The following is the document sent to Sen. Lauren Zavrel, chair of the Personnel Committee, by Derek Nix about the confrontations between Nix and Sen. Nate Gulley, which led to Nix resigning from his post as Senate Administrative Assistant. (more…)

I got a call today while working in the ASUO from a member of the Barack Obama campaign saying that Obama is planning on coming to Eugene on Friday, and they need to find a 10,000 plus occupant arena. I informed them that there would not be many students on campus at this time, at which point he responded, saying, “Yes, President Frohnmayer just informed me of that.” Of course you talked to the president of our university before little ol’ me. I don’t know if this is all for real. It might have been a hallucination caused by pulling an all-nighter in the library, taking too much aderall and the disillusionment caused by working in the ASUO. Maybe it was a premonition from God that the Messiah is coming. I will keep you posted.

Update: Word is 90% sure that Obama will be at Mac Court at 8:30pm on Friday March 21st! But this isn’t official. I am just trying to share my vision with the world. I hope no one is freaking out about this. 

Update 2: Just found a bit of confirmation for you all that my premonition about this might just in fact be true. KMTR commented on their website regarding the visit saying that is was for sure the he would in Portland on Friday and possibly Eugene.

Update 3: The Register Guard has confirmed that Obama will hold an event Friday at Mac Court. For the record, I scooped them all. It’s just too bad it’s Obama and not my man McCain.

Up late doing a paper due later today, I naturally am wasting my time online and checking the OC and ODE. In the Daily Emerald today (man, I am up way too late for this…) an article is featured about the Ethnic Studies departmentalization resolution that was almost presented to Senate last night. I saw the person that was going to present the resolution. At the time, I didn’t know that it was ASUO Executive Candidate Sam Dotters-Katz…anyways, I was excited for it to happen. Then he disappeared from the meeting.

I stepped out into the hall about an hour later, and I found Dotters-Katz essentially being harpooned by Jennifer Lleras, Kari Herinckx, and Oscar Guerra about the Ethnic Studies issue and race relations. Having dealt with Ethnic Studies majors off and on for the past two years, I can tell you that listening to any Ethnic Studies major is excruciatingly frustrating. I actually went BACK into Senate instead of listening to them talk.

Anyways, the article in the ODE quotes Oscar Guerra as saying that Dotters-Katz was making the resolution to benefit his ASUO Exec bid. True or not, I like how Take Back Campus is just getting people involved and this resolution is a political move. I really don’t see any difference in the two, except that putting a resolution before Senate actually is doing something instead of just bitching for two hours and calling it good.

But I suppose the real difference is because Dotters-Katz is white, so anything he does must be a political move. And Take Back Campus was organized by more “people of color”, so it cannot be related to elections in any way.

A grievance was filed yesterday against ASUO President Emily McLain and Vice President Chii-San SunOwen by University freshman Caroline Beranek for non-fulfillment of duties. The grievance requests the two be removed from office. From today’s Emerald story:

Three elections board members were confirmed by the Senate on Jan. 23 and one was confirmed on Feb. 20, 2008. The ASUO constitution states that all members must be confirmed by November 1 of each academic year. […]

 

“Some of the issues were brought up months and months ago, so I’m really confused why this grievance is being brought up several months after the fact,” McLain said. “I’m confused as to why a student who wasn’t even here is bringing this up. She was a senior in high school in May.” […]

 

Last year, then-Senate President Sara Hamilton was removed from Senate by a grievance alleging non-fulfillment of duties. The court ruled it had no other choice.

Derek Nix, campaign manager for the Oregon Action Team slate and candidate for a PFC Senate seat, has resigned from his position as Student Senate Administrative Assistant. In his resignation letter, sent out Monday morning and acquired via a public record’s request, Nix said verbal conduct in the workplace that may be interpreted “to cause professional harm to my position in the ASUO and worse, to my personal safety,” led to his resignation effective immediately.

Over the last two weeks, I have been subject to repeated workplace harassment that threatened me with my job, the details of which have been reported to the Personnel Committee, but it culminated Thursday when Senator Gulley threatened me with physical injury. Senator Gulley had and has no evidence to support his slanderous accusations at Wednesday night’s Senate meeting.

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Take Back the Campus was what it was. I’m a little embarrassed at my own ignorance of the situation; I thought it would be more of an open forum. Silly me. It was obvious that a lot of work went into this. But just because one works hard doesn’t mean the results will be good. There were numerous petitions made, cameras, Zane Kesey was there, many (so many!) student presenters and the rest of the works. Yet, not much was accomplished with all these resources.

There were about 100 students who attended. I figure at least half were ASUO insiders and about half of the rest left half-way through. Some of the speakers were good, some were not. Depending upon the audience, some ideas were good and some were not. All together the forum informed maybe 25 students about issues that have been in the newspapers for weeks and months.

When it was all said and done, there was one dissenting voice. When the presentations were over and it opened up to “an open forum,” Ryan McCarrel asked to use the podium. In the past few weeks, he has been creating discussion via e-mails with political science students about apathy. He had a prepared statement, which he was not allowed to finish, about the need for change. Now imagine the irony of it all. On the chalk board “MAKE CHANGE” was written huge and “APATHY” with a slash through it was there too. McCarrel spoke about the problem of widespread apathy within the student body, and the desperate need for a change to better the student body as a whole. Sen. Nate Gulley yelled out “bullshit”. Sen. Patrick Boye interrupted to call out the Oregon Commentator (not sure why; we hadn’t said anything). It was obvious that those in charge did not want to have a discussion about change or apathy. They wanted to finish their job and go home.

Here is the speech that McCarrel didn’t get to finish. (more…)

Take Back Campus was clearly just a thinly-veiled front for next year’s potential Executive candidates, shamelessly backed by the current ASUO Executive. Did anyone else think it was ridiculous for Take Back Campus to be substitutable for a Programs Council Meeting (that all programs MUST attend)?

It’s obvious that the conspirators organizers of Take Back Campus are not going to be able to accomplish most of the issues they railed against (which were as far and between as the Wrestling team cut, a police force on campus, and the Holy Cow). The only possible reason, then, for them to address ALL those hot topic issues is that they were trying to get as wide of a range of potential VOTERS in the same place, and for those VOTERS to see the faces of the potential Executives as candidates that will ‘take action’ somehow.

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There are many problems some of my friends and I have with the Pit Crew. I think it’s a shotty sports fan group for the most part. There will be a commentary about this in the OC’s next issue, next week, but for now, read this article from SI.com and decide if the Pit Crew is a good use of student funds (granted they only get a few hundred dollars, but still). I really hope the athletic department discontinues the Pit Crew section in the new arena.

Boy, oh, boy, do I love election season.

You know why? Because people start bitching. And if they have been bitching, they start bitching LOUDER. Diego Hernandez starts writing more in the Emerald with empty accusations of racism. People actually respond. Other people start forming ‘Take Back the Campus’ coalitions that address issues that aren’t even affected by student opinion. Grievances go up by 100% (because no one files grievances during the rest of the year). And the rest of the student population actually pays attention to the ASUO.

Stay tuned, shitstorm to follow in the next couple weeks. :-)

As I previously reported, there will be a meeting, now titled “Take Back the Campus”, held on Monday, March 3 at 7 p.m. in Willamette 100. The event, co-hosted by the ASUO and the Sustainability Coalition, will focus on student involvement on campus and recent actions by the university administration.

You can tell from the oddly proportioned “power to the people” fist on the right (the event’s logo) that the organizers mean business. Or at least have some vague concept of business. According to the Facebook event, the meeting “is not one night of complaining but a chance to come together and take action.” No, I’m pretty sure it will mostly be complaining. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; I’m just saying …

For a full list of the grievances cited by the event organizers, (more…)

Check out the Commentary in today’s Daily Emerald.

Meili Yu, the Vice-Chair of the Programs Finance Committee quite verbally body slams Senator Diego Hernandez for his guest commentary last week in a fashion only possible by a ghettofab Asian-American. I have to say I’m proud of her as a friend. The last line seals the punch, and almost seems to be followed by a finger-waving, head-snap “Oh no you did-n’t”.

Next Monday at 7 p.m. (location to be confirmed) the Sustainability Coalition and the ASUO will hold a meeting to discuss recent controversial actions by the university administration, such as the closing the Holy Cow and the axing of the men’s wrestling program, among others.

The Sustainability Coalition is a loose confederacy of environmental groups on campus, such as the Survival Center, the Coalition Against Environmental Racism and, my personal favorite, Students for Reusable Bags. According to student Robert Kirkpatrick, who is currently involved in the Holy Cow Crusade, the coalition hopes to confront the “general prickishness of the administration” (i.e. it’s lack of student involvement, lack of accountability, etc.).

The ASUO Executive confirmed its 4th Elections board member last Wednesday. The Constitution actually states that board members have to be confirmed before November 1st, but the Exec blamed previous administrations for taking out that 4th board member and not following the rules. The current Exec’s excuse for not knowing about the required 4th board member in the rules was unclear (as in, why didn’t they read the rules before?)…but it basically gave them an opportunity to plug a 4th person into the election board at their discretion…curious. The timing of all of this is very curious.

Hopefully Andrew Jensen, the new Outreach Coordinator, will focus outside of the Greek and Housing areas and actually outreach to the large majority of students that don’t vote and aren’t normally involved in ASUO.

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It’s Saturday, and I’m still trying to figure out the weirdness of the last Senate meeting. It wasn’t loud, it wasn’t crazy…it was just weird. And there are a lot of things going on that the student body needs to be aware of.

Senate Surplus is currently at $138,550. Woohoo…spend away!

ADFC is projected at coming in with a NEGATIVE benchmark this budgeting season. I don’t think  Senate really understood because the reaction was largely nonchalant. While I’m not entirely clearly on what happens to the money that ADFC doesn’t use (I guess it rolls back and lowers the I-Fee?) the point is that an ASUO Finance Committee is NOT raising its money usage.

Apparently the SRC Advisory Board has determined unilaterally that it is an advisory body, and not a governing body, thus it doesn’t have to follow Oregon Public Meeting Laws. They are making their hearings private and only available to people that email the Board chair for pre-authorization. Apparently the Board chair doesn’t want ‘politically powerful’ or ’strongly opinionated people’ at the meetings. Wow.

Weird moment of the meeting: Senator Billy Hatch made a motion to ‘Commend President Emily McLain for being a strong student representative”. The motion passed 14-0-1.

Senator Boye later presented cookies for everyone, which totally negated any political disagreements I’ve had with him.

In discussing the new arena project, some Senators and the Executive brought up the points that the priority of the University seemed to have shifted from Housing and Student Buildings to the Arena once the donation from Knight was passed through. Apparently the University is reporting the projected F-bond debt as being under the 7% they were allowed, but they are not saying how much. Noting that Professor Bill Harbaugh has also been hounding the Administration for information that should be public but isn’t being made public, Senator Gulley irrelevantly managed to slam Harbaugh, as well, calling him “Not the best champion of equality” and “Not very genuine”. Uh huh. Yeah.

The following is a letter to the editor by Sen. Diego Hernandez that will (probably) be printed tomorrow morning in the Emerald.   (more…)