Scott Coltrane was introduced as provost of the University of Oregon in February 2014. Not even six months later, he was introduced again, this time as interim president of the University of Oregon.

There’s a lot to cover in order to answer why. Funding from the state government has shrunk for all public universities across the state and, last fall, the UO, Oregon State and Portland State all got their own Boards of Trustees.

Coltrane’s predecessor, Michael Gottfredson, led the charge to get the Board of Trustees, but had grown unpopular with faculty for mishandling the university’s bargaining with a newly unionized faculty. Faculty and students were outraged at last spring’s revelations of sexual assault scandals within the UO men’s basketball team because they seemed to take too long to act.

Then, a month after the Board of Trustees took complete control, Gottfredson stepped down, invoking the “spend more time with my family” trope.

“I think this is a turning point for the university,” Coltrane said. “I think we’re poised with the private capital we expect to get, with our new board setting direction for us, I want to make sure that the university stays on the right track.”

Coltrane was schooled at the University of California, Santa Cruz where he earned his bachelors, masters and doctorate between 1974 and 1988. He then moved to UC Riverside to teach and research for 20 years, until he became dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the largest school at the UO.

One of the biggest hurdles Coltrane and the next president will face is that of keeping tuition costs low. The State of Oregon covered almost 10 percent of UO’s costs back in 2008, but today that’s closer to 5 percent. It will be the Board of Trustees’s job and the president’s job to try and get the state to reinvest, while shaking hands with donors.

“All that we can do that’s going to get more resources to do it, so I think the legislative piece and the private philanthropy piece go hand-in-hand,” Coltrane said. “We’re tuition dependent, we have private dollars and we have research dollars that come in but the state did provide for us.”

Coltrane also inherited an administration derided for its opaqueness. He quickly became a favorite of the faculty for his openness, hosting public forums and city hall-style meetings for people across the school to chime in on issues.

“The administration and the faculty have to work together,” Coltrane said of the divide. “…We need to be better at posting information before it’s asked for, and routinely put up important documents and financial statements and that sort of stuff. That should be available to the public all the time.”

He has already made waves in the academic department with the announcement of a Clusters of Excellence initiative, designed to find the best proposals from schools within the UO to attract better teachers and programs.

“I think first and foremost we want to look at ways we can increase academic quality,” Coltrane said. “And examine ways can increase access and build a curriculum with student life and support that makes our students successful.”

Coltrane believes that Eugene and the UO are poised to grow under the next president and the Board of Trustees. Eugene itself, he said, could be a big draw to get a stronger faculty at those clusters of excellence.

“Faculty want to live in Eugene, people want to live in Oregon,” Coltrane said. “We have good communities, we’re a more intimate university than a lot of the big state schools, that’s a huge factor.

It will likely be a year before a permanent president is found. Coltrane will operate as what Board Chairman Chuck Lillis called a “super provost.” He has no intentions of throwing his hat into the ring for university president because that would hurt the search.

“No, my job is the interim,” said Coltrane. “And my job is to make sure the pool for the presidential search is the best that it can be and one of the ways to signal that I am an interim, so I’m going to be participating with the hire efforts.”

The University of Oregon purposely delayed  the expulsion of three basketball players in order to preserve its academic standing with the NCAA and financial incentives for members of the athletic department, according to an exhaustive investigative piece from KATU News.

In a 17-minute segment on Monday night, the Portland-based television station stated that by keeping the players enrolled until June 23 — three months after allegedly sexually assaulting a female student at an off-campus party — the university could buoy it’s Academic Progress Rate.

APR is a statistic used by the NCAA to measure the classroom successes of athletes by looking at enrollment and retention rates of student-athletes. KATU’s report alleges that the university kept the players registered in class well into spring term so as to not harm the school APR. However, the university has stated that it kept the players enrolled to not interfere with the Eugene Police Department’s investigation. EDP has denied this claim.

Every term, a player gets a point for being both academically eligible for classes and enrolled, which contributes to the athletic department’s overall score.

1,000 is a perfect score. The University of Oregon had a 918, the lowest in the Pac-12 according to KATU. If a school falls below a 930 four-year average threshold that may result in sanctions from the NCAA possibly including barring from postseason play. After spring term, UO elevated its score to 945, ensuring eligibility for the program.

On April 28, the school got ahold of the police report. This was also a vital week for the schools APR score because the NCAA would be looking at how many players were currently enrolled. Should the players receive incompletes in their classes would subtract from the school’s APR. Though Brandon Austin, as a recent transfer, was inconsequential to the overall APR, Artis and Dotson could impact it.

Furthermore, the report suggests that members of the school’s athletic department were contracted for bonuses tied to APR. Athletic director Rob Mullens would receive $40,000 for a good APR, Dana Altman would get $20,000 and $6,000 each for assistant coaches Kevin McKenna and Tony Stubblefield.

“If you were to kick an athlete out of school mid-semester, like I said you’re almost guaranteed to lose both points as opposed to keeping them in school,” said John Infante, a “nationally recognized APR expert” to KATU news’s Joe Douglass. “Having them be eligible, and getting those eligibility points, the dates that these occurred line up with the significant APR dates and with avoiding those worst-case scenarios.”

Douglass states in his report a University of Oregon spokesperson declined APR as a factor in their decision-making.

Across the country, law schools have been facing a serious decline in enrollment over the last few years. In fact, applications across the country have sunk to their lowest figures in 30 years. The combination of rising tuition and student debt with diminishing job prospects has steered students into other fields.

Oregon has not bucked the trend either. Information provided to by the Office of Institutional Research at the UO shows that fall 2013 had the lowest enrollment since at least 2001. Other schools at the University of Oregon see their enrollment fluctuate throughout the years, but for a school as small as the law school, with under 600 total students enrolled, losing 100 students between years can have a big impact.

While fall 2009 was the highest year for enrollment, with nearly 600 students seeking their juris doctorates or their master’s of law degrees, fall 2013 shows a marked drop-off of 20 percent. The raw numbers provided by the Office of Institutional Research show that there were 558 students enrolled for their JD and 40 students enrolled for their LLM in fall 2009. Just four years later, those numbers were at 443 and 55 respectively.

Though there has been a rise in students attending the University of Oregon School of Law for their master’s degrees, universities depend on law enrollment for a sizeable chunk of their financing.

Meanwhile, almost every other college has grown with the student population. The College of Arts and Sciences has upwards of 1,100 more students since fall 2009. The School of Journalism has grown by 43 percent, with more than 2,000 students at present.

Another telling sign, according to Inside Higher Ed, is that the number of prospective students taking the LSAT has dropped 45 percent from the same time frame. Meanwhile, costs have not decreased in any notable way and it’s estimated that somewhere between 80 to 85 percent of law schools are losing money.

This puts UO law in a precarious position. Erica Daley, the law school’s associate dean for finance and operations, says that the lower enrollment has been inevitable. She says they’re focusing on what they can control, which is the job prospects for their currently enrolled students.

“There’s two things, there are fewer students to cater to, and making sure you have the best programs available for them,” Daley said. “The other thing is giving them experiential learning along the way, so that when they get out they have a better chance of getting those jobs. The legal education a law student gets, the education, the critical thinking skill — is very applicable across many many careers.”

Still, the UO boasts one of the strongest environmental law programs in the country and announced a Portland-based program in February. The initiative was proposed to take advantage of Portland’s grander opportunities for externships and extracurriculars.

“I would say that being in the industry and dealing with this, the story now is what are law schools are doing and how are they kind of re-tooling to address a broader employment opportunity for lawyers for the long term and enhancing,” said Daley, who was a practicing lawyer before coming to the UO.

Another way the law school has responded to the enrollment struggles is the pilot run of the summer Sports Law Institute. The UO’s affair with sports has been common knowledge for decade, but only this past summer has the law school really attempted to embrace it from a law standpoint.

Nearly two dozen students are enrolled in the program, from Arizona State to Notre Dame, to listen to lecturers with intimate knowledge of some of the most intricate issues facing sports today. One lecturer, for example, was Brian Halloran, a former member of the NCAA committee on infractions. The summer program gave students a glimpse into a highly specialized field of law and was a unique way to draw interest to the university.

The decrease in enrollment doesn’t have to doom the law school. Though every other program has either grown or remained steady, the law school looks at the situation as a chance to refocus.

The University of Oregon is searching for a president after Michael Gottfredson abruptly walked out of Johnson Hall for good in the middle of last week. In a letter to the university, the now ex-president said he wanted to spend more time with his family and return to the book-diving ways of academia.

Yet, questions hang over the announcement around why he would step down immediately versus give notice and serve until his permanent replacement is found. Why resign from a contract renewed last November? What exactly was Gottfredson’s reasons for stepping down? Was the decision his alone?

Regardless, Gottfredson lasted little over a month after the university’s Board of Trustees came to power on July 1. And when the Board of Trustees convened last Thursday there was little elaboration on these questions.

Board chairman Chuck Lillis, a businessman who prospered running an internet provider in the mid-90s, wouldn’t point out any single issue. Raising funds was Gottfredson’s main duty, he has said in the past. And in the two years of Gottfredson’s tenure, the University of Oregon collected over $300 million in donations – though it may be fair to say that those streams of donations were already in place before Gottfredson took over. Last year’s totals breached the $200 million mark and was the second most successful year in school history. Still, Gottfredson is gone.

There was also last summer, when UO teachers finally unionized to author a contract with the administration. Gottfredson was no where to be seen during the bargaining, which slighted many.

Gottfredson was also mired in the university’s image problems. Faculty and students alike were dumb-founded by the university’s public relations bobbling in the wake of allegations that three members of the Oregon men’s basketball team sexually assaulted a female student. Lillis elected not to point to any action taken as a final straw.

“I will say that very few people in the media have a very sophisticated understanding of the very tough network to protect students rights. That decreases the freedom to do things,” Lillis said on Thursday. “For example, the board pretty routinely kept saying ‘Can’t we say anything?’ and I know every time I asked that question I was convinced the answer was ‘No’ for a very good reason.”

Regardless, that day the board voted to accept Gottfredson’s resignation, give him $940,000 in severance and offer provost Scott Coltrane the post of interim president while a search committee finds a permanent replacement. Coltrane became — including himself and last interim Bob Berdahl — the fifth president in seven years for the UO.

Coltrane’s appointment has been lauded around the university. There’s of course always still time for opinions to change, and its a president’s job to take brunt of the blame should anything go awry while he’s working in that capacity, but administrators tell the Emerald that the former dean is more than capable.

Coltrane has been at UO since 2008, first serving as the dean of the biggest department on campus — the College of Arts and Sciences. Enrollment surged during that time and Coltrane has been lauded for how he handled the crowding classrooms.

“[Coltrane succeeded at] handling stresses in terms of space and allocating resources to make sure students received a good education,” said W. Andrew Marcus, who is the current interim dean. “He was instrumental in making sure all those things happened. There was a 20 percent jump across the whole university, but almost all students take classes in the college of arts and sciences.”

Before that, Coltrane was posted at the University of California, Riverside, as a professor and associate dean. He had only been officially named provost since February before the board trusted him with the interim presidency last week. By holding open meetings with faculty about his plans for the university, Coltrane endeared himself to the professors.

“He’s very calm, he’s very measured, and he’s always very clear,” said Brad Shelton, interim vice president of research and innovation at UO. “You can trust him to make a careful and well-considered decision on things. You can always trust him to be very fair and to take into account everyone’s point of view.”

The University of Oregon is changing rapidly. With the Board of Trustees in place and booming enrollment numbers, the functions of being the president are also fluctuating. Some days the president will be raising funds from donors, some days the president may be in Salem lobbying. Regardless, the Board of Trustees is still figuring out its own flex across the state. Lillis said on Thursday that Coltrane won’t have to worry about “external constituencies” – donors, politicians, etc. because the board will, while searching for Gottfredson’s permanent replacement.

Instead, Coltrane will be a “super provost,” talking to faculty publicly about how the university is going adjust to swelling enrollment and to bolster research through the new “clusters of excellence” program that will hire 40 new professors to research departments. Coltrane will pick up the president’s $540,000 a year salary and move into the presidential house off-campus called the McMorran house.

As of Thursday, there was not yet a search committee for the next president. The Board of Trustees is determined to find the ideal candidate, a president who handles tee times with alumni and politicians as well as he conducts an open meeting with the faculty. The board told Coltrane to expect to be sitting on the interim for a year.

Alex Cremer contributed to this report.

The landmark trial of O’Bannon versus the NCAA concluded today with a federal judge ruling against the NCAA.

Arguing that the NCAA’s stipulations for benefits or compensation college football and men’s basketball players can receive, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken issued an injunction preventing college sports’s governing body from “enforcing any rules or bylaws that would prohibit its member schools and conferences from offering their FBS football or Division I basketball recruits a limited share of the revenues generated from the use of their names, images, and likenesses in addition to a full grand-in-aid [scholarship].”

The ruling won’t go into effect until next year. The case is expected to be appealed.

The case has been headed by Ed O’Bannon, a former power forward for UCLA’s men’s basketball team in the early 1990s. He filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA, EA Games and Collegiate Licensing Company saying that they conspired to profit from popular college athletes through booming television revenues and by using their likenesses in merchandise while preventing players from being fairly paid for their contributions.

In a 99-page ruling, Wilken said “justifications that the NCAA offers do not justify this restraint and could be achieved through less restrictive means.” She also ruled the the NCAA will be allowed to cap the amount players are paid as long as the cap is not lower than the cost of attendance in schools.

The NCAA had long argued that amateurism was fundamental to college athletics and that to pay players would put competitive balance on its head. During the trial, lawyers for the NCAA also said a ruling in favor of O’Bannon and other players would permit third parties to pay players and universities would struggle to maintain control of players.

Representatives for the University of Oregon athletic department declined to comment on the news of the ruling.

The Oregon athletic department pocketed the ninth most revenue in the country during the 2012-13 fiscal year, according to USA Today Sport’s latest update to its college athletics spending database. The database does not account for private universities such as the University of Southern California or Stanford. Those latest financial reports also indicate it was the most expensive year for the Ducks, as well – though it was a return to profitability since only breaking even in the three years before.

Follow Troy Brynelson on twitter at @TroyWB. Information reported by USA Today and ESPN was included in this article. 

University of Oregon provost Scott Coltrane will be stepping in for Michael Gottfredson in the interim, the Board of Trustees of the University of Oregon decided Thursday evening.

Following Gottfredson’s sudden resignation, announced via a letter on the president’s website Wednesday evening, the Board of Trustees scheduled the meeting on short notice to vote on both whether to accept Gottfredson’s resignation and to appoint an interim president. The board hasn’t yet formed a committee to find a permanent replacement.

The change was swift. The board voted 12 in favor and 2 excused in both resolutions, naming Scott Coltrane to the top job and giving Gottfredson a severance package worth $940,000. At least by half an hour after the meeting, the president’s official website has swapped Gottfredson’s portrait for Coltrane’s. And the votes were near unanimous, the two excused votes only because of absent voters. With the majority of the board joining by teleconference, Ann Curry could not be reached and the student representative seat is now vacant following former ASUO President Sam Dotters-Katz’s graduation.

Gottfredson’s severance is rooted in his leaving two posts: the university presidency and a faculty position within the University of Oregon’s sociology department. It will be paid in two separate lumps of $470,000 – the first within five days of now and the second on January 3, 2015.

“He’s resigning from president, but he’s resigning from a lifetime tenure track faculty position, as well,” Chuck Lillis, the chair of the board, told reporters Thursday afternoon. “Of course if you read the contract, the terms of that are that he would be paid well.” Lillis also told reporters that they first learned of Gottfredson’s intentions to step down on Monday.

The board also says that the alleged sexual assault scandal involving three of the Oregon’s men’s basketball program did not sour the relationship between the president and the newly effective board. “I will say that very few people in the media have a very sophisticated understanding of the very tough network to protect students rights. That decreases the freedom to do things,” Lillis said. “For example, the board pretty routinely kept saying ‘Can’t we say anything?’ and I know every time I asked that question I was convinced the answer was ‘No’ for a very good reason.”

Coltrane’s duties as interim president don’t seem as spread out as Gottfredson’s were. Whereas a university president’s job often entails working closely with organizations both within the school and the across the state, Lillis said Coltrane is tasked first with keeping a happy home within the university. “We’re approaching this a little differently. We’re not asking Scott Coltrane to do everything we asked Mike Gottfredson,” Lillis said. “We have said [to Coltrane] ‘Your principle task is to focus on the internal operations of the university. Work with the faculty, work with the various organizations, staff. Run the university.’” Lillis said that Coltrane should expect to be in his position for at least a year.

In all, Gottfredson was the fourth president for the Unviersity of Oregon in six years, a fact pointed out to Chuck Lillis.

“Well I don’t think that’s healthy, I don’t think that’s the best situation,” Lillis said of the high turnover rate for UO presidents recently. “…You know, each of those presidents contributed in some very important way, more than one important way in almost every case. I would argue that while this isn’t ideal, we ended up in a better place.”

Coltrane himself looks at his chance at interim optimistically.

“We’re poised for really great things. We’ve never had more students applying, we have a great record now recruiting excellent faculty in targeted areas,” Coltrane said near the end of the meeting. “… We’re working with the state to reinvest in higher education now that we are out of the recession, I think we’re poised for good things.”

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In one of his final acts as president of the University of Oregon, Michael Gottfredson handpicked former Dean of School of Journalism and Communication Tim Gleason as the faculty athletics representative.

The faculty athletic representative, otherwise known as the FAR, is an NCAA-required post for someone in the school faculty to act as a liaison between the athletic department and the campus at-large. In an email to the university, Gottfredson describes the position as being “responsible for ensuring the academic integrity of the intercollegiate athletic program, promoting the well-being of student athletes, and supporting institutional oversight of athletics compliance and student eligibility.”

Gleason’s appointment intertwines with the retirement of longtime FAR, law professor Jim O’Fallon. The two will work together starting January 1, 2015, beginning a half-year training period until O’Fallon bows out at the end of June 2015.

The search for O’Fallon’s replacement officially began in late February with the creation of a confidential search committee, chaired by human physiology professor Andy Karduna. Karduna spoke to the Emerald Thursday afternoon in a phone interview and said he reached out to around 50 candidates, a list that was whittled down to five before being handed off to Gottfredson in June to take over the hiring process.

“The ideal candidate would have been someone with the rank of full professor,” Karduna said. “Just so they would have some degree of independence and wouldn’t have to worry about job security. Someone in this position might make a call that the president or others might not be happy about and they need to be independent enough to do that.”

Gleason has been at the University of Oregon since 1987 and served as the Edwin L. Artzt Dean of the SOJC for 15 years. He announced he was stepping down in January 2014 but wasn’t replaced until November, when Julianne Newton moved behind the desk.

The search wasn’t without its detractions. Members of the school’s faculty senate tried throughout the search to open the process, but to no avail. Karduna says the process itself was difficult if only for the fact that this is the first time the faculty athletic representative position has been open in over two decades. “No one else was on campus when he was first appointed,” Karduna said. “It was interesting because he had been the FAR for the longest time as far as I know among the Pac-12 teams, so it was a challenge to find out what the process should be.”

University of Oregon president Michael Gottfredson announced his resignation on Wednesday afternoon.

In a letter to the university’s Board of Trustees, Gottfredson said his desire to return to academia, where he is a professor of criminology, is the reason he’s calling it quits after two years running the UO. He also says he wants to spend more time with his family, though his contract would have allowed him to serve as president until June 30, 2016.

“Today it is with mixed emotions that I announce my decision to depart the UO as President and pursue other opportunities in academia,” Gottfredson said in his message. “…My scholarly interests beckon and Karol and I are eager to spend more time with our family. With our outstanding campus leadership and new strategic planning underway, it is appropriate for a new president to continue the legacy of this great University.”

Gottfredson’s time at the helm has seen an NCAA investigation into the university’s football program, the installation of the Board of Trustees itself and the faculty form its first union, United Academics, and negotiate its first contract. Gottfredson was the university’s 17th president.

The chair of the Board of Trustees, Chuck Lillis, also issued a statement.

“The challenges before [Gottfredson] and the University were no small feat- but he successfully concluded the NCAA issue, worked and repaired relationships with the other University presidents, Governor and State Legislature to establish a new system of higher education governance for Oregon, including institutional boards, and negotiated a fair labor contract with the faculty union,” Lillis said in the statement. “Despite the competing challenges, President Gottfredson never lost sight of the mission of the University of Oregon and continued to push to move the UO toward even greater academic excellence.”

The Board of Trustees officially went into effect July 7 of this year and will be in charge of hiring Gottfredson’s successor. The board meets next on Thursday, August 7.

Gottfredson, 63, was hired by the Oregon Board of Higher Education and started August 1, 2012 after the board fired his predecessor, Richard Lariviere. Before coming to Oregon, Gottfredson was vice chancellor and provost at the University of California at Irvine, and was a professor of Criminology, Law and Society.

During his first year as president, Gottfredson handled the NCAA investigation into the Oregon football team’s recruiting practices, which resulted in the program being put on probation.

The formation of the Board of Trustees is perhaps the biggest change during his time as president. Gottfredson played a key role in loosening the authority the Oregon University System had over the university by pushing for Oregon to have its own governing body to set tuition rates and order construction on campus. Now, UO, Oregon State University and Portland State University are all run by their own boards of trustees.

Most recently, Gottfredson formed a panel to review how the university prevents and responds to reported sexual misconduct, which came on the heels of a sexual assault scandal within Oregon’s men’s basketball team. Johnson Hall, the building his office is located, was the site of protests during the spring term for both its transparency in handling the sexual assault cases as well as demonstrations by the union representing Graduate Teaching Fellows at the school and currently bargaining with the administration over its next contract.

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Beaverton Police have located three of the four missing Ethiopian track and field athletes, according to University of Oregon Police Department spokesman, Kelly McIver.

Amanuel Abebe Atibeha, Dureti Edao and Meaza Kebede were spotted in the Portland suburb of Beaverton on Monday afternoon. The missing persons case for those three is now closed. Zeyituna Mohammed is still being sought.

University spokeswoman Julie Brown said that the university’s involvement in those three cases is now also closed.

“Any other steps that they may be taking would involve other law enforcement agencies and won’t involve the university,” Brown said.

The four athletes — one 17-year-old male and three 18-year-old females — went missing sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning. The school first noticed the athletes missing that morning when they weren’t in their assigned rooms at the university’s residence halls.

UOPD led the investigation since and had reportedly made contact with people close to the athletes on Monday but could not verify anything.

“The problem is that when you’re talking to someone over the phone you can’t verify that people are who they say are,” McIver said in a phone interview Monday. “We need them to come forward and positively confirm their identity to say, ‘Yep, they’re safe and they’re here by choice,’ and so they can continue what they want to do here in Oregon.”

Eugene Police Department, Portland police and the FBI have assisted, as well.

The popular assumption has been that the athletes are seeking asylum in the United States and fled to Portland, which boasts a large Ethiopian population and is where the Department of State offices are located. Ethiopians are the third largest group to receive asylum by the United States, according to 2012 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics as mentioned by The Oregonian.

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Updated 2:29 p.m. with 2012-13 information.

Donations to the University of Oregon have breached the $100 million mark for the seventh straight year, the school announced Monday afternoon.

Announcing via the school’s public relations blog, Around the O, the University raked in $115,150,868 through a shade less than 50,000 total donations.

Seventy-seven percent of those funds were funneled into classrooms, scholarships and other academic pursuits, cashing out to around $71.8 million. And, according to the release, 20 percent of donors were first-time donors, a boost from last year’s 12 percent.

“I am grateful to our alumni and friends who see such value in the University of Oregon. Their generosity will help advance our institution’s position as a premier public residential research university,” UO president Michael Gottfredson said. “I’m especially pleased to see such strong growth in support of our priority areas of student access and academic excellence.”

However, this year’s total is a rather steep fall from what the school banked in 2012-13 when it topped $200 million on nearly 8,000 fewer donations. Last year’s haul was the second-most all time for the university.

This story will be updated.

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