Last fall during the Graduate Teaching Fellow strike, protesting students tried to enter office spaces in Johnson Hall and were barred. Around this time 15 years ago, protesting students did something similar and were arrested.

It was April 2000, and the anti-sweatshop movement had the nation’s attention. Kathie Lee Gifford’s Wal-Mart label had come under scrutiny for hiring 13 and 14-year-olds working 20-hour days in Honduras. United Students Against Sweatshops was mobilizing across the nation.

At University of Oregon, students were camping on Johnson Hall’s grounds at night and invading office spaces during the day until then-President Dave Frohnmayer met their demands.

Here’s what they wanted: Duck apparel was made in foreign countries in factories with questionable labor practices. Students were asking Frohnmayer to sign on with the Workers’ Rights Consortium, an independent organization that inspects working conditions. They wanted him to sign on for five years; he only wanted to sign on for one. They weren’t a recognized organization, he said, and the dues were too high.

On April 3, student activists organized a sit-in at Johnson Hall with signs. The next day, five of them–including the vice president of the student body government–were arrested for trespassing when they refused to leave the building after-hours. Six more were arrested the next day by Eugene PD, and the day after that another was arrested.

Student activists went so far as to camp out on the lawn of Johnson Hall. Students were divided on the activists’ tactics: An Emerald columnist even called the whole thing “a bad case of compensation” for their parents’ protests in the ’70s.

Frohnmayer ended up sitting down with student representatives, but a lasting decision was never reached. The State Board of Higher Education ended up getting involved, banning schools from signing on with the WRC.

The activist students graduated, and the movement lost momentum. Today, our apparel is still made in other countries–but companies like the one that prints our clothes are much more regulated.

A previous version of this article stated that the UOPD and the Eugene PD arrested the students. Not only did UOPD not exist in 2000, the Office of Public Safety that did exist didn’t have the authority to arrest students. The Eugene PD made the arrests.

Update: Clark’s car has been towed. Both lanes are open again.

A two-vehicle crash has closed one lane of traffic on Patterson Street near 12th Avenue Wednesday morning. The  cars collided at approximately 11:20 a.m.

Aaron Clark said he was driving on Patterson when a car pulled out from Peace Health Medical and hit him. His car was totaled.

Police said they arrived within one minute. There were no injuries.

University of Oregon is looking to pay a new position up to $120,000 per year to combat sexual assault.

The assistant vice president for Campus Sexual Assault and Title IX Coordinator would start in July, according to a job posting on jobs.uoregon.edu.

Title IX is a civil rights law that bans discrimination based on gender at all schools that receive federal funding. This position will respond to all sexual harassment — sexual assault, sex-based bullying and stalking, and intimate partner violence. The position will coordinate effective communication between different parties in the university.

But is this position too much for one person to do? UO professor Carol Stabile thinks so, according to The Register-Guard. Stabile led the Task Force to Prevent Sexual Assault last year, which recommended that UO create an independent office to deal with these issues.

The university is looking for someone with a master’s degree and previous experience as a Title IX officer.

The heat in the EMU will be off for the next two weeks from Wednesday because of the construction, according to Erb Memorial Union administration.

This is a result of the ongoing EMU construction that will result in a new wing of the EMU and has shut down two coffee shops and the Union Market.

Weather in Eugene for the next 10 days hovers around the 50s and 60s, jumping up to 66 degrees next Wednesday–but will be 52 degrees and rainy this Sunday.

“All of my coworkers are wearing their little parkas and Patagonias,” receptionist Molly Snyder said about the first day of the cold.

*A previous version of this article stated that the employee had been fired. The University of Oregon contends that she has not been fired, but is undergoing a “transition in employment” to another UO position that she requested. Stokes has not yet replied to that statement.

A University of Oregon counseling center employee says she has been fired because she signed a letter criticizing administration for accessing counseling records of a student suing the university.

Karen Stokes, former executive assistant to the director of the counseling center, emailed the counseling center staff Thursday announcing that she had been let go. This was first reported by The Register-Guard.

But the UO didn’t terminate Stokes’ position, according to university spokesperson Tobin Klinger. In an email to the Emerald, Klinger said that the university wouldn’t terminate someone for speaking up.

“The university took the concerns that she raised very seriously,” Klinger said in the email. “At her request, there is a transition in employment under way. This is the result of an employment process that began long before Ms. Stokes raised any concerns about the university actions. Despite Ms. Stokes’ assertion to the contrary, she remains employed by the university.”

Stokes and staff therapist Jennifer Morlok were the ones who said the university took counseling records without the student’s permission in February. The university says that it acquired the records because they was pertinent to the student’s lawsuit and that no one looked over the records and that they have since been returned. The university was filing a countersuit against the survivor of the alleged sexual assault, but it recently dropped the lawsuit.

Stokes believes her dissent is why she was fired. In the email, she said:

“Instead of taking our concerns to heart and recognizing the courage it took to come forward with such concerns, the UO appears to be more concerned about defending itself and attacking those who brought the ethical and legal concerns to light.”

Stokes has not yet responded to the university’s assertion that she hasn’t been terminated.

More to come.

Follow Scott Greenstone on Twitter @smgreenstone.

The post UO employee who criticized use of counseling records says she has been fired appeared first on Emerald Media.

Senators. Sons. Doctors. Daughters.

Everyone was equal in remembering Dave Frohnmayer and revisiting his life on Saturday.

Called “Mr. Oregon,” Frohnmayer led University of Oregon for 15 years, bringing enrollment up by thousands. Frohnmayer meant a lot to the university, but also the state at large. Flags at the state capitol buildings flew at half-mast when he died, honoring his work both as a state legislator and Attorney General.

Speakers at the celebration of his life were as varied as U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, UO Board of Trustees chair Chuck Lillis, Dr. Grover Bagby of the Fanconi Fund and many members of Frohnmayer’s family.

Classical music from a cello and three violins played as attendees entered. They were dressed in everything from full suits and ties to Patagonia jackets and H&M.

Frohnmayer’s lifelong friend Bill Gary MC’d the celebration of life, and he spoke with an intimate knowledge of Frohnmayer’s life– from Medford, OR, to Harvard, to Salem, to Eugene.

“Dave was a geek before geeks were cool,” Gary said.

Brother John Frohnmayer also doled out old memories of playing with squirt-guns and listening to the Green Hornet on the radio. Mira Frohnmayer, sister, said that Dave Frohnmayer was her closest friend and ally.

A video slideshow set to inspiring, timpani-heavy music depicted Frohnmayer through many years and many haircuts—a clean, combed childhood cut in the ‘40s and ‘50s to the longer, more unkempt style of the ‘60s and ‘70s he had in the classroom, to the reserved haircut he had in most of his later life.

There was a photo of him meeting Tom Cruise, and footage from his Frohnmayer for Governor campaign with the slogan, “A lot of people really like him.”

This seems true even in opposing political parties—though Frohnmayer was Republican, both senators who spoke were Democrats.

This is because Frohnmayer always chose to search for the center in politics, said Oregon Senator Betsy Johnson, D-Scappoose.

“Those of us who love Oregon and hate what’s happened to our state’s polarized politics need to mark Dave Frohnmayer’s passing by making the same choice,” Johnson said.

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, was a student in Frohnmayer’s first class at the law school. He said that Frohnmayer made the often-stale subject of law come alive to his students.

“Just look around this campus—you will see Dave’s imprint,” Wyden said.

The ceremony reached an emotional peak when Frohnmayer’s children took the stage. Son Mark Frohnmayer talked about the last breakfast he had with his father, where his father apologized for having nothing profound to say.

Mark Frohnmayer shared a statement from Frohnmayer’s student Ricky Parker that sincerely touched him. Parker spoke on Monday about the one thing Frohnmayer modeled more than anything: “Always overshadow your greatness with your goodness.”

“That kid got to know him for a handful of hours,” Mark Frohnmayer said. “I had the fortune of decades of his attention and love and still, it wasn’t enough. I miss you, Pops.”

Mark Frohnmayer choked up as he said these words. He was the first to lose his composure, but not the last. His sister followed him speaking directly to her father, and Bill Gary gave last remarks.

Gary ended the service with the last stanza of the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling.

“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”

The post Senators, colleagues and family honor late Dave Frohnmayer at Matt Knight Arena appeared first on Emerald Media.

UO alum Noah DeWitt has been missing for over a month, and an extensive and involved search by many friends and family turned up very little. So Noah DeWitt’s UO friends have created a video, half as another way of reaching him and half as a tribute to their friend.

Using footage from DeWitt’s time at UO and a song written and performed by DeWitt that they “usurped” from his computer, friend and roommate Tyler Pell and several other UO alums created this video.

“Maybe it’ll find Noah’s ears,” Pell said in the video description.

Scott Greenstone 

The post This video missing student Noah DeWitt’s friends made is trippy and haunting appeared first on Emerald Media.

The state is recommending 14 years in prison for Jaime Tinoco, a teenager who is pleading guilty to sexually assaulting a woman near Autzen Stadium last September. Tinoco pled guilty at Friday morning’s hearing to kidnapping in the first degree,  sexual abuse in the first degree and rape in the first degree, KEZI reported.

Tinoco was 17 when he came to Autzen Stadium in September with a group from the Washington County Juvenile Department on an organized trip. He broke away from the group and sexually assaulted a 39-year-old woman, police say.

The judge could punish Tinoco for more than the state’s recommendation. Each of the three counts carries between 10 and 20 years as penalty.

The post Teen pleads guilty in Autzen sexual assault case appeared first on Emerald Media.

Today’s campus activism climate might be a far cry from the protests of the past, like when anti-Vietnam war students burned down the ROTC building on campus in 1970 and threw a bomb into a PLC bathroom.

But the past year has had its share of student activism, most commonly in the classic form of protests. And since most of the protesting has been against administration, a lot of it takes place at Johnson Hall.

The Emerald gathered statistics on 25 protests that took place at University of Oregon from beginning of spring term 2014 to end of winter term 2015.

Here are some of the key events that took place during that time:

Sexual assault case: Three UO basketball players allegedly sexually assaulted an unnamed female student in March 2014. Many student and faculty activists see institutional betrayal in how UO handled the case.

Labor rights: After failing to reach an agreement with the administration, hundreds of Graduate Teaching Fellows went on strike during December 2014. It took ten days to come to an agreement, but finally the UO and the GTF Federation came to terms.

There were fifteen labor rights protests at Johnson Hall during spring 2014 to winter 2015, and almost all of them were related to the strike: However, six of them happened consecutively during the strike, when GTFs rallied at Johnson Hall each night.

Tuition and university spending: Students protested the Board of Trustees’ plan to raise tuition by 3.8 percent in March, sending a Board of Trustees meeting into recess. Only weeks before, students had rallied asking UO to take the money it was making and divest it from fossil fuels.

Issues like these have shaken students’ opinions of administration in the last years, according to Kelsey Jones, an involved activist and student at UO who is most well-known as the girl on the couch in the viral video “A Needed Response,” which won a Peabody award in 2013.

Johnson Hall leadership seems unstable to Jones, and, she says, other students. She’s watched a parade of three presidents come and go through Johnson Hall.

“Having all these different people in the top position is concerning, and then the administration sends them away with millions of dollars and they leave,” Jones said.

The connection between administration and students is one of the main issues: Students don’t feel that administration cares about what they care about, Jones said.

Jones does public relations for the Organization Against Sexual Assault at UO, and the organization emailed Coltrane often during the debacle last year. His answers were “vanilla” at best.

“People don’t trust the administration anymore,” Jones said. “Now there’s this distrust in the admin, and there’s distrust in the counseling center and there’s distrust in the library. …It’s just a mess and I think the administration needs to own up to their mistakes.”

Helena Schlegel is the student representative for the Board of Trustees, speaking on behalf of all students at UO. She made this statement:

“Whether it be rising tuition or the egregious act of attempting to sue a survivor of sexual assault, to students, it seems that the focus and priority for some administrators is on maintaining their reputation and recruiting future students rather than admit they were wrong and ensure that the needs of their current students are met. I think these students see a lot of wasted money go to lawyers and recruitment when it could be going to keep tuition low.”

The Emerald contacted UO administration with questions and an opportunity to respond, but did not hear back before deadline.

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Students left artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol’s presentation a little disappointed: It was “lackluster,” according to UO special collections.

That’s probably because he wasn’t Andy Warhol.

It was October 6, 1967 and Warhol was in the middle of a national college tour (admission: 50 cents). Or rather, an actor named Alan Midgett was in the middle of a tour where he impersonated Andy Warhol. And not even well, apparently. Four days earlier, Midgett had presented at University of Utah and several students walked out, University of Utah’s Daily Utah Chronicle reported.

This article called his presentation at Utah “stale.” When asked “What role do you play in the production of your films?” he answered, “carelessly,” “I start them, I think.”

The Daily Utah Chronicle was more interested in the fake Warhol than the Emerald, and it reported on the entire thing–to the point where national media realized what Warhol had done.

After his presentation at Utah, the director of lectures at the university held onto Warhol’s $1,000 pay for the presentation, suspicious after two staff members of the art department at Utah told him that they had met Warhol and that wasn’t him.

According to the Daily Utah Chronicle:

“I decided I’d better hold on to the $1,000 check until we were certain of his identity,” Mr. Cracroft (the director of lectures) recalls. “The contract had specified Warhol himself must appear.”

In a news conference, Warhol said he sent Midgett because he thought the actor (who would later act in his films) was “more entertaining.”

Warhol did end up coming to UO on Feb. 21 and presenting another one of his films, called “****.”

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