

Critics of the court’s decision claim that lowering the score will lead to an increased amount of incompetent and underprepared lawyers in the state.

This concern was not ignored by the deans of Oregon’s law schools, who claimed that the bar exam was only one potential filter to deter unqualified attorneys from practicing law.

In the letter to the Oregon Supreme Court, the deans wrote that “…attorneys often assess a graduate’s legal knowledge and skills by reviewing the graduates own work performance in the real world as a law clerk over the course of weeks or months before making any offer of employment…”

Another potential filter to limit potentially incompetent lawyers before they progress further into law school is the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), a standardized entrance exam which gauges student’s comprehension in reading and writing.

A closer look at the LSAT scores of the state of Oregon’s three law schools indicate that the median score decreased over the past five years. Over that period, University of Oregon’s median score dropped by two points (159 to 157) while Willamette and Lewis and Clark’s decreased by four (155 to 151 and 161 to 157 respectively).

While there are questions as to how competent future lawyers will be, there are even bigger questions regarding the process that the BBX and the Oregon Supreme Court took to lower the scores.

The BBX went into a closed, executive session to make their decision.

The Emerald requested transcripts to determine the nature of the meeting, but the Oregon Supreme Court provided a non-specific page of minutes detailing the events of the meeting.

Given the lowered score, the results of the July bar exam could potentially be higher. In February, only 67 percent of law students in Oregon who took the exam passed.

Follow Michael on Twitter: @Tobin_Tweets

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UOPD responded to reports of a potentially armed subject on 13th and Kincaid last night. Students were advised to keep away from the area via email and text messages from the UO Alert System.

A little after 9 PM last night, a caller informed police that a man pointed what appeared to be a gun at a woman, according to UOPD spokesman Kelly McIver.

UOPD identified the man based on the caller’s description. After investigation, police determined that there was no gun, but the rather the man had made a gesture with his finger.

The incident was resolved around 9:40 PM.

Any student at the university can register for the alerts via DuckWeb.

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A new study done by two University of Oregon students found a correlation between grades and course evaluations: When student grades are higher, so is the professor’s evaluation score.

The finding by students Kenneth Ancell and Emily Wu suggest a possible “social exchange” in which professors make their classes easier in hopes of getting higher evaluation scores, according to the faculty member who supervised the study.

Other studies done on the topic allude to the existence of the social exchange between faculty and students , says UO Senate Vice President Bill Harbaugh.

“Most of the literature supports that argument, which is incredibly destructive because professors are dumbing down their classes for better evaluations,” Harbaugh said.

The results from Ancell and Wu’s study were consistent with those done at other universities, but had some unique qualities.

“One element that we had in our study that others do not always have was the ability to link the SET scores received by an instructor for a given class to the grades received by students enrolled in that specific class in future courses,” Ancell said. “This data allowed us to evaluate the connection between SET scores and future student achievement.”

The results of student teaching evaluations are not taken lightly, they are a factor in determining which professors receive tenure and raises.

Chris Sinclair, a math professor and faculty senate president, said that the social exchange explanation is a cause for concern.

“If this is what the evaluations are being used for, it’s not unreasonable to expect that some people are going to try to game the system,” said Sinclair. “It’s conceivable that to get better evaluations, and therefore better raises, professors give better grades.”

While the argument for the existence of the social exchange is compelling, Harbaugh offers a second hypotheses. He suggests that better professors teach more, and therefore their students learn more and receive better grades. This leads to the professor receiving higher course evaluation scores for teaching effectively.

Given the impacts of the results from course evaluations, the administration is working to amend the system to better gauge student learning and reduce bias against women and faculty members of color by changing the evaluations altogether.

Michael Weisman is a representative from the group CampusLabs. He addressed members of the university about possible alternatives to the current course evaluation system. His organization collects student feedback to improve campus services.

Weisman proposed that instead of focusing course evaluation questions around the instructor, the new method would include questions that are aimed at gauging the amount students learned during the term. Further options to revising course evaluations will be tested over the summer.

Sinclair said that despite the course evaluations being redesigned by the administration, addressing grade inflation is not a top priority.

“We want to put in place a system that is fair to everybody and allows input from students,” Sinclair said. “If the new course evaluations also help with grade inflation, then that’s great too.”

The post UO study finds correlation between grade inflation, student course evaluations appeared first on Emerald Media.

A new study done by two University of Oregon students found a correlation between grades and course evaluations: When student grades are higher, so is the professor’s evaluation score.

The finding by students Kenneth Ancell and Emily Wu suggest a possible “social exchange” in which professors make their classes easier in hopes of getting higher evaluation scores, according to the faculty member who supervised the study.

Other studies done on the topic allude to the existence of the social exchange between faculty and students , says UO Senate Vice President Bill Harbaugh.

“Most of the literature supports that argument, which is incredibly destructive because professors are dumbing down their classes for better evaluations,” Harbaugh said.

The results from Ancell and Wu’s study were consistent with those done at other universities, but had some unique qualities.

“One element that we had in our study that others do not always have was the ability to link the SET scores received by an instructor for a given class to the grades received by students enrolled in that specific class in future courses,” Ancell said. “This data allowed us to evaluate the connection between SET scores and future student achievement.”

The results of student teaching evaluations are not taken lightly, they are a factor in determining which professors receive tenure and raises.

Chris Sinclair, a math professor and faculty senate president, said that the social exchange explanation is a cause for concern.

“If this is what the evaluations are being used for, it’s not unreasonable to expect that some people are going to try to game the system,” said Sinclair. “It’s conceivable that to get better evaluations, and therefore better raises, professors give better grades.”

While the argument for the existence of the social exchange is compelling, Harbaugh offers a second hypotheses. He suggests that better professors teach more, and therefore their students learn more and receive better grades. This leads to the professor receiving higher course evaluation scores for teaching effectively.

Given the impacts of the results from course evaluations, the administration is working to amend the system to better gauge student learning and reduce bias against women and faculty members of color by changing the evaluations altogether.

Michael Weisman is a representative from the group CampusLabs. He addressed members of the university about possible alternatives to the current course evaluation system. His organization collects student feedback to improve campus services.

Weisman proposed that instead of focusing course evaluation questions around the instructor, the new method would include questions that are aimed at gauging the amount students learned during the term. Further options to revising course evaluations will be tested over the summer.

Sinclair said that despite the course evaluations being redesigned by the administration, addressing grade inflation is not a top priority.

“We want to put in place a system that is fair to everybody and allows input from students,” Sinclair said. “If the new course evaluations also help with grade inflation, then that’s great too.”

The post UO study finds correlation between grade inflation, student course evaluations appeared first on Emerald Media.