With construction blocking off The Fishbowl and The Buzz, the EMU is mostly empty. But in 1967, students at University of Oregon had the opposite problem.

The Emerald published a four-page piece that was equal parts photo essay, editorial and report on the status of the Erb Memorial Union on October 30, 1967. The piece plastered lyrics from The Dovells’ “You Can’t Sit Down” under photos of a student looking for a place to sit, and above a photo of a packed EMU Ballroom where students spread all the way to the distance. “Erb Memorial Pregnant Union” said the headline.

When the EMU was built in 1950, there were only 5,637 students enrolled at UO. At the time this article came out, there were 13,865, and only one addition had been made.

The Fishbowl was overcrowded, and so was the dining area. The article states that in the Fishbowl, dining areas, “Bottom-of-the-Bowl” (a proto-The Buzz, apparently) and Taylor Lounge, the average occupancy in 1966 was ninety percent, were 15 percent above the national standards level.

Room bookings went fast–usually most weekends were booked in May for the school year beginning that fall. Administrators had to share offices.

Efforts had just begun on extending the EMU–the EMU director had submitted a request to the director of vampus planning to almost double the size of the EMU, adding 125,000 square feet. But the state would have to approve the money, and most requests were turned away at the time.

“There’s just no more money now,” director of facilities Jack Hunderup said. He surmised that it might be 1973 or 1974 before the addition could be open.

At the time, students paid $10 per term in incidental fees, and it was all for buildings–the students didn’t really control it (now the students pay over $200 a term, and there’s a separate fee–$45–for buildings). But the money was going toward academic buildings, and this editorial was calling for student fees to be used to extend the EMU.

“We are not denying the need for academic buildings,” the editorial said. “But we feel it is wrong that the $10 per term paid by students for special purpose buildings should be used to supplement general funds in the construction of academic buildings.”

The editorial talked about how students had voted in 1925 to start this fund, and now they had lost control of it.

“The crowding of Erb Memorial Union is one of the first visible results of that loss,” the editorial said.

Unfortunately, it seems the editorial did little for the crowding–as Hunderup predicted, it wasn’t until 1973 that the West Addition became operational in the EMU.  But one thing has changed: Now, the incidental fee is controlled by student government and goes to student organizations like the Emerald.

Chapel Hill. Charlie Hebdo. Sydney hostage crisis. Ahmed al-Jumaili‘s shooting.

These are examples of extremism and backlashes against Muslims because of extremism. Because of these and more news items, for many across the world, Islam is more closely connected to violence than peace, according to Sheikh Yosof Wanly.

Wanly spoke at the Muslim Student Association’s “Violence and Islam” about the need for knowledge and understanding of Islam—that Islam is a religion of peace and Muslim extremists are distorting the message.

“Some philosophers say in our day and age we need less religion because of extremism,” Wanly said. “I disagree. I say we need more religion. … I say we need more scholars.”

Wanly, who received a Ph.D in Islamic Studies in Medina, Saudi Arabia, and is now in Corvallis, spoke about how extremists use some verses from the Quran to justify their actions by taking them out of historical context or using unreliable narratives.

Wanly spoke about the media’s negative portrayal of Muslims.

In attendance were students from the MSA, the Arab Student Union, the body of UO students, the Veteran’s Association and other friends and interested members of the community.

Don Kimball, a UO alum who graduated in 1950, has been hosting Muslim international students since 2002. He’s had students from Yemen, Dubai, and Riyadh, and he said it’s destroyed any stereotypes he’d developed.

“If day after day you get negative stuff in the media, it’s hard not to start being swayed to that persuasion,” Kimball said. “I think that the more you know about them, the more it broadens your view.”

There was also a performance by Baba Ali, a Muslim comedian who riffed on the TSA, joked about going on the no-fly list and being racially profiled.

After that, a member of the U.K. Nasheed band Labbayk performed contemporary religious music.

“I was kind of worried about it at the beginning,” Fahma Mohammed, UO student and one of the event’s organizers, said, “I had high hopes, and after talking to people during dinner, it seems like people really love it.”

Watch the entire event on Periscope here for 24 hours after the event.

“Officials giving movie ‘bad reviews.’”

That was the headline of a newspaper article on June 1, 1978, the day National Lampoon’s Animal House was released. And it wasn’t talking about critical reception, either. The movie has a 91 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, Time and Roger Ebert called it one of the year’s best and it still  routinely gets put on Top 100 comedy film lists.

This headline was talking about University of Oregon officials, who had signed a deal with Universal Studios that they wouldn’t make the location of Animal House’s filming public.

If you’ve seen Animal House, it’s not hard to imagine why the university would be eager to protect its name. Written by Harold Ramis of Ghostbusters and two other National Lampoon writers, based on their experiences in fraternities, this movie is full of anti-establishment high jinks, pranks and academically undesirable fraternity behavior.

Though Animal House was a spin-off of National Lampoon magazine, the magazine had not signed a similar agreement with the UO to not release anything. In one of its advertisements for the film, National Lampoon revealed that Animal House was filmed at the UO. The university was frustrated but also helpless to do anything about it, because its contract was with Universal Studios and not National Lampoon.

At the time the movie was filming, local news had covered it as well (university officials said this was because it was a “dull” season for news), so it was not possible for the UO to keep the information embargoed.

This wasn’t actually the first time the UO faced a problem like this. Eight years earlier, Jack Nicholson directed a film called “Drive, He Said,” filmed on the UO campus, and the same thing had happened.

University spokesperson Muriel Jackson ended the article by saying the university wasn’t too worried about the entire thing.

“I trust that we are sufficiently regarded academically so we haven’t sustained any damage because of it,” Jackson said.

A woman was allegedly sexually assaulted Saturday night at a Jason Aldean concert. The assault, according to a campus crime alert sent out by the University of Oregon Police Department, occurred in a Matthew Knight Arena bathroom near the east doors.

The woman was not a student or affiliated with the university, according to UOPD. She described her assailant as a tall white male with brown hair, blue eyes, wearing a red flannel.

The investigation on this incident is ongoing, according to UOPD. Anyone who has information on the assailant or that would help the investigation should call UOPD at 541-346-2919.

The path to success is a game, says Dr. Daniel Pascoe.

And with the software his team in the University of Oregon Division of Student Life is developing, this fall it’ll be a game for every student on campus.

The Registrar has declared all attendance data—what events students show up at, workshops, etc.—university information, and the University has been working on ways they can track that data and use it for Student Life.

But Pascoe and his team want to use that data for students, too. When students start swiping their cards and getting tracked at events this fall, a new program will be putting that information into a program called UO Advantage.

The university is developing UO Advantage to turn student experiences into a comprehensive journal, portfolio and resume, and starting this fall, it’s going to start tracking every student’s extracurriculars—whether they ask or not.

“GPA is not what gets students the jobs that they want,” Pascoe said. “You are at a time in life where you are making your story. Be intentional about how you’re making your story, be thoughtful about it, be strategic about it, make it in a way that’s planned, that uses all the resources you have available—here’s a tool that can help you do this.”

That story, to Pascoe, is made up of experiences. UO Advantage is going to be a way to collect, categorize and present experiences in a way that potential employers can understand.

By selling the program with a game-like interface, the Career Center hopes to get students more into the process.

Here’s how it works: Each event has different outcomes, in the form of badges. These are things like “intellectual and interpersonal skills,” “connecting ideas,” “reflective thinking” and “problem solving,” according to Jonathan Lidbeck, a programmer working on UO Advantage.

These outcomes get unlocked and developed over time as the student adds more experiences, like internships and lectures. Professionals can even rate students from one to four stars on different outcomes, or give them endorsements (which work like achievements).

“The career and professional development of UO students cannot be delegated to the Career Center,” Pascoe said. “Every professor should think about it, every staff member, every student.”

At each point during that process, the student is encouraged to journal and reflect about the experiences—which might sound cheesy, but beta tester and senior Christina Demarinis said the software made her wish she had more record of her volunteerism from freshman year. Demarinis is one of forty student beta and alpha testers.

All these experiences—or just the ones the student wants potential employers to see—are put into a report the student can print out and show to employers. Then, at job fairs, potential employers can see exactly what skills the student has.

Every student will have a UO Advantage account tracking their data–students can opt out if they really want to—but no one will be looking at private data, according to Assessment GTF Adam Shen. The Career Center hopes to get it to the point where bot aggregators managing the interface will be the only ones looking at that data.

“The higher level of automation, the lower level of any threats to identity or privacy exposure,” Shen said.

A previous version of this article made assertions about software other universities were using that wasn’t in the same vein as UO Advantage. These assertions were not backed up with research from the Career Center or the Emerald. That previous version also said that the system does not have an opt-out option. The data Student Life is gathering is not an opt-out system, but UO Advantage is. The previous version of the article also stated that bot aggregators are the only ones looking at that data–currently, staff programmers will be looking at that data, but they hope to make the system fully automated.

Two fire trucks and an ambulance responded to a medical call at Taylor’s Bar and Grill at approximately 3 p.m. on Thursday.

Jorge Tapas, a witness, said the man who needed help passed out when he got excited playing video poker.

The patient was wheeled out on a stretcher.

More to come.

They were incredibly persuasive, victims said.

The scammers who hit the Portland area on April 3, 2007 said they were UO cheerleaders and students when they asked for money to fund the UO baseball team–and they persuaded some people to give over $100.

Police ended up arresting four people–two men and two women on April 3. The women’s faces appeared on the front page of the Emerald.

The two girls masquerading as cheerleaders were Tasha Mitchell and Amanda Wheatley, and this wasn’t their first or last time getting arrested for the same crime. Local newspapers and message boards reveal that one or both women were cited or picked up on various occasions: in September 2006 in Woodlands, Texas; the next March in San Jose, California; and then after they were released in Oregon, Mitchell was again arrested that November in Virginia.

The two men were Jeremiah Conner and Thomas Ray Kintigh, and the people they scammed in Oregon said they got them right in the heart.

“They get you on the emotional level by reporting to be local, by being from the neighborhood,” said Ken Jensen, a West Hills resident quoted in the original article. “Then they make the charity connection, which tugs on your heart strings. You think you’re doing a good deed for the University of Oregon.”

One of the men with Mitchell and Wheatley knocked on Jensen’s door pretending to be a young man from the neighborhood–actually the son of a pediatrician who lived in the neighborhood. But when Jensen’s wife didn’t recognize the young man’s fake name after he left, they canceled the check.

The scammers could get lots of money through seeming like charming, wholesome people, according to another West Hills resident named Rich Williams. Williams signed a $120 check for the scammer.

“Part of his persuasiveness is that he was a smooth talker,” Williams said. “He seemed to be a college-aged guy who wasn’t used to going door-to-door and didn’t particularly like to do it.”

It’s almost surreal, the about-turn that takes place between Dec. 5, 1941’s issue of The Daily Emerald and the next one, Dec. 11. Dec. 5th’s is full of announcements about plays and socials with cake, and Dec. 11th’s is all war.

In the intervening days, Pearl Harbor had been attacked by Japanese bombers and Congress had declared war on Japan. Besides two little notices and two photos, the entire front page of Dec. 11th’s Emerald is war-related. Faculty officials give their comments, President Erb announces his intention to introduce training facilities for civilian defense, and Japanese students at UO speak out.

There are two letters at the bottom of the page of Japanese students proclaiming their allegiance to the United States signed by many male and female Japanese students.

There’s a headline right above the fold that says “Japanese Cash Ordered Held”:

“On orders from Washington the funds of all University students of Japanese descent have been “frozen” in local banks.”

The article goes on to say that this affects twenty-three second and third-generation Japanese students at the UO, and one “Japanese alien.” The native born or naturalized Japanese were allowed to draw their money again when they proved their citizenship, but the “alien”? He or she was in “imminent danger of apprehension by police or federal agents.”

This was a dark period for Japanese Americans and resident aliens on the West Coast. Over the course of the war, Japanese in Oregon, California and Washington would be forced into internment camps in terrible conditions.

At UO, nearly half the Japanese students had left by the end of the 1942 school year, relocating to places like Colorado or the East Coast. Ones who stayed still faced discrimination: Senior Michi Yasui couldn’t even attend her graduation that May because of a curfew enforced on Japanese students.

Administrators like Karl Onthank were advocates for Japanese students at this time, helping them relocate and, in Yasui’s case, trying unsuccessfully to get the government to lift the curfew so she could go to her graduation.

Onthank said the Japanese students were “surprisingly unresentful” about the push to move them away from the West Coast.

“If they are thrown out of college and can do nothing but mark time the next few years,” Onthank said, “it would not only be too bad, but would involve a very grave risk of developing antagonisms which do not yet exist.”

Here’s the basic equation of why your tuition is as high as it is: States that are putting less money into public universities equals public universities that are making up that loss by raising tuition.

But when and why did the state stop investing in higher education? It turns out the seeds of disinvestment were being laid around the time most students at University of Oregon were being born.

Mainly, two pieces of legislation messed with higher education funding: Measure 5 and Measure 11, according to Joe Stone, professor of economics at UO who specializes in labor and education. Both of them required the state to put more money in places other than education.

Measure 5 had to do with property taxes.

Kenneth Osborn/Emerald

Property taxes are tied to the value of property—if the value goes up, taxes go up. Many voters were mad about this because their taxes were going up and they didn’t have any say, according to Robert Parker, an instructor in Policy, Planning and Public Management at UO. So they lowered taxes from $15 to $5 per thousand.

But that took a lot of money away from counties, so Measure 5 required the state to make up that difference.

Kenneth Osborn/Emerald

Four years later, another piece of legislation took yet more money away from the state — Measure 11, which put in mandatory minimum sentences and ended up putting more people in state prisons.

Mandatory minimum sentencing requires courts of law to standardize how long they put someone in jail for — it takes away the possibility of any reduction in sentence by getting out on good behavior or any other reason, under a certain time period.

Kenneth Osborn/Emerald

So, Oregon was putting more money into counties and, at the same time, more money into prisons. That money had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere was education.

And, according to Stone, higher education paid more in the long run.

“The state is sitting there with new obligations, so they needed to come up with revenue to make up for these losses to K-12,” Stone said. “One place they went to get it is higher ed.”

Kenneth Osborn/Emerald

There were ballot measures that protected K-12 education, but nothing protecting college education. So between 1980 and 2011, funding for higher education decreased in Oregon by 61.5 percent, according to the American Council on Education.

Something like this happened nationwide, according to Stone, but it’s worse here in Oregon than it is nationwide because of Measure 5 and Measure 11. That’s not to say our tuition is higher — it’s only a little above average compared to other Associated of American Universities schools.

More recently, there have been calls for reform not only in funding for higher education, but in these measures that took money away from higher education. House Bill 3194, which passed in July 2013, changed sentences for marijuana offenses and suspended driving, among others.

Senator Arnie Roblan, D-Coos Bay was in the committee on public safety that pushed this bill through. He said the law was trying to “bend the curve.”

“The law has made (corrections) a higher priority than education,” Roblan said.

The University of Oregon has narrowed its search for the next president of the university down to four candidates, The Oregonian reported Thursday.

The Oregonian’s main source on this topic was Connie Ballmer, head of the presidential search.

The committee won’t be revealing the names of the final four candidates until further review, to provide confidentiality for the candidates and their current positions.

Next week, the Board of Trustees will be sitting down to discuss the potential candidates.

Ballmer was hopeful that the university’s next president could be in this batch, but was cautioned by the search firm to not get too attached to any one candidate.

Ballmer said that the search committee met in Portland last week and interviewed 10 semi- finalists, before narrowing the selection to four.

UO has been looking for a new president since Michael Gottfredson resigned in August. Interim President Scott Coltrane has held the position in the interim since. If all goes well, Ballmer said it is possible to have a new president in weeks.