Bill Harbaugh might be the most divisive figure at University of Oregon. He’s been hailed as the “open-records king of Eugene” and even accused of harassment. His blog, UOMatters, is a mixture of hard numbers and even harder opinions about the way UO is run and the people who run it.

Harbaugh runs this blog, and his economics courses from his office on the fifth floor of Prince Lucien Campbell overlooking the quad. It’s in this office that the Emerald got a chance to chat with Harbaugh about what keeps him blogging despite controversy.

Do you do most of your work here, in PLC?

I mostly work from home, because I’m afraid an earthquake’s going to come and kill everyone in PLC. I don’t mind if it’s during the day, but I’ll be damned if I want to be killed at 2 a.m. working late in the office.

What keeps you up until 2 a.m. pouring over old or horribly tedious documents? What causes you to pay out of your own pocket for things like public records? Why do you care so much?

It’s sort of the same drive that makes you research anything, you know? The more difficult the question is, the more energy you’re willing to put into finding the answer. If it’s an easy question, nobody really cares, but if it takes some digging, a little bit of detective work, that makes you think somebody’s hiding something. It just makes it more fun to put the pieces together.

What are they hiding?

A recent case would be the International Track and Field Championships. It’s a huge endeavor, it’s kind of like a mini-Olympics–thousands of people, thousands of athletes, thousands of officials. There’s a bidding process where cities that are interested in hosting this make bids. The University of Oregon, the UO Foundation, and the State of Oregon all combined to make a bid proposal. They kept everything secret: For example, Governor Kitzhaber and Kate Brown are on video promising to do everything they can to get $40 million in Oregon tax money to help subsidize this thing. The University of Oregon gets about $50 million a year in state tax money–this is a huge amount of money, for which there are many other potentially good things to spend it on. There’s no documentation, no public discussion, no public meetings about any of this–it was all done behind closed doors.

How do you decide what to request and what to leave alone?

A lot of times people give me tips. They say, “Hey, Bill, I can’t ask for this because I don’t have tenure, or I’m a staff member, or an officer of administration, but you really ought to ask them for this kind of document,” and I do. Sometimes that’s not interesting, sometimes that’s extremely interesting. I get a lot of tips from people.

You have tenure. So you’re fairly safe?

There are a few things the university could still fire me for. For example, the university archives stuff. But that didn’t work out too well for them.

Why do you stay here at UO when you fundamentally disagree with the people who run the school? Do you think you’d be happier at a university where nothing shady, in your opinion, was going on?

I think shady things go on at every university. That’s one answer. The other answer is I really love my colleagues in my department and I like the students, I like the job, I like Eugene. And I’m kind of a stubborn guy. I don’t think they’re going to chase me out of here. I think I’m going to change the way they do things.

Noah DeWitt, a University of Oregon alumnus, has been missing since Saturday. DeWitt was last seen at The Heart and Spoon Community House in Eugene at 2 a.m. on Feb. 14. He left the house barefoot and emotionally distressed, friends said, but there was no other apparent reason for his disappearance.

Jessica Feather was a friend and one of the two Heart and Spoon residents who last saw DeWitt. She was going to bed and thought he was too, but when she checked his bedroom at approximately 7:30 a.m., he was gone.

Feather said that DeWitt is normally very stable, but he was in an unusually anxious mood. DeWitt was a witness to the Dorena bus crash a day earlier, according to Feather and other friends, and this was giving him “irrational fears.”

“He was expressing a lot of anxiety and fear about bad things happening to him and his friends and family,” Feather said. “He wasn’t in his normal, coherent mind.”

Police were notified once DeWitt had been missing for 48 hours. John Hankemeier, public information coordinator for the Eugene Police Department said the police have no further information on the disappearance.

Noah DeWitt attended the UO from 2008-2012 and worked at the Oregon Voice. His friend and fellow student Tyler Pell worked with him during that time.

Pell is now one of the organizers of a search that he says hundreds of people have participated in down the coast, posting on Craiglist and calling police stations, jails and hospitals.

“The feeling is he may have hitchhiked south,” Pell said, although he doesn’t know why DeWitt wouldn’t have told anyone. “He’s never disappeared before.”

The UO’s use of non-university lawyers in fall negotiations with the Graduate Teaching Fellows was controversial.

GTF advocates vilified the university’s use of what they called a “union-busting” lawyer at the bargaining table. Physical education instructor Karen Creighton summed up what many were saying in a tense University Senate on Nov. 19. Creighton attended bargaining sessions and said the way the lawyers spoke to GTF bargainers was “insulting.”

“We were appalled,” Creighton said. “We couldn’t believe it.”

A day before the strike happened, the Emerald published a letter to the editor calling out the university and its outside lawyer Jeffrey Matthews for arguing unethically and treating the GTF bargaining team with “condescension, dismissal, and disrespect.” The letter was signed by 55 instructors in the UO Composition Program who teach ethical argumentation.

The GTFs complained that using outside lawyers robbed them of the chance to work with people who knew them and the university culture.

“That was a mistake,” said Michael Dreiling, president of the faculty union. “They made the same mistake with us.”

No lawyers at the table in faculty bargaining

In 2012, when the university first bargained with faculty through United Academics, the lawyers they brought in “did nothing to help our relationship with administration,” Dreiling said.

Now, the university is going to the bargaining table again with the faculty union and, for now, they aren’t bringing in outside lawyers. That’s not a result of anything in the past, the administration said.

“That is not in any way, shape or form an assertion about any past practice,” Klinger said in a voicemail. “The two are not at all related.”

Instead, the university is employing a team led by Bill Brady, new senior director of employee and labor relations at UO.

Brady is trained as an attorney and has worked on both sides of the table: for the Minnesota higher education system and for workers in building trades–painters, sheet metal workers, plumbers.

Though Brady is new to the campus, since his arrival he’s begun building relationships with the deans, a tactic he thinks is key to success.

Why do faculty and administration fight?

UO has a bad national reputation for being a university where staff and faculty don’t get along, Chair of the Board of Trustees Chuck Lillis said at the same meeting where Creighton talked about the bargaining lawyers’ behavior.

Dreiling believes it has taken the university two decades to reach that point, and it started when the state cut funds for higher education. The administration had to make cuts, and faculty felt they weren’t being paid fairly, Dreiling said.

Oregon now has the 47th-lowest funding in the nation for higher education.

Both sides seem to be all for moving beyond past conflicts. According to Dreiling, that means figuring out how both sides can work together when funds are scarce and the state isn’t helping out.

“Let’s solve some problems together,” Dreiling said. “We recognize this history, we recognize that the University of Oregon is at risk of falling in its stature as a major public research university.”

Brady and administration agree.

The University Senate represents 30,000 people at UO—students, faculty, staff and others. In their meeting on Wednesday topics were as diverse as hiring a president, fighting sexual assault and gender-inclusive bathrooms.

Here are some highlights:

Wanted: New UO President

Since Michael Gottfredson resigned in August, the university has been working under an interim president, Scott Coltrane. Now, UO is advertising all over the country for a new one.

Everything in hiring will be entirely confidential, because candidates could face scrutiny at their home universities if their names came out in a job search, according to Laurie Wilder, president of the search firm looking for UO’s next president.

Coltrane promises the UO is deciding how to fight sexual assault

Interim President Scott Coltrane addressed the senate recommendations on fighting sexual assault given to his office in fall term. Many have said the university is moving too slowly to answer the recommendations, but Coltrane said the university has reviewed the recommendations and are going into the process of deciding what to do.

“I received communication this week saying ‘move faster, move faster, you’re not doing anything,’” Coltrane said. “But we are.”

These recommendations were made in September 2014.

Gender-inclusive bathrooms resolution

Student advocates for transgender rights on campus have been working for months on putting more gender-inclusive bathrooms on-campus. They’re asking for 15 to 17 new gender-inclusive bathrooms and they wanted the support of the University Senate.

UO is currently one of the top 10 trans-friendly universities in the nation, but in order to remain there, we need to make these changes, according to Maure Smith-Benanti, assistant director of the LGBT Education and Support Services Program.

The University Senate passed the resolution with no opposition. That means they’ll present the resolution to President Coltrane and wait for his response.

The meeting didn’t last 45 minutes, but decisions regarding millions of dollars still took place.

Any major decisions at the University of Oregon need to go through the Board of Trustees. At their Feb. 9 meeting, they okayed the following:

• Raising the salary of Mark Helfrich, the Ducks head football coach, by $3.15 million. Helfrich recently received a five-year contract extension, and he wasn’t the only one in the athletic department to receive a raise: Rob Mullens, director of Intercollegiate Athletics, was renewed for $700,000 a year.
• Allowing the university to bring outside vendors into the remodeled Erb Memorial Union. Vendors talking with the university include local brewery Falling Sky, Chipotle and Starbucks.
• Building a new softball field for $16.5 million. The current softball field is good for neither spectators nor athletes, according to Chris Ramey, VP of campus planning and real estate. Among other things, athletes have to change in MacArthur Court.

When the University Oregon Health Center learned that another student had contracted a meningitis-causing bacteria (its scientific name is meningococcemia) Feb. 3, the staff dropped all afternoon plans.

The call came at 2:45 p.m., and by 3:30 p.m. the Health Center Director Michael Eyster met with UO’s Office of Emergency Management and Lane County Public Health.

The trio used names provided by the university registrar to determine those at risk for infection: anyone who had shared food, cups or even just air with the infected student in the four hours before she was transported to a local hospital for treatment. By the time the Health Center closed at 5 p.m., all 400 at risk received antibiotics.

Two hours later university officials handed out antibiotics at Earl Hall, where the student lived. The university also texted 1,200 of her classmates and peers.

Eyster said that swift damage control is a necessity for the university because of what has happened in the past.

Meningitis and its related bacteria have a destructive history at the university. Two students have died of it, one in 2001 and the other in 2012.

The first time the disease hit the university, the health center didn’t take it seriously.

Freshman Jill Dieringer showed up at the health center in 2001 complaining of a sore throat. Nurses thought it was a cold and sent her back to her residence hall, not realizing she had an early symptom of meningococcemia.

Dieringer checked into Sacred Heart Medical Center the next day with a severe headache and a fever. The doctors at Sacred Heart Medical Center allegedly didn’t diagnose her symptoms until it was too late and failed to prescribe antibiotics in time. Dieringer died about a day after she had been admitted.

The most recent meningococcemia-related death at UO was that of senior Lill Pagenstecher in 2012, a Chi Omega sister. Her death shook her sorority and the university at large, prompting an outpouring of condolences on social media and a candlelight vigil.

“One of the really dangerous things about meningitis is it also moves so quickly,” Eyster said. “Everyone knows our roles and what we need to do.”

After 2012, there were no more cases of meningitis until this year. Then, on Jan. 16, a student was hospitalized with meningitis again, and another was hospitalized a few weeks later.

What’s especially troubling about the recent cases is that they occurred so close to each other. Seven days after after a student contracted meningococcemia on Jan. 16, Lane County Public Health believed they were past the point of danger.

Meningitis has a seven day incubation period in which the symptoms manifest, health official Jason Davis said. Thus, if seven days pass and no one else has been diagnosed, it’s reasonable to believe the university community is safe.

Not even three weeks later, however, a second case appeared.

Neither the university nor Lane County Public Health know if the two are connected.

“Lab tests that are being conducted right now,” Eyster said. “We will know that.”

The news spread quickly: “Greek Life is under attack.”

That’s how senior Andrew Lubash, ASUO senator, Delta Tau Delta member described the reaction in FSL when the community’s growth was threatened in November 2014.

That is when a task force of anti-sexual assault advocates at the University  of Oregon released “20 Students Per Week,” a recommendation to the university on how to fight sexual assault at University of Oregon.

One of the recommendations was that FSL’s growth should be suspended until the university can find out why sexual assaults are three times higher for sorority women.

FSL presidents and leaders moved quickly and uniformly, asking fraternity and sorority members to come before the task force in a student forum and let the task force know their opposition to the recommendation.

“Come stand in solidarity with FSL,” the messages said, according to Lubash. Lubash is a critic of FSL expansion himself. 

The student forum on Nov. 4, 2014 was a sea of formal suits and dresses, a request by leadership to show that they took the issue seriously. When the task force asked how many were from FSL, nearly every hand in the room went up.

FSL members brought their reasons for continuing growth: They have fixed problems on their own before, and they can work together with the university to fight sexual assault. The task force’s responses were reasonable, but unswayed: Suspension of FSL is necessary.

That was three months ago.

Both sides agree that there is a problem, but neither has the power to do anything alone — both are waiting for the university to either suspend FSL or let it grow. But the university has yet to respond to nearly all of the recommendations, and unless it does, FSL will continue to grow.

Students in FSL make up 16.5 percent of the UO’s population. FSL wants to get that to 20 percent in the next few years, and it’s doing that by allowing new fraternities and sororities to come onto campus. Theta Chi fraternity colonized in fall 2014, fraternity Alpha Tau Omega is recruiting its founding members this term and sorority Sigma Kappa is returning fall 2015.

The task force recommendation would stop these efforts by prohibiting new fraternities and sororities from colonizing on Oregon’s campus until sexual assault numbers in the community decrease.

It came after a survey by UO psychology professor Dr. Jennifer Freyd found that women in FSL at UO are three times more likely to be sexually assaulted.

“Obviously we are not in support of the halt of expansion for Fraternity and Sorority Life,” said Max Lehman, the current Interfraternity Council president. “I believe very adamantly that FSL is an amazing opportunity for everybody to be a part of, and simply halting its expansion will not stop or solve this issue.”

But to Freyd and other advocates against sexual assault, halting expansion is an important way to reduce sexual assault.

“It’s going to make fraternities and sororities safer, so students can enjoy them in the way that they were intended,” said Marina Rosenthal, a doctoral candidate who works with Freyd.

But leaders in the FSL community say that they have effectively dealt with problems in their community before, and they are prepared to do so again without the need for outside sanctions.

In spring, FSL changed their social policy to decrease alcohol-related hospital transports in FSL. As of fall, these efforts decreased transports by 50 percent. Lehman and other leaders say they can do the same thing with sexual assault.

Lehman says that creating a sexual assault prevention task force for FSL, and going to other leadership conferences to learn how other schools are dealing with this issue are all proactive steps to decreasing the percentage of FSL members becoming victims of sexual assault.

“We’re not trying to shy away from the truth,” Lehman said. “We want to face the truth head on – we want to know what the problem is.”

Former IFC president Chase Salazar and Lehman want continued research on the subject to prove their ability to decrease it.

“There are extreme benefits to all of our organizations, and I personally do not see the correlation of halting all expansion and solving this issue,” Lehman said. “Everybody is trying to solve this issue, everybody is trying to find solutions for this issue, let’s have Oregon Fraternity and Sorority Life be the leader in that.”

But Freyd and Rosenthal argue that self-policing hasn’t worked.

“There’s research suggesting these really high rates of rape and sexual assaults in FSL going back into the ‘90s – this isn’t news,” Rosenthal said. “It’s information that we’ve had for a really long time and no one has done anything about.”

Both researchers say they don’t have anything against FSL — but when it’s shown that a community is unsafe, expansion of that community needs to stop.

“I don’t care strongly if we have fraternities or not,” Freyd said. “I care that our students are safe.”

Freyd and Rosenthal say that allowing a community where sexual assault is more prevalent is simply reckless to Oregon’s student body as a whole.

The recommendation from the task isn’t supposed to harm FSL, but to protect its current and future members.

“I don’t doubt their good will. I don’t doubt their good intentions,” Freyd said. “But what I implore this university to do is to protect students from being exposed to this risk until we really have a handle on what’s causing it and therefore how to stop it.”

“I grew up in an era where people actually believed in government,” Governor John Kitzhaber said toward the beginning of his speech on January 22 at University of Oregon.

Kitzhaber was speaking to a collection of UO political science students, Wayne Morse scholarship recipients and student government representatives.

The governor described watching Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign as a young man. Kennedy “asked profound but uneasy questions”: Questions about inequities and disparities in wage and joblessness that still existed in America. Kennedy’s campaign only lasted 82 days before he was shot in Los Angeles.

Nowadays, people don’t believe that government can help as much anymore.

“Today, things are a little more ambiguous,” Kitzhaber said. “Problems are more complicated.”

The governor laid out his vision for 2015: By most measurements, Oregon is doing incredibly well in economy. In GDP, Oregon had the fifth-fastest growing economy in the United States; in jobs, Oregon has “made up all the jobs we lost” in the recession.

But does that translate into the wellbeing of Oregonians? Kitzhaber said it doesn’t.

While Oregon workers are more productive than ever, many are stuck in part-time work and ethnic minorities have drastically high levels of unemployment. One in five children in the state are still living in poverty, Kitzhaber said.

Kitzhaber said that his goal for 2015 was to ask those questions.

“If we can ask those questions and if we’re willing to hold as our common purpose… I am absolutely convinced that we can figure it out,” Kitzhaber said.

Kitzhaber’s appearance at UO is timely, considering the presidents of Oregon’s public universities signed a letter just last month criticizing Kitzhaber’s new higher education budget. The Emerald asked Kitzhaber what he would say to students who wonder why tuition is higher than ever and the state isn’t helping.

“There’s no question that Oregon and a lot of states have disinvested in higher education,” Kitzhaber said. “So I think we have to put this in the context of where we were four years ago in 2011 and we are much closer now than we were. So we have to continue to reinvest in postsecondary education.”

The Emerald also asked what advice Kitzhaber would give to UO students.

“I would say that it’s very important… to be directly engaged in public policy,” Kitzhaber said. “They’re going into a very uncertain job market, where a lot of people graduate with great credentials but they can’t find a job, and I think public engagement is going to be as important for this generation as it was to mine.”

Helena Schlegel, a Wayne Morse scholar and Student member of the Board of Trustees for the university, said the governor is showing that he’s willing to work with students to address these issues.

“It showed one of his priorities this term is higher education–student issues,” Schlegel said. Schlegel was not speaking on behalf of the Board.

It’s been over seven days since a student was hospitalized with an infection from a bacteria that causes meningitis and Lane County Public Health is no longer worried about whether or not the bacteria has spread.

The incubation period for meningococcemia is seven days, which means that if the unnamed student passed it on to other students, they would have begun showing symptoms already, according to Jason Davis, public information office for Lane County Public Health.

“The fact that we haven’t received any reports of cases is encouraging,” Davis said. “I think we have moved past the window of when we’re most concerned.”

As for the student, the conversation has switched from mortality to recovery, Davis said. The student is sure to make it, but health professionals still aren’t sure if she sustained neurological damage from the infection. Until the student is lucid and can start performing tasks, doctors won’t know.

She is not being treated in Eugene, but is receiving “the best care she can in Oregon,” Davis said.

The student who contracted Neisseria Meningococcemia on Friday is stabilizing, according to Lane County Health officials. She remains unnamed, and has been moved to a hospital in her hometown.

This is an improvement over the student’s health earlier today, when the Emerald posted an update saying that the student was in septic shock and unresponsive.

Nearly 800 students who may have come into contact with the student have received emails and text alerts warning them of possible infection and encouraging them to get antibiotic treatment at the University of Oregon Health Center.

The University Health Center may extend it’s weekly hours to be open on Sunday so that students can get antibiotics, according to university administration. Students who received emails and texts are encouraged to keep checking the Health Center website.

This is the email sent out to any student who came into contact with the patient from Dr. Richard Brunader, director of the University Health Center:

The University was notified today (Friday January 16, 2015) that one of your classmates in [FILL IN NAME OF CLASS] was diagnosed with Neisseria meningococcemia on Thursday, January 15, 2015. This is a bacterial illness that can lead to meningitis, a very serious condition.

While people with Neisseria meningococcemia have the potential of infecting others, the bacteria cannot live for more than a few minutes outside the body, so the disease is not spread as easily as the common cold or influenza. In fact, many people carry the bacteria in their body and are never affected because their immune system prevents the disease from making them ill. The disease is transmitted through respiratory droplets. Typically, extended face-to-face contact for an extended time (at least 4 hours cumulatively within one week), or coming into contact with saliva through kissing or sharing cups and utensils is necessary to infect others.

Neisseria meningococcemia is preventable with prophylactic medication.  Please seek medical attention as soon as possible to decrease your risk of contracting the illness.

If you have an unexplained fever, headache or neck pain, please seek medical attention immediately.

Due to patient confidentiality, I am unable to share the name of the student who was hospitalized with this illness. However, if you believe you have been in the type of contact described above with the student who was hospitalized, you should  contact the University Health Center. You may also see your own provider or seek care at a local urgent care.

Health Center Hours:

Monday through Friday 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Friday, January 16 open until 8:00 p.m.

Saturday, January 17, 9:00 a.m.  – 4:00 p.m.

Monday, January 19, 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. (hours may change- please refer to the website).

http://healthcenter.uoregon.edu