State of Oregon officials are investigating a possible sixth University of Oregon student diagnosed with meningococcemia, according to KVAL.

Meningococcemia is an infectious bacteria that can lead to meningitis. The Oregon Health Authority is researching whether this student also has meningitis.

This would be the sixth student on campus who has caught this sickness since January. Lauren Jones, UO freshman, died from this disease. 

University officials did not immediately respond for comment.

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A fifth student since the start of winter term was diagnosed with Neisseria meningococcemia Thursday. The patient is hospitalized and responsive. The University of Oregon immediately identified the closest contacts the patient has been with in the past few days and is administering Cipro antibiotic treatment to them, according to university spokesperson Jen McCulley.

When the university learned of the case, they immediately notified the student’s classmates and faculty members, as well as members of the patient’s fraternity, and other students the patient told them he’d been around in the last few days.

The patient is helping health officials identify who he has been around.

More to come.

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(PHOTO TO COME)

The “Orientation Edition” of the Oregon Daily Emerald in 1967 proudly announced on the front page that Richard Nixon was going to be speaking to the Associated Students of University of Oregon on Oct. 6. The headline read “Nixon Accepts ASUO Invite For ‘Fall Talk,’” and that was about as precise as the description got.

ASUO had invited Nixon, and the Oregon Nixon for President Campaign confirmed that Nixon would be there.

Five months after this article ran, Nixon would announce his intention to run for presidency, and in a little over a year he would be sworn in as the 37th president of the United States. The article describes Nixon as the ‘former vice president,’ referring to his eight years as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Vice President.

This article doesn’t talk about Nixon very much because he hadn’t been heavily involved in politics for a while; he hadn’t been vice president for eight years. It’s like if John Edwards came to UO now: Nobody would really care.

But care or not, Nixon never actually spoke at UO. He cancelled on Oct. 2 after his mother died.

Another tidbit from this article: Lee Harvey Oswald’s mom spoke at UO.

Follow Scott Greenstone on Twitter @smgreenstone.

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Physics department head Raymond Frey and his wife were already separated when the argument began on Sept. 26, 2014. But when it ended, she was under arrest.

Raymond Frey and Regina Claypool-Frey were arguing in the home they still owned together when she picked up a 10-inch knife and slashed him. According to the police report, he fled to his own house and wouldn’t let her in. It wasn’t until she threatened to harm their teenage child that Frey let her in.

Then she stabbed him in the chest. She was arrested two hours later and sentenced in January to 45 months in prison, according to The Register-Guard.

On Tuesday, Frey filed a $705,000 lawsuit against his imprisoned ex-wife. The lawsuit accuses his wife of assault, battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Frey’s lawyer told the Register-Guard that a settlement would work to offset the alimony Frey will probably be required to pay Claypool-Frey upon her release.

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Two travelers meet at an old mill near Interstate 5 in Grants Pass, Oregon. They share a cigarette among abandoned train cars and talk about the weather.

One of the men is just traveling through the region; later, he’ll see a missing persons poster and call the number on it.

The other man is Noah DeWitt, the person on that poster.

DeWitt is a 2012 University of Oregon graduate who disappeared from a Eugene house on Feb. 14. This sighting on Feb. 18 was one of two sightings friends and family believe was probably him. They don’t know where he’s going, and they don’t know why he disappeared.

All they have are guesses.

“Some switch flipped in his mind”

DeWitt was a dedicated, efficient student: He graduated in a little over four years with a double major in journalism and international studies. It was after he graduated that he “stalled,” according to DeWitt’s sister, Rachael.

DeWitt had new ideas all the time for projects. He loved making music and art and being creative, but he couldn’t focus enough to move toward finishing those projects. He didn’t move himself toward anything, his sister said.

DeWitt wanted to help the world in the best way he could, but he was confused about how that translated into a career, according to Rachael.

“The bar he set for himself prevented him from moving forward,” she said.

This went on for the next two and a half years. DeWitt took a part-time job at the New Frontier Market, a grocery store focused on raw and non-GMO foods, and continued working on his projects.

DeWitt’s mother Joan Zivi talked to him about once a week, and she said his mood began to go “up and down.”

“He’s normally an extremely positive, happy person,” Zivi said. “And then some days he sounded down and a little depressed.”

That’s the same way the witness in Grant’s Pass described the man he thought was DeWitt, according to DeWitt’s close friend and college roommate, Tyler Pell. Pell spoke with the witness himself.

The last time Zivi talked to DeWitt, she was helping him get on her health insurance plan.

He was very paranoid after having witnessed a bus crash in Dorena. No one was harmed in either instance, but they both shook DeWitt.

“Whatever happened that caused him to hit the road, I think some switch flipped in his mind and some event happened that sort of changed his approach,” DeWitt’s sister said.

She insists that he didn’t intend to leave.

Detective Mel Thompson from EPD declined an interview with the Emerald, but Rachael has been in steady contact with Thompson and she said he expected DeWitt to be less elusive, that he would show up within a week or so.

Rachael DeWitt said that at this point, Detective Thompson is thinking what they’re all thinking: That Noah is choosing not to be found right now.

“He’s eluded us,” Rachael said.

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article stated that Noah DeWitt’s mother, Joan Zivi, said his lack of success in his field affected his personality. Zivi did not say this.

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Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article stated that the Board of Trustees would have to ratify the legislation. This decision is up to the president of the university.

The article also said that student fees pay for MacArthur Court. They actually pay for Matthew Knight Arena.

The athletic department at the University of Oregon has a budget of nearly $100 million, and faculty think that should go to academics, like student scholarships. If this new legislation passes, it might.

While the Board of Trustees was having their winter meeting, the University Senate met and approved a resolution to have athletics pay the academic side a 3 percent dividend out of its $98 million budget.

Many faculty consider the monetary focus UO puts on athletics over the top, like paying head coach Mark Helfrich more than the university president  –  though less than average for a college football coach. Economics professor Bill Harbaugh, the sponsor of the bill, has criticized the university and athletics department for years on his blog and has several followers.

The athletics budget is only 2 percent subsidized by the university – it makes most of its budget, according to athletic director Rob Mullens who was quoted in The Register Guard.

But Harbaugh said that looking at the other money athletics gets tells another story.

UO pays $2.2 million a year on running the Jaqua Center, used by student athletes (tutoring, etc.), and nearly half a million of that money comes out of UO’s academic budget to pay off the purchase of the land under Matt Court. In addition, $1.6 million in mandatory student money goes toward purchasing tickets.

Besides that, Harbaugh said that it’s unclear if the athletics department has to pay for things such as legal costs – which are substantial, especially when taking into account the suing of Dana Altman and the university by an alleged survivor of sexual assault.

“Obviously, Rob Mullens seems to be great at getting money for himself,” Harbaugh said. “It’s time for them to step-up and show they help out the academic side.”

The university has not yet commented because the Senate hasn’t given them formal notice of the legislation. It would have to be ratified by the president.

Follow Scott Greenstone on Twitter @smgreenstone

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The president of University of Oregon makes less than most others, and that’s a problem when a university is looking to hire.

At the Presidential Factors Committee on March 4, Stephen Pollack, of the consulting firm Mercer, presented statistics on presidential pay from 17 universities around the nation. This is all part of the discussion surrounding UO’s search for a new president after Michael Gottfredson resigned last summer.

There’s been a lot of controversy surrounding how much UO should pay the president, mostly based around the fact that while administration pay has been rising, staff salaries haven’t.

Also, many students criticize the desire to raise the president’s salary when tuition is rising for students. On Thursday, student protesters showed up at the Board of Trustees meeting to speak out against tuition rising.

But members of the Board insist that the university has to pay its president more if it wants to get good candidates, and Pollack’s findings seem to back that up: Out of the 17 universities he looked at, the UO president’s base salary of $458,484 is lower than about three quarters — but including the benefits, like retirement, it’s more toward the middle compared to the peer universities Pollack picked.

Some of those benefits include “deferred compensation,” which is basically a bonus the university gives the president after a certain amount of time in the office — an incentive to stay.

Pollack recommended that the Board tie this compensation to a set of goals that would have to be completed before the president gets the bonus.

“These are dollars that you want to make sure you’re getting better performance for paying,” Pollack said.

One way working for UO is much better than other universities: Employees only pay five 5 percent of their healthcare plan cost. Most require around 20 percent, Pollack said.

The presidential search could end as soon as April.

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If the Board of Trustees had stepped in during the graduate student strike last term, would things have gone differently?

This is the question the Executive and Audit Committee faced on Wednesday. Kurt Willcox, a non-faculty staff trustee, brought a resolution to the committee that would better inform the board on labor relations, and force them to call an emergency meeting if a strike is announced.

To many in faculty and the student body, the Graduate Teaching Fellows’ labor negotiations that ended after a finals week strike felt like a power struggle between administration and academics.

University Senate opposed the administration’s efforts to keep the strike from derailing finals week, and general sentiment among faculty, graduate students and staff was that the administration should give the GTFs what they were asking for.

This is also the case when the classified workers came close to striking in 2013, according to Willcox.

The Board of Trustees stands above administration, and many in academics and the GTFF wanted the Board to step in and mediate. They didn’t, and in fact did not address the strike as a board until after it was over.

This is what Willcox wants to change with his resolution. His resolution would require the president to report labor negotiations to the Board and, most importantly, call an emergency Board meeting if a strike is impending.

But Willcox didn’t really expect the resolution to pass from the start.

“I am well-aware there is little to no support for this resolution within the committee,” Willcox said in the meeting.

The Trustees delegated responsibilities for labor negotiations to Interim President Scott Coltrane. But this resolution classifies a labor strike as a crisis where the Board should step in.

But other members of the Board spoke loud and clear with their response: They don’t want to mediate.

Mediation from the Board would undermine the authority of the President, said Ginevra Ralph, board vice-chair. Trustee Allyn Ford (of the Ford Alumni Center, where the meeting was held) voiced his discomfort with getting involved in such an emotional, complicated process.

“I just don’t feel competent being put into that role,” Ford said.

This resolution could be construed as an attack on leadership in the university, Board Chair Chuck Lillis said in the meeting—specifically on him and the president. Willcox insisted that it’s not, and that it is common in education for the governing board to step in.

After some discussion like this, the committee voted the resolution down unanimously.

“They don’t see themselves as having a role between the president and any of the unions on-campus,” Willcox told the Emerald. “They see themselves as having given authority to the president and want the president to handle this.”

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Myriam Rahman was on a street corner in Oakland the first time she thought she could be God.

Rahman was having a psychotic break brought on by ten days without sleep. She was in a relationship that was at times abusive, as well as health issues and long-repressed trauma.

Diagnosed as bipolar with psychosis diseases, she could have spent the rest of her life in a mental institution.

But today, Rahman is working in counseling, leads seminars with a non-profit called The Process Work Institute, and presents on mental health internationally.

Rahman doesn’t believe “mental illness” is really an illness at all. In fact, she believes it could be a kind of genius.

“People who have experienced extreme states are some of the most brilliant in the world,” Rahman said. In the community of peers Rahman works with, psychotic episodes like hers are often called “dangerous gifts.”

Rahman knows this genius can manifest itself in ways that are extremely disturbing and challenging, like hers. Rahman’s extreme state had her yelling about healing the world and racial divisiveness. According to Rahman, people who experience extreme states need the right kind of support and care.

What she did and said on that street corner is considered socially unacceptable, and that’s what causes so many to hold in what they’re feeling. Rahman is trying to fight back against that brand of normalcy.

“We’re in a world where we’re told ‘you’re too unusual, you’re too weird, you’re too loud, you’re bringing up too many uncomfortable things,’” Rahman said. “We have this force against us where we’re trying to conform.”

What Rahman was saying that night, about healing racial divides, wasn’t meaningless: To people who knew Rahman’s life story, what she was hallucinating would make sense.

As a child of a French Catholic and Indian Muslim, Rahman was constantly asked “What are you?” by classmates in Connecticut, where she went to a magnet school that integrated students from white wealthier neighborhoods with more diverse students from inner-city neighborhoods. Rahman fit with neither.

“I was the target of extreme bullying,” Rahman said. “Kids were so polarized around race.”

Eventually, the bullying became so severe that Rahman was taken out of school.

To Rahman, what she saw and spoke about in her extreme state had meaning for her life. But society doesn’t see mental health patients as people with stories, and there’s a lot of shame weighing down people with mental illness, according to Rahman.

That’s what Rahman’s work is trying to end, and that’s why she’s coming to University of Oregon.

While Rahman has spoke all around the world, it’s “cutting edge” for a university to want to hear what she has to say. UO’s Accessible Education Center reached out to Rahman and asked her to come present. Her presentation will be Wednesday, February 25, at 6 p.m. in Hedco 220, and the next day she’ll hold a workshop specifically for students at 4 p.m. in Room 202 of the Ford Alumni Center.

Rahman is hoping to change how students at UO approach people with mental illness.

“If you take this story and you tell it to someone else because it affected you, and that causes a paradigm shift…” Rahman said, “We can see these experiences in a new way.”

University of Oregon alumnus Noah DeWitt walked out of a friend’s house barefoot on Feb. 14. He hasn’t been seen for nearly a week.

Here’s everything we know so far about DeWitt, a journalism and international studies student who graduated in 2012:

DeWitt gave no reason for his disappearance. He had been uncharacteristically anxious the entire day after supposedly seeing the Dorena bus crash the day before.

There have been a lot of reports of sightings, but the search party is often skeptical. KVAL reported on Friday that DeWitt had been sighted south of Roseburg.

However, DeWitt’s friends think that was a sighting originally reported on Tuesday because they drove down to that area, talked to the police and put up posters from Winston all the way to Coos Bay.

That’s one of many reports received by Tyler Pell, Jessica Feather and other friends of DeWitt who have joined the search.

“We don’t know if that was Noah,” Pell said, “but we’ve canvassed that area pretty well at this point.”

Police think he could be anywhere up and down the I-5. On Monday, a “credible source” apparently saw DeWitt hitchhiking south of Roseburg, according to EPD’s public information office. This wasn’t reported by police until Friday.

“We’re reaching out as much as we can with everything we can,” McLaughlin said.