Twenty-three crimes were reported to the University of Oregon Police Department the last two weeks. The most common crime was theft, with 10 cases reported. Here’s the map breaking down of all the noticeable crimes.
August 2
Criminal Mischief: Lot 56
August 3
Unlawful Entry of a Motor Vehicle: Barnhart Hall
Bike Theft: 401 E 10th Ave
August 4
DUII: E 15th & University
Bike Theft: Hamilton Complex
Theft: Klamath Hall
Warrant Arrest: North Soccer Fields
August 5
Criminal Mischief: Hedco Building
Bicycle Theft: Walton Complex
August 6
Theft from vehicle, Unlawful Entry of a Motor Vehicle: 1760 Ferry Street
Criminal Trespass: UO Riverfront
August 7
No crimes reported
August 8
Criminal Mischief: E 15th and Agate Street
Criminal Mischief, Theft from Vehicle: Portland campus parking lot
August 9
Warrant Arrest: Barnhart Hall
Theft: Lot 3A
August 10
Theft by deception, Coercion: 1180 Willamette Street
Theft: Student Recreation Center
August 11
Warrant Arrest: South Millrace Lawn
Warrant Arrest: Baker Center
Theft from Vehicle, Bike theft: 1940 Emerald Alley
Bike theft: Spencer View Apartments
Hit and Run – Property Damage: Columbia Garage
August 12
DUII: E Broadway & High Street
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“Students Won!” Oregon Student Association’s Facebook post read, as Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission unanimously approved a budget request that represents a more than 40 percent increase in public universities’ and community colleges’ operating support budget on Thursday.
The budget will be sent to Governor Kate Brown for her consideration ahead of next year’s legislative session.
The request includes $943 million for public universities, a 42 percent increase from the current budget. It also includes $795 million for community colleges, $200 million for the Oregon Opportunity Grant and $40 million for the Oregon Promise.
“This is a very aggressive and ambitious budget request,” HECC’s executive director Ben Cannon said at the meeting at Columbia Gorge Community College.
University of Oregon student Vickie Gimm was also at the meeting to testify in front of the commission. She is optimistic about the result of the meeting, but also said it is not a done deal.
“I’m very thrilled about this victory,” Gimm said, “[but] we still have a long way to go towards affordable education. Next stop is the governor’s office to get the final approval on this budget, and I’m hoping for the best.”
Last year, the Oregon legislature approved $665 million in operating support in 2015, a significant increase for public universities after years of steep decline.
University leaders said at the meeting, however, that even if the proposed increase gets approved, it still won’t make up for the years of state disinvestment. Earlier this year, UO Board of Trustees passed a tuition hike of 4.7 percent and 4.5 percent to cover the increasing operating costs.
Gimm and ASUO Local Affairs Commissioner Amy Schenk both criticized UO President Michael Schill for the tuition hike at the meeting, The Oregonian reports.
At the Higher Education Coordinating Commission meeting in The Dalles, and two UO students just roasted Mike Schill on tuition hikes
The Emerald asked students and faculty to vote on changing the names of Dunn and Deady Hall, which are named after a member of the Ku Klux Klan and a pro-slavery politician who supported excluding black people from the state.
Ninety one votes later, 57 percent voted ‘Yes’ and 43 percent voted ‘No.’
UO President Michael Schill asked campus community for their opinions on the renaming of Deady and Dunn Hall via an email August 9. The forum is open until 5 p.m. August 24.
The consideration came in after a student group, the Black Student Task Force, gave UO administrations a list of 13 demands in fall 2015. The BSTF stated that Matthew Deady’s and Frederick Dunn’s racist histories as the reason for renaming these halls.
Earlier this month, three assigned historians – David Allan Johnson, Quintard Taylor and Marsha Weisiger – submitted their findings on Deady and Dunn to President Schill’s office, which confirmed many of the criteria the BTSF stated in its demand list.
Schill said in the email the administration will announce next steps after consideration, which includes the possibility of taking a renaming proposal for one or both buildings to the UO Board of Trustees.
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Since the university announced its $2 billion fundraising campaign in 2014, UO libraries on and off campus have received numerous donations from alumni and community members.
To be exact, it has raised $37,101,451 as of March 31, 2016, exceeding its goal of $36 million, its website announced in celebration of UO surpassing the $1 billion milestone in July.
(Courtesy of UO Libraries)
UO Libraries is, moreover, the first academic unit on campus to reach its fundraising goal in the campaign, said Keri Aronson, director of development with the UO Libraries.
“Our students and faculty need an outstanding system of libraries to create groundbreaking research across all disciplines and throughout all of campus,” Aronson said, “[The donation] packs a one-two punch: not only does it support the services and resources we provide to the school or college from which you graduated, it also helps us serve every other school and college on our campus as well.”
The UO Libraries was also well-supported during the university’s first giving day, #DucksGive, which lasted 36 hours from midnight of May 19 to noon on May 20. It received $528,095 from 125 donors, almost a quarter of the total of $1.8 million that the university received during the event. The amount helped UO Libraries meet the DeArmond Challenge, which included $500,000 to help fund the new Allan Price Science Commons and Research Library.
WE DID IT!$500k has been unlocked thanks to our amazing donors.Keep up the #DucksGive challenge until noon tomorrow!https://t.co/R8okwEi25N
— UOregon Libraries (@UOregonLibNews) May 19, 2016
With eight locations across campus, the UO libraries assists roughly 50,000 students with their studies and research everyday. With the Price Science Library at its final stage, the majority of the donations from #DucksGive will go towards the construction.
Some of the other funding priorities include a library fund, collection budgets, technology and the Student Employment Endowment Fund, Aronson said. Early May 2016, UO Libraries decided to cut $500,000 out of its collection budget due to the annually rising costs of databases and President Michael Schill’s initiative realignment. Two positions were also laid off due to the 2 percent cut.
Associate Dean for Research Services Mark Watson said, however, that cut is not new to the library. He said the system where publishers inflate the price of repackaging research is problematic.
“We get upset about it every time it happens, but in reality, this is kind of the way things operate.” Watson said.
Aronson said UO Libraries will continue to work on its fundraising campaign.
“We have surpassed some fundraising targets but have fallen short in others,” she said, citing collections, technology, and student employment as key areas still in need of support.
The previous version of this article mentioned Laura Bickerstaff’s donation of $60,000 to the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology in Charleston, Oregon as the part of UO Libraries’ fundraising total. It was not true. The Emerald regrets this mistake.
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The University of Oregon went to court Tuesday seeking dismissal of the lawsuits filed by Brandon Austin, Dominic Artis and Damyean Dotson, former UO basketball players.
The lawsuits claim that the former players were treated unfairly, and school officials denied them due process when they were suspended.
All three players have been expelled and banned from campus up to 10 years for allegedly raping a female student in March 2014.
The university’s attorney, Michelle Barton Smigel, said that neither federal nor state law prevents a public university from suspending a student who is “found to have engaged in an act of sexual misconduct,” according the university’s student conduct code.
The UO administration “pre-judged the situation,” Austin’s attorney, Alan Milstein, said in court Tuesday.
“To expel these kids [was wrong],” Milstein said, according to The Register-Guard. “They should have had access to a fundamentally fair hearing.”
Artis and Dotson’s lawsuits also argued that the university responded to the allegations with a series of “arbitrary, capricious, discriminatory and gender-based actions.”
“From the outset, the investigation and hearing process were slanted in favor of the female accuser because of her gender,” the lawsuit said.
UO officials “granted the female accuser the presumption of truth because she’s a female,” the suit stated.
Barton Smigel said the accusation was invalid, citing the university’s duty to protect students from sexual assault on campus in accordance with federal Title IX protections.
“That argument really falsely assumes that efforts to keep women safe and from being sexually assaulted, and to keep men from sexually assaulting others, is somehow against men,” Barton Smigel said in court, according to the Guard.
The hearing lasted three hours with attorneys on both sides arguing whether UO handled the incident legally.
The players’ attorneys said the decision to expel them violated the players’ Fourteenth Amendment rights to a due process hearing.
Barton Smigel argued that the former players, under legal advisement, waived their rights to a more formal hearing-like process where they could have cross-examined witnesses and potentially appealed a finding.
U.S. District Judge Michael McShane said he expects the process to take several weeks to review all the materials, including police reports, before coming to a ruling.
This is the latest episode of lawsuits surrounding the alleged rape case of the three former basketball players in March 2014. Since then, the university has settled with Jane Doe, the alleged victim, of the amount of $800,000 and a full-ride scholarship. The university also settled with two former counseling center employees for $425,000 in July. About the same time, director of the University Testing and Counseling Center Shelly Kerr was fined by the Oregon Board of Psychologist Examiners for failing to take reasonable precautions to protect the student’s confidential mental health information.
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A Comedy Central show gained the Twitter spotlight three weeks ago for calling out college campuses on the problem of sexual assault. The University of Oregon became embroiled in the conversation after the show aired, due to speculation on social media that a parody mascot created by the show for the segment resembled the duck mascot.
A fake mascot called “Shooshy The Rape Ignoring Ostrich,” an ostrich wearing a green sweater with a yellow circle on it, appeared on “Not Safe with Nikki Glaser” on July 12. Both The Register-Guard and The Oregonian implied that Shooshy is a parody of Puddles, the UO mascot, despite UO not being mentioned in the segment.
“Not Safe” is a weekly show that exclusively talks about sex, with segments such as “#NameABonerPill” and the science of the female orgasm. The online comedy show and podcast series, however, talked about a more serious issue on July 12: Rape on campus, criticizing how some universities are handling sexual assault and prioritizing sports over students.
“I know that sounds like a good thing, but it’s not,” Glaser said in the segment. “It’s scary how far these schools will go to protect their sports programs.”
Glaser also included an extensive interview with Brenda Tracy, who came out with her story in 2014 – 16 years after she was raped by four men, two of which were football players at Oregon State University at the time.
Tracy gave her account of her experience trying to report to the police and university administration, just to get shut down because the school needed money for a new football stadium in 1998.
The mention of OSU and the Shooshy’s resemblance to UO’s mascot prompted several Twitter users to question whether the show did its homework before coming up with the mascot.
Many praised the show on Twitter for calling out the current system. The video of the segment gained more than 32,000 views within a week on Youtube.
The student government President Quinn Haaga and Internal Vice President Zach Lusby also took a stand with the show via Twitter.
“Incredibly shocked to see the long list of universities with no reports,” Haaga said on Twitter. “Denial does not equal progress.”
Throughout the 10 minutes segment, neither Glaser nor Nolan mentioned UO or its latest alleged rape incident involving three former basketball players. The incident got the university in at least four lawsuits, two of which UO has settled for $800,000 and $425,000.
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The Oregon State Public Interest Research Group delivered a petition with 25,000 signatures to a local KFC on August 2, asking the fast food chain to go antibiotic-free.
Ten people from the community showed up at the event, OSPIRG Media Advisory Bobbi Wilson said. Prior to delivering the petition, speakers were given an opportunity to address the issue.
“KFC shouldn’t chicken out on taking this step to save antibiotics,” Wilson said at the event. “Nearly 25,000 Oregonians are sending KFC a clear message: stop serving meat raised with the routine use of our life-saving medicines.”
At the University of Oregon campus, the OSPIRG school chapter launched a campaign in January calling on KFC, the world’s largest chain of fried chicken restaurants to purchase antibiotic-free meat.
The project to convince fast food chains to stop using meat raised on antibiotics started several years ago. Concerns on the use of antibiotics in agriculture were raised after studies, including ones from World Health Organization, revealed that the overuse of antibiotics could potentially be a threat to public health.
According to Food and Drug Administration study in 2012, 70 percent of antibiotics sold in America is for use on livestock and poultry, and approximately 23,000 Americans die each year from an antibiotic-resistant infection.
“Routine dosing of antibiotics allows bacteria to mutate to survive, and therefore, are resistant to previously effective medicines,” registered nurse at Peachhealth Sacred Heart Medical Center Janet Sinelli said. “Would you knowingly sit down to a meal and eat a plateful of food that has been raised with medically important antibiotics?”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, these infections would kill more people worldwide by 2050 than cancer does today, unless action is taken.
OSPIRG and other PIRGs across the nation did just that.
The organization succeeded in convincing McDonald’s and Subway in 2015, and Taco Bell in 2016, to go antibiotic-free with their meats, but KFC still lags behind.
Local farmer at Deck Family Farm in Junction City Brendan Jackson spoke at the event, calling for a change in KFC operation.
“KFC is in a unique position to leverage their purchasing power in a meaningful way,” he said, “Doing so would not only help stop the spread of dangerous superbugs, but would allow farmers that raise KFC birds to farm in a manner that is better for the animals, better for business and better for public health.”
“The cost of resistant bugs is too great to ignore,” said Sarah Gillem, a community member whose children have fought an ongoing battle with antibiotic resistance. “We must address this problem now. It’s here, and it affects more people than you may know. We are asking KFC to say NO to chicken produced with the indiscriminate use of antibiotics.”
Nationally, the organization has gathered more than 87,000 signatures for the petition. Its hashtag #KFCsavesABX also gained some traction on Twitter.
Wilson called Oregon the front-runner of the campaign with 25,000 signatures, which was handed to the general manager at the KFC in Gateway Mall in Springfield. Wilson said the interaction was brief, but the manager was surprised with the large turnout of signatures.
Wilson said the organization will continue to push for a switch by the end of August 2016.
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Fire crews are fighting a 2-acre fire along the popular McKenzie River trail about 70 miles from Eugene, according to the National Forest.
The fire was reported by a resident there at about 3:45 p.m. Wednesday, McKenzie River Ranger District spokeswoman Joanie Schmidgall said to the Register-Guard. The cause of the fire is under investigation.
Willamette officials have closed six miles of the trail between Trail Bridge Campground and Carmen Reservoir, cutting off access to Blue Pool.
“We realize this is a very popular destination for bikers and hikers,” Fire management officer for the National Forest’s McKenzie River Ranger District Randy Harbick said in a statement, “This closure is in place to protect firefighter and public safety. We will open the McKenzie River Trail and Blue Pool as soon as possible.”
Officials expect the closure to last through Thursday and possibly into the weekend.
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Eugene and Springfield residents of all ages took the street of Downtown Eugene today during rush hour for a peaceful rally for the Movement for Black Lives.
Springfield/Eugene Showing Up for Racial Justice and the Community Alliance of Lane County host the event in order to honor the black lives that have been lost due to police brutality and to raise awareness about the Black Lives Matter movement. The march is meant to echo the call for #FreedomNow from National SURJ.
“No one is free, until our black neighbors, colleagues, friends and family members have dignity, justice and respect,” said Promise Partner, one of the organizers, through a megaphone, “Freedom now! Black Lives Matter!”
One speaker called out names of the lost lives before the march – Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice – the crowd of 200 people responded, “Black Lives Matter!”
Promise Partner spoke to the crowd of 200 in attendance before the march. Springfield/Eugene Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) and Community Alliance of Lane County cohosted a rally for Black Lives event in Downtown Eugene July 21. More than 200 residents of all ages attended the march and rally. (Tran Nguyen/Emerald)
Eugene resident Betty Grant said she’s grateful the SURJ put together such event. Grant said she wasn’t aware of SURJ prior to the rally.
“It’s important that we show our support at such event like this,” Grant said. “I have been meaning to get involved with some organizations that talk about race and try to make a difference.”
Members of campus also showed up at the march to support the movement. UO employee Polly Moak said she didn’t get to go the rally on campus two weeks ago, but she shared this event on her Facebook page, hoping more people will get involved.
The crowd then marched through downtown with numerous cars honking at them in support. They stopped at Kesey Square to allow more speakers to speak.
UO Academic Advisor Christina Jackson was one of them. She read a poem, named “Him” amid the cheering of the crowd.
“They will take his name and number him
Do the same thing to the son of him
Did the same thing to the father of him.”
Christina Johnson was one of the speakers at the event. Springfield/Eugene Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) and Community Alliance of Lane County cohosted a rally for Black Lives event in Downtown Eugene July 21. More than 200 residents of all ages attended the march and rally. (Tran Nguyen/Emerald)
UO student Tarik Richardson also spoke in front of the crowd, criticizing the white superior system.
“When Trayvon [Martin] was murdered last year, I saw [my friend] staying up late, making a sign that said, ‘Justice for blank.’ He said, ‘the blank is because I’m going to use this sign for next year.’ And sure enough, next year, I saw him with the same sign,” Richardson said.
UO student Tarik Richardson called for justice for black lives at the event. Springfield/Eugene Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) and Community Alliance of Lane County cohosted a rally for Black Lives event in Downtown Eugene July 21. More than 200 residents of all ages attended the march and rally. (Tran Nguyen/Emerald)
The rally didn’t meet any major opposition or turn violent, although police were nearby at all times. SURJ urged marchers to stay in touch with the organization for future events.
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Fun fact: The UO ID card design is now 10 years old.
Another fun fact: That will change soon.
The UO Card Office is launching a “re-card” project that will allow all current UO ID card holders to get a newly designed UO ID card. Incoming students will also receive the new card during IntroDUCKtion.
The UO ID card serves as the official identification card for students, faculty and staff at the University of Oregon, which allows them to access buildings on campus, ride local public transportation for free, use campus libraries and pay for meals on campus with meal points or Campus Cash.
UO student Kathleen Darby, an undergraduate student majoring in Digital Arts, created the winning design through a competition judged by a committee of professionals and students. She also worked as a student graphic designer for UO Housing.
“I decided to pay tribute to our beautiful campus as well as highlight the residence halls and iconic university architecture,” Darby said.
“The update was intended to bring a little more creativity to the cards, as opposed to the generic look currently on the IDs,” Card Office and Guest Services Manager Tamarra White said.
Besides the design, not much will be change with the new ID cards, White said. Card holders will automatically have access to almost all same the services as the old cards, with the exception of building access after closing hours. White said students can update their information with the new card in order to continue access to academic buildings that they may need to get into after they close.
In 2014, UO Active Minds launched a campaign to persuade the university to include university resources numbers – Health Center, Safe Ride, Sexual Assault Prevention, Non Emergency Public Safety – on the back of the card.
“A lot of the time (these are) resources that students forget,” Active Minds member Juan Rivera said. “In my case, as a first year student you know about them, and you learn about them. As you progress throughout the years, you start forgetting what was originally there.”
Not all of these resources made it in the new design, though the numbers for the Sexual Assault Response Team and the Emergency 9-1-1 number do appear on the back of the new card. Students will also find their student ID number and barcode on the back of their new cards.
This is the most recent major change with UO ID cards, since last year when card holders were first allowed to submit selfies as their ID photos. There were some restrictions including funny faces, cropped pictures, costumes, sunglasses or other headgear, out-of-focus photos and angled pictures.
Some students that have already gotten the new cards ran into some issues while trying to get onto Lane Transportation District buses earlier this month. Student government adviser Becky Girvan said the problem has been resolved after three students reported the incidents to LTD and ASUO.
All current students, faculty and staff will be able to pick up their new ID cards beginning of this fall term. By the end of Winter 2017, the services associated with the old cards will be deactivated.
A previous version of this article stated that none of the numbers for emergency response resources will appear on the new ID cards. This is not true.
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