Wednesday’s faculty senate meeting started with remarks from the president as usual, but today’s were stricken with a darker, more concerned tone than typical. This afternoon was the first meeting of the faculty senate since allegations surfaced against three former Oregon men’s basketball players. As remarked by Senate President Margie Paris in the opening minutes, Lawrence 115 was bursting at the seams with both faculty and administrators. Many couldn’t find a seat, and stood for nearly 90 minutes to discuss not only the sexual assault case that swept through Eugene last week but also the pervasiveness of sexual assault on college campuses everywhere.

“No one ever should have to experience sexual violence, harassment or intimidation of any kind,” President Michael Gottfredson said to the packed assembly. “Not one student, not one staff member, not one faculty member, not a single member of our community. Yet too many do … We as a campus have an opportunity to take our anger, to take our energy around this issue and direct it toward a solution.”

Gottfredson’s speech mirrored the one he presented alongside Vice President of Student Affairs Robin Holmes and Athletic Director Rob Mullens last Friday, four days after it was revealed that three players on Oregon’s men’s basketball team were investigated for sexual assault in a graphic, 24-page police report. He invoked his 12-year UC Irvine education in criminology to explain his steadfast assurance that the university did everything it thought was appropriate given the circumstances. The president even went as far as to mention that administration consulted the Eugene Police Department before the basketball team flew off to Las Vegas for the NCAA tournament as to whether the three players should attend. Gottfredson says EPD told them that to do so would alert the players they were being investigated and stall the whole operation.

“In my opinion, at the time, the balance of our interest favored protection of the integrity of the criminal process, and not interfering with a criminal investigation,” Gottfredson said.

The university’s handling of the allegations has left many wondering how transparent the university really is. In response, the president’s office released a timeline of events. The UO Coalition to End Sexual Assault threw two demonstrations within four days of each other outside of Johnson Hall in the past week — the latter coming attached with a list of demands from the UO Coalition to End Sexual Violence — with a third planned for tomorrow at noon. Questions include why there was no entry in the crime log for the case for the University of Oregon Police Department, who first encountered the alleged victim.

“Because we cannot, by law, share many details of this case, some have speculated that we are not acting in the best interest of the university and that student safety has been compromised,” Gottfredson said. “… These assumptions are patently false, and such speculations are very, very inappropriate. We are dealing with highly sensitive and incredibly complex issues concerning people’s lives — our students’ lives.”

The president did announce plans to hire two new staff persons, one being a sexual violence response and support services director that will “provide support and advocacy to survivors.” The other, an equal opportunity specialist and Title IX investigator to ensure proper and thorough reportage of sexual transgressions.

“These hires will improve our prevention and support efforts, and support our goal for the actions of this campus to go beyond those called for by the White House — to lead the way in this charge nationally,” Gottfredson said.

Gottfredson’s remarks lasted nearly 20 minutes, but the question and answer portion ate up another half hour of his time at the podium. Many concerns stemmed from whether or not the faculty had the time or the haste to make marked changes to things that could alleviate concerns over the safety of the campus. Some suggested helping claimants in a sexual assault get university aided legal assistance. Another suggested redrafting the jurisdiction of the student conduct code.

“Right now, our campus is grappling with this issue,” Gottfredson said. “An incident occurred that is incredibly complex and profoundly disturbing. It’s angered many people, including me, and rightfully so — it violates our very sense of who we are as a community of caring people. How we, as a university, go forward from this incident — what we choose to learn from it and how we decide to act upon what we learn — will be a clear representation of who we are and what we stand for.”

Sociology professor Michael Dreiling, who has attended the rallies this week in support of the coalition, plead to the faculty to find solutions alongside the administration rather than pointing fingers. The two sides have often butted heads on how much power the faculty senate actually wields when trying to pass resolutions the administration doesn’t agree with.

“To me, this is a bigger issue and I think all of us need to own it. Not just the administration here. I’m hearing from dear colleagues from all corners of the campus their deep concerns, that this is a sobering moment. This is a very real conversation here with a very real issue that has been magnified by an incident,” professor Dreiling said. “I’m not interested in a resolution that in anyway deflects responsibility … I’m interested in the senate making a bold statement about we as faculty — we as a university — working within our shared governance model to really tackle this … That’s where I put my voice on this. It may be a simple statement: that we have not done enough for this issue.”

The Intercollegiate Athletic Committee, the dysfunctional faculty subcommittee with the most interaction with the athletic department, met for the first time this morning since February. The members passed two motions to put before the senate later this month: One to possibly enact sexual assault awareness classes for all student-athletes, and another to reach out to the “special athletics admits group” — who oversaw Brandon Austin’s transfer — to learn more from their procedures and potentially embed a member of the IAC with them. Austin was linked to a sexual assault at his previous school in Providence, Rhode Island.

Additionally, a resolution proposing a vote of no confidence in Gottfredson, urging the Oregon University System and the incoming Board of Trustees to fire the president did not make today’s agenda. The resolution was sponsored by biology professor Nathan Tublitz. The faculty senate reconvenes on May 28 to further discuss how to address the issue.

Editor’s note: The events detailed in the following story may be triggering to some readers. The report released by the Eugene Police Department describes the rape allegations involving former Oregon basketball players Damyean Dotson, Dominic Artis and Brandon Austin. For more information on this story, check out our topics page.

News broke Monday evening when three members of the Oregon men’s basketball team were suspended from team activities because of their alleged involvement in the rape of a University of Oregon woman. Sophomore guard Damyean Dotson is currently under investigation by the university. Sophomore Dominic Artis and freshman Brandon Austin were also allegedly involved, however they are not under investigation.

The news came after the Eugene Police Department released a 24-page police detailing out a series of incidents that occurred in the early hours of March 9 at the home of basketball player Johnathan Loyd and the apartment where Dotson and Artis live.

Eugene police interviewed eight individuals and obtained phone recordings between the survivor and two of the men.

Over the course of 12 separate interviews, two separate incidents inside a bathroom during a party and one more at an apartment leased to Dotson and Artis was detailed.  The interviews contain inconsistent details.

On April 14, the district attorney decided not to press charges on behalf of the state, citing “insufficient evidence to prove charge(s) beyond a reasonable doubt.” The same report also states that “while there is no doubt the incidents occurred (sic), the conflicting statements and actions by the victim make this case unprovable as a criminal case.”

UOPD officer John Loos first met with the survivor on March 14, nearly a week after the events took place. UOPD communications officer Kelly McIver says Loos was in field training at the time and reported to EPD instead of UOPD. It’s standard protocol for city police to handle cases that happen off campus.

What We Know

On Friday, March 7, the survivor and a friend met Oregon guard Joseph Young while scouting out apartments. One of the women recognized him. “[The survivor] and Young then exchanged phone numbers after a short conversation, and then went their separate ways,” the report says.

The next night, the survivor attended a party on 1975 Onyx St. before police arrived just after midnight to shut it down. She drank before the party and during. The survivor and Young texted about another party happening three blocks south at Loyd’s house. The survivor and her friend arrived at Loyd’s home just after midnight.

Dotson, Artis and Austin were all present at Loyd’s house. At some point, Dotson, Artis and Austin convinced the survivor to go into a bathroom. None of their accounts say she was forced into the bathroom.

“I had no idea what room we were going into. Then there were three of us in a small bathroom and I thought it was strange,” the survivor told Loos in his initial report. “I thought, maybe this is just what happens in college… just college fun.”

Once inside the bathroom, Dotson and Austin asked the survivor to dance and took her phone. At some point, sexual acts occurred. Artis was not in the bathroom initially.

Artis later entered the bathroom and the acts continued. As the party wound down around 1:30 a.m., the survivor’s friend began to head home. In her report, the survivor said she was strong-armed into staying with the three men, alleging that Austin put her in a sort of chokehold. Players denied this occurred. In an interview, a friend of the survivor recalls spending roughly 20 minutes arguing with the survivor and the men trying to get her to leave with them. The friend told the survivor that Dotson was “not a nice guy.”

In the same report, the friend mentions that she had never been around the survivor while she’d been drinking, so she couldn’t say for certain how the survivor handled alcohol.

The survivor, the three players and a fourth man — who Artis identified as fellow Oregon basketball player Richard Amardi — entered an Oregon Taxi and drove to an apartment leased to Artis and Dotson.

Soaked from the rain, the woman asked for dry clothes. Artis provided her with a sweatshirt and a pair of shorts. The survivor and the four men — Artis, Dotson, Austin and an unidentified man, who Artis and Dotson said was not a teammate, entered Artis’ room where the woman was again assaulted.

“I think I just gave up,” the survivor told Loos. “I let them do whatever they wanted, I just wanted it to be over and to go to sleep.”

During the incident, she began to cry. That’s when the three men stopped and leave the room. She gathered herself and went into the living room where Dotson and Austin were playing video games. She talked with Artis on the couch, then she and Artis went into his room and fell asleep until approximately 8 a.m.

In reports given by the basketball players, the woman again had sex with Artis in the morning after waking up. Her first reports made no mention of this. When the police learned about it after interviewing Dotson and Artis, they followed up with the survivor. She said she partly remembered. Her initial reports mention taking a taxi home that next morning, then making plans to see Young.

When the survivor arrived at Young’s apartment, she found Artis and Dotson playing video games in the living room and confronted them about the previous night. Artis told investigators he tried to reason with her, but she insisted that she felt like she had been taken advantage of. The survivor then says she met up with Young and the two went into his room where they eventually had consensual sex.

Loos asked the survivor if she wanted to press charges. Loos’ report states that the survivor initially said she wanted the players to receive something like “a slap on the wrist” and that she didn’t “want to ruin their lives.” Loos asked her to clarify whether that meant producing the report or actually pressing charges, to which she said, “Probably both.”

The survivor did not file a report with EPD until March 13, though her father contacted UOPD shortly after the incident. She said UOPD reached out, but she never picked up the phone. “I was really mad at my dad,” she told Loos. “I wanted to report it, but on my own time.”

Follow Troy Brynelson on Twitter @TroyWB
Follow Victor Flores on Twitter @vflores415

After the rally outside of Johnson Hall, the GTF union and the administration are digging in for spring term.

The Graduate Teaching Fellowship Federation is expected to meet with the administration twice in the upcoming week. Members hope to close the gaps on issues surrounding minimum salaries, paid leave and dental care. The past contract ran out on March 31, but the GTFF leaders have yet to hold a vote to authorize a strike or call for a federal mediator.

GTFs insist they are on the bottom half of the pay scale for similar universities compared to cost-of-living in their respective cities. According to the federation, graduate assistants at the UO make $264 per month less than UO’s calculated cost of living. Graduate assistants at Oregon State University earn $13 below OSU’s cost of living.

Complaints about paid leave came to a head recently in an open letter written by a women and gender studies GTF posted April 28 — and since been removed for ongoing legal reasons — that detailed the pitfalls. The GTF had been hit twice while riding her bicycle in Eugene.

The first incident occurred near the end of the term. The second time happened near the start of fall term. In her letter, she describes an undergraduate veering out of an alleyway in an SUV and hitting the GTF on her bicycle.

“His SUV T-boned my right knee, the impact of which made my femur into a battering ram that crushed the top of my tibia,” said the GTF, who spoke anonymously due to pending litigation. “Instead of attending the first day of lecture, I was waking up from surgery.”

Shawna Meechan, a political science GTF and a member of the GTFF bargaining team, says graduate assistants involved similar incidents are often forced to take time off from work if they aren’t well enough to make it into the office.

“If you have a serious accident, you are faced with the option — first of all — to try and find someone to cover for you and depending on what your assignment is that might not be easy,” said Meechan.

There is also the question of how much work GTFs are allowed to do. Many graduate assistants may only work 20 hours a week and are contracted to abstain from taking other jobs because the university wants academics to take priority.

“One of the things that the university believes is important to keep in mind is that GTFs are students first,” said Kassy Fisher, a member of the UO bargaining team and assistant dean and director of finance and administration for the graduate school. “We have to allow them to continue focusing on their studies.”

GTFF members say that offering competitive wages will be better for the university in the long-run. Friday’s bargaining session saw philosophy professor Scott Pratt plead to the administration that qualified graduated assistant candidates are rejecting the UO in favor of schools offering better pay.

Fisher, however, maintains that the university is not struggling to lure candidates.

“We’re operating in a competitive environment and we have to recruit the best graduate assistants we can,” Fisher said. “If you look at total compensation, the UO is offering competitive support and I think we are able to recruit some very, very strong academically oriented students.”

The GTFF and the UO will sit down for negotiations again at 12:30 p.m. on May 7 in Pacific 16.

President Gottfredson announced today his intention to create a new, interim committee to oversee the university’s athletic department.

“It has become necessary for me to appoint an advisory group to provide advice and recommendations on intercollegiate athletic issues,” Gottfredson said via email to faculty senate president Margie Paris. “As you know, the chair of the University Senate’s Intercollegiate Athletics Committee (IAC), has made this recommendation.”

In the email, Gottfredson mentions that the primary goals of the group are to advise, and this measure is just in the interim until the faculty senate decides what to do with the IAC, and that he “invites nominations” for members of the new committee from the senate.

“It is critical that the university have an advisory group, one that operates such that all members can participate in an environment free of the numerous problems the chair clearly identifies in his report to the senate,” Gottfredson said in the email

The IAC has been hamstrung by infighting for most of the year, the majority of the disagreements stemming from confusion over whether the committee has the right to serve as a watchdog group or rather act as a sounding board for the athletic department. The committee’s current chair, UO law professor Rob Illig, reported to the faculty senate on April 9 that the committee was a house divided and recommended that a second committee be created.

“Because it is trying to do both, it is accomplishing neither,” Illig said in the report.

While the email mentions nothing about dismantling the IAC in its current form, the move seems to aim to create another committee to effectively supplant the IAC — which hasn’t met since Feb. 27 — and wrest the committee’s main function as the main line of communication between the athletic department and the university at large.

The first thing you notice about Elvy Musikka are her eyes. Behind a pair of leopard-print glasses, they are as thin as crescent moons. They’re dark and slanted, like she’s permanently squinting, which is a result of her glaucoma, borne from congenital cataracts.

One afternoon, she sits on her couch and draws a long breath from her purple glass bong. That’s likely the second thing you notice: the wall-to-wall scent of weed around her. Musikka, 74, smokes a lot. What separates her from other pot users, even other medical marijuana recipients, is that her supplier is the federal government.

Even as cities all around Oregon are imposing one-year bans on medical marijuana dispensaries – 71 cities in Oregon as of April 15 – Musikka is largely unaffected. While she does claim an Oregon Medical Marijuana card, she can still fly once a year to Florida and pick-up tins of government-sanctioned weed. The weed is harvested at the University of Mississippi and is rolled into 300 weed cigarettes, socketed into a tin and sent to Florida. Each tin contains a half-pound and Musikka brought six back during her last trip.

“Sometimes they send us trash,” Musikka said, referring to a previous batch as essentially hemp. “The other (patients) don’t complain about it, they don’t talk to the press and the reason they don’t is very simple: We’re all scared to death to lose the damn thing.”

Musikka is one of four living patients still supplied through the Compassionate Investigational New Drug program, enacted by the FDA in 1976 after a federal judge ruled that Robert Randall — also with glaucoma — required marijuana to alleviate his symptoms. The trial put Randall at the forefront of the fledgling movement to legalize weed as medicine.

A native Colombian, Musikka has endured cataracts since birth. She lived with stinging eyes for years as a young woman while shuttling around the East Coast with her mother and stepfather. Several surgeries and painful prescription drugs couldn’t abate the pain until one doctor finally suggested weed, more than a decade before California became the first state to permit medical marijuana in 1996.

Marijuana is the only thing that quells the pain behind her eyes – prescription drugs, she says, never helped.

“First time I tried marijuana, I stuffed it in an apple and cooked it. And nothing happened to me. I said ‘well that figures. When I drink with my friends, they get drunk and I don’t,’” Musikka said. “The next morning I woke up and the room was spinning and I had to go to work. I learned the meaning of ‘paranoia’ that morning real quick. That day lasted forever.”

She’s a funny woman. Crow’s feet and deep laugh lines etched around her mouth make it seem like she’s always smiling. Resurfacing from the mouthpiece, her glasses are skewed and yarns of light brown hair flop around her face. A tendril of smoke climbs from her mouth and her eyes seem to grin on their own.

“For about four decades I could only see about light and movement with this eye,” Musikka said, pointing to her right eye.

Musikka’s good humor belies a decades long frustration with the status quo. The pain in her eyes lit a fire, with logs thrown on by years of searching for relief and being denied again and again. She was arrested while living Florida in 1987 for possession. Regional press took notice of the unusual case – she never denied the pot was hers and argued it was the only remedy for her eye.

“This government has got to understand that there’s absolutely no way you can eliminate the instincts of self-preservation,” Musikka said. “If I know I’m going to go blind if I don’t take marijuana or go to jail then I’m going to take the stupid jail because maybe I’ll still have a chance to fight for my sight.”

Randall himself testified on her behalf. Her doctor defended her claim, and she was eventually acquitted that same year. By 1988, she joined the Compassionate Investigational New Drug program, just four years before President George Bush Sr. terminated it during a nationwide crackdown on drugs.

Since then Musikka has been on the guest speaking circuit as a marijuana advocate. She’s received awards from both NORML and the Reform Center, two major leaders in reforming drug policy. She moved to Eugene to be closer to her grown son. Now she spends her time keeping her apartment tidy, playing with her 5-year-old granddaughter and taking occasional trips around Oregon to support pro-medical marijuana.

However, advocacy remains an important part of her life. Her position as one of the last federal medical marijuana recipients gives her a soapbox she’s not afraid to stand on. This fall she plans to return to Florida to support a medical marijuana initiative.

“If they tell us they will only catch a few of us, but if they have jailed 25 million – I mean 25 million,” Musika said, adjusting her pitch for effect, and smiling behind her glasses. “How many are we really?”

This summer the University of Oregon Law School will start a new five week seminar focusing on sports, while reeling in some big names from the industry help grow the stature of the UO Law School.

Rob Illig, an associate professor at the law school, is spearheading the program called the Oregon Sports Law Summer Institute. It will begin July 6 and cost $10,000 for both in and out-of-state students and be worth six credits.

The institute hopes to leverage the growing prominence of  the UO Law School to lure students from top tier law schools who are struggling to find summertime work. Currently there are only two UO students enrolled and 13 from other schools including Michigan and UCLA.

Eugene is a natural fit because of the city’s open-air reputation and ascending sports culture, as both the home of the Ducks and the moniker of “Track Town, USA,” Illig said.

“I like to say that the reason we care about the environment is so that we can strap on our Nikes and take a run,” Illig said. “It creates a sense that we’re about health and harmony, if you will.”

The new seminar hopes to buoy the law school in the face of dwindling enrollment levels since 2008. Oregon Law is not alone, law schools across the country have been facing the same trend according to the Law School Admission Council, which governs admissions into law schools around the country. They say that enrollment is down nationwide nearly 25 percent.

“When you’re running downhill, you can’t pass anybody because everyone’s running downhill and it’s easy,” Illig said. “It’s when you’re running uphill is when you make a surge and you find out who is a pretender and who is for real. We’re uphill right now.”

One goal is to mimic the success of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center in the Lundquist College of Business. Illig has said that his faraway aspiration would be for Oregon to become a capital of sports law, much like the Warsaw Center, which grew from a pilot program started in 1993. Today the Warsaw Center has become a hotspot for students interested in sports business, and the program has churned out employees for regional powerhouses like Nike, Adidas and Columbia Sportswear.

“The real traction came when we were able to get a concentration at the undergraduate level and the MBA program to embrace the sports area,” said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center. “Since then it’s been one of the real flagships of the business school.”

The current slate of lecturers at this summer’s conference includes professors from UO, in addition to professors from popular law programs with their own sports focuses — such as Tulane and Wake Forest. Each professor will teach for one week, Illig said.

Swangard hopes the two programs — and any program incorporating sports into its curricula — will benefit the university as a whole.

“My hope is that as the law school finds its realm of Sports Law and builds its cadre of good professors that there will be natural synergies between us,” Swangard said. “Bottom line, I’m excited whenever I hear a program bring sports into its academic domain.”

The real last call of the night — before it slips into the drunken oblivion — comes to most of us wrapped in aluminum foil. The cashier doesn’t eye us up and threaten to cut us off, and as long as you’ve got a couple bucks you can’t strike out. Wipe those stubborn tears away, gargle at your friends excitedly and bask in the unconditional love that is the late-night burrito, a tradition for some that should be adopted by more.

There are many options on the menu that is Eugene’s after-hours restaurants, but I haven’t visited many of them — maybe just most of them. However, here are a handful of popular places, for better or worse.

Uly’s Taco Shack

13th Avenue and Kincaid Street, 13th Avenue and Olive Street

Often seen kitty-corner from Taylor’s, it has become a local favorite destination after crawling off a barstool near campus. The cart has the Spanish food on standby for a couple bucks. The workers carve through lines happily and this may be the quickest place on the list to grab a bite to eat. Tacos ring up for $2.50 and burritos hover around $6.

Rivas Taco Shop

1484 Willamette St.

Rivas has been a bastion of after hours eating for being open 24 hours for those of us on the western edges of West University. From tacos to nachos to chili, there’s a larger gamut of Hispanic foods here than the other places listed, though a skeleton crew at 3 a.m. may take some time. However, it’s been maligned for poor quality foods. A January inspection from the Lane County Health Department dropped their health inspection score from 89 to 51 (out of 100). Their biggest deduction came from not separating raw foods from ready-to-eat foods in storage.

Caspian Mediterranean Café

863 E. 13th Ave.

Mediterranean food (though the menu is not limited to it) and serves until 2:30 a.m on weekends and Wednesdays. This a solid place for gyros, burgers and burritos. The food is usually great quality, while sacrificing both time and money compared to the rest of places on this list. It’s worth mentioning that, in early March, Caspian was hit with the same raw food-handling penalty that smacked Rivas, but its overall score is still 85 out of 100.

Dough Co.

1337 Hilyard St.

A great option if you’d rather get home quick and have your food delivered. Despite some hiccups in service, mainly a logjam of late-night calls that land you with a busy signal for the remainder of time, Dough Co. practically monopolizes the afterhours delivery game. As long as you have a couple bucks, retain the wherewithal to dial and speak coherently, you can pick from a variety of calzones. The phone lines are open until 3 a.m.

Burrito Boy

510 E. Broadway

This location, just northwest of the bookstore, is open 24-hours a day. It can be packed late at night because of the name recognition (there are six locations in Eugene), but the food is delivered timely. True to its name, the taqueria provides pretty delicious tacos and burritos.

A new vice president of the faculty senate was nominated and approved during the faculty Senate meeting on Wednesday, March 12.

Robert Kyr, a professor of composition and theory in the music school, was chosen from three nominees this afternoon. His election comes 10 months after the usual point, every May, in which the positions of president and vice president are typically approved.

Kyr has served as the president of the senate twice before. In front of a half-filled Lawrence 115, Kyr told the senate that in light of fast-approaching changes to the university in the form of the Board of Trustees and further separation from the Oregon University System, his leadership will help steer the senate in another run.

“We’re really at a crossroads at the university,” Kyr said. “In transition and a period of transformation and I would hope that I could provide the kind of leadership that would help us move through that into a new period of very positive and constructive action that we need.”

Other nominations came down to Christopher Phillips, of the math department, and Randy Sullivan, chemistry. Phillips’s nomination was stricken from votes by the committee and a secret ballot was formed to preserve relationships among faculty peers. Professor Sullivan used his statement to recommend Kyr for this cycle of elections in order to elect Sullivan for vice president in May, under Kyr as president.

“We start acting out of fear. We have to have trust for each other. We have the way of making it happen, when actually none of our constituencies can make it happen without the others,” Sullivan said. “Having said that, I think the best way forward for this body right now is to, in this election, elect Rob Kyr. And then elect me in May.”

Kyr was then elected by the majority via votes written on index cards.

The next faculty senate meeting will be on April 12.

Broken car windows are nothing new in Eugene, particularly around the University of Oregon. But it doesn’t often happen to two high-ranking ASUO officials about a mile apart in one night.

MacGregor Ehlen found the driver’s side window of his car had been smashed in late at night on Feb. 28.

Nothing was stolen.

He had recently raised some ire by appointing three fraternity brothers to the elections board, so he texted a photo of the damage to ASUO President Sam Dotters-Katz with the caption “Maybe I’m making too many waves as elections coordinator.”

Dotters-Katz called back an hour later. The ASUO president had just found that his own car’s tires had been slashed. His vehicle was the only one vandalized on the entire block. It was parked in front of his parents’ house in the College Hill neighborhood.

The two went down a list of people who could have had an axe to grind with both of them. One person stood out: Bill Harbaugh, a professor in the economics department, author of a divisive blog called UO Matters and a rival on the Intercollegiate Athletics Committee.

Ehlen acknowledges that it seems farfetched a tenured professor would sink to vandalism against students. But he isn’t ruling out any of Harbaugh’s supporters and readers.

“I don’t know if Bill did it personally. I’m not necessarily making that accusation. I think it has something to do with Sam’s and mine opposition toward Bill,” said Ehlen, who resigned from the IAC on March 3. “Even the professors I’ve talked to who hate Bill say this isn’t his M.O. I agree, but that’s not to say that he’s not involved indirectly.”

But it made sense to Ehlen and Dotters-Katz at the time: Tensions between the ASUO president and Harbaugh came to a head the previous day during an IAC meeting.

“People are finally calling Bill Harbaugh of @uomatters on his bullshit during this IAC meeting,” Dotters-Katz tweeted on Feb. 27. Harbaugh then retweeted it.

The day after the car vandalisms, a post on UO Matters contained an email allegedly sent from Dotters-Katz pointing a finger at Harbaugh and his “intimidation tactics.” Dotters-Katz wouldn’t comment whether he sent the email and the UO Matters post has since been removed. Ehlen had yet to file a police report as of March 4. Harbaugh denies any involvement.

“I obviously haven’t vandalized any cars,” Harbaugh said. “The first thing I heard about it was (Saturday) when I received an email from Sam with him accusing me of vandalizing his car. It’s really too bad that their cars were vandalized. That’s a really ugly thing to do.”

The accusation was the culmination of a term of back-and-forth within the IAC.

Harbaugh uses his popular blog and public records to crowbar information from the administration and the athletic department. Harbaugh has been lauded by some for his efforts to keep the school transparent and vilified by others who say he slanders and defames in his writings.

“Bill has willfully and merrily destroyed the ability of the committee to function, in my opinion, in order to create a dysfunctional relationship to help advance the false narrative of an unresponsive athletic department,” Dotters-Katz said. “He has to justify his ridiculous tactics and actions, but in doing so he destroys the ability of myself and the IAC to have that crucial external safeguard of student athletes.”

Ehlen decided to start his own blog called UO Matters Doesn’t Matter on Feb. 23, intending to give Harbaugh a taste of his own medicine. Harbaugh sent emails to the IAC, specifically Dotters-Katz and Ehlen, after comments on UO Matters falsely penned under the names of IAC members telling commenters to visit the new blog surfaced.

The first order of business during the Feb. 27 IAC meeting — the day of Dotters-Katz’s tweet — was to approve the previous meeting’s minutes. Even that was contested. Committee members quickly switched to the question of the day: Does the IAC function as it should?

Debate raged over whether Harbaugh and his role with UO Matters presented a conflict of interest. Some say he acts as a whistleblower. Others feel that UO Matters commentaries border on defamation. Dotters-Katz has been the subject of a UO Matters post accusing him of “intercepting“ emails to secure himself a position on the newly formed Board of Trustees.

The vandalism happened the night of Feb. 28.

A controversial figure within the university, Harbaugh has been running UO Matters since 2009. His efforts to help the faculty in union negotiations last summer led to an administration-run blog called UO Fact Check. He’s been awarded the First Freedom Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. He’s written headlines such as “Rob Mullens drives another student-athlete to drink.” He has a CafePress account that sells merchandise that displays the slogan, “University of Nike.”

“Whenever I ask him, ‘Bill why are you doing this in such an inflammatory way?’” UO professor and IAC member Andrew Karduna said, “his response would be ‘Andy, I used to be like you. I used to be where I would try and work it out and talk to people, and I got nowhere. This is the only way it works.’ That’s how he does things.”

Lately, Harbaugh has been pushing for the athletic department to foot the bill of academic support for student athletes, and send some money to fund scholarships for undergraduates. It’s a $2.5 million endeavor currently paid by the university, which Harbaugh rounds up.

“If we keep fighting, we’re going to get the three million bucks back,” Harbaugh said. “That’s why they’re trying to paint the committee as dysfunctional. They want faculty to stop fighting for the $3 million.”

There’s also the issue of whether the IAC has the authority to be a watchdog of the athletic department. It’s charged with advising, but the athletic department is not bound to divulge everything to the committee. Dotters-Katz has opposed Harbaugh because he feels that the blog exceeds the duties of the committee.

“In response to my actions opposing Bill’s antics, he has made things personal, routinely authoring blog posts about me which not only are filled with personal attacks and smears, but further consist of outright lies,” Dotters-Katz said.

Harbaugh, however, is undeterred. He has been elected twice to the IAC from the faculty senate by people who know he runs the blog.

“There is a lot of money in athletics. There are a lot of people getting rich off it. There are a lot of people that care a lot about it,” Harbaugh said. “And those people don’t like the faculty asking questions about it. They want to run it as a business where they can do what they want to do in private, but it’s a public university.”

The committee hasn’t functioned for some time. Chairman Rob Illig’s predecessor stepped down before Thanksgiving. The chair prior had been impeached. “In the spring I said, ‘Could this be saved?’ I sat on the meetings and watched to see if we could salvage a working relationship,” Illig said. “(Now) I’ve given up. In its present structure it doesn’t work.”

Jennifer Freyd, a psychology professor at the UO and member of the IAC, suggests that opening the meetings up to the public may remedy the toxic environment.

“If (the meetings) were open, it wouldn’t be all of Bill’s reporting,” Freyd said. “Let’s say Bill says something that isn’t true on UO Matters. Who’s going to be there to counter it? There’s no significant information flowing.”

Illig will address the faculty senate on Wednesday on what the future holds for the committee and the university’s relationship with its athletic department. He suggests a watchdog group appointed by faculty members seems the best course. Harbaugh, however, insists that being upfront with everyone is better.

“I hope that we someday get a university administration that realizes the university’s interests will be served by being more transparent,” he said. “They’ll put me out of business.”

ASUO President Sam Dotters-Katz took to Twitter on Thursday to express his frustration with University of Oregon economics Professor Bill Harbaugh during an Intercollegiate Athletic Committee meeting, which occurred earlier in the day.

People are finally calling Bill Harbaugh of @uomatters on his bullshit in this IAC meeting

— Sam Dotters-Katz (@SamDottersKatz) February 28, 2014

Sources inside the meetings say that the IAC, which is a subcommittee of the UO faculty senate, has struggled to be an effective liaison between the athletic department and the university because of infighting and distrust. As the athletic department’s national profile has grown in recent years, so too have concerns over its rapid growth and administrative oversight. The athletic department meets with the faculty through the IAC to keep the faculty senate in the loop on its budget status and internal decisions.

Dotters-Katz also tweeted some insight into a question posed within the IAC during the meeting: whether it was broken, and why. The second-term president tweeted that the answer was “Yes, Bill Harbaugh.”

UO Matters, a blog that Harbaugh founded, runs and often generates controversy with, retweeted Dotters-Katz.

“My account is that a large majority of the folks said we don’t have a working committee because we don’t have a working relationship with the athletics,” Dotters-Katz said over the phone on Friday afternoon. “We are an advisory committee — we can’t subpoena them. We request their presence, but there’s no trust. There’s no communication because there’s no trust and there’s no trust because of Bill Harbaugh.”

Harbaugh says that athletic department officials and members of the IAC are trying to cover themselves from investigation.

“The athletic department has a lot of stuff to hide,” Harbaugh said. “And they’re trying to argue that the IAC is dysfunctional to make it easier for them to hide bad stuff.”

Harbaugh takes pride in muckracking and fact-checking many of the administration’s and athletic department’s claims. He does so through UO Matters, primarily through the acquisition of public records and attending meetings, which he’ll often live blog. This has won him awards for defending free speech from the Society of Professional Journalists. His efforts have also landed him on the receiving end of scathing emails calling his ethics into question and accusing him of defamation.

IAC Chairman Rob Illig will deliver a report on the Jaqua Center for the March 12 faculty senate meeting. The senate is also expected to hear a resolution sponsored by Harbaugh to end payments from the university at large to the athletic department for academic support for student-athletes.