Today’s campus activism climate might be a far cry from the protests of the past, like when anti-Vietnam war students burned down the ROTC building on campus in 1970 and threw a bomb into a PLC bathroom.
But the past year has had its share of student activism, most commonly in the classic form of protests. And since most of the protesting has been against administration, a lot of it takes place at Johnson Hall.
The Emerald gathered statistics on 25 protests that took place at University of Oregon from beginning of spring term 2014 to end of winter term 2015.
Here are some of the key events that took place during that time:

Sexual assault case: Three UO basketball players allegedly sexually assaulted an unnamed female student in March 2014. Many student and faculty activists see institutional betrayal in how UO handled the case.
Labor rights: After failing to reach an agreement with the administration, hundreds of Graduate Teaching Fellows went on strike during December 2014. It took ten days to come to an agreement, but finally the UO and the GTF Federation came to terms.
There were fifteen labor rights protests at Johnson Hall during spring 2014 to winter 2015, and almost all of them were related to the strike: However, six of them happened consecutively during the strike, when GTFs rallied at Johnson Hall each night.
Tuition and university spending: Students protested the Board of Trustees’ plan to raise tuition by 3.8 percent in March, sending a Board of Trustees meeting into recess. Only weeks before, students had rallied asking UO to take the money it was making and divest it from fossil fuels.
Issues like these have shaken students’ opinions of administration in the last years, according to Kelsey Jones, an involved activist and student at UO who is most well-known as the girl on the couch in the viral video “A Needed Response,” which won a Peabody award in 2013.
Johnson Hall leadership seems unstable to Jones, and, she says, other students. She’s watched a parade of three presidents come and go through Johnson Hall.
“Having all these different people in the top position is concerning, and then the administration sends them away with millions of dollars and they leave,” Jones said.
The connection between administration and students is one of the main issues: Students don’t feel that administration cares about what they care about, Jones said.
Jones does public relations for the Organization Against Sexual Assault at UO, and the organization emailed Coltrane often during the debacle last year. His answers were “vanilla” at best.
“People don’t trust the administration anymore,” Jones said. “Now there’s this distrust in the admin, and there’s distrust in the counseling center and there’s distrust in the library. …It’s just a mess and I think the administration needs to own up to their mistakes.”
Helena Schlegel is the student representative for the Board of Trustees, speaking on behalf of all students at UO. She made this statement:
“Whether it be rising tuition or the egregious act of attempting to sue a survivor of sexual assault, to students, it seems that the focus and priority for some administrators is on maintaining their reputation and recruiting future students rather than admit they were wrong and ensure that the needs of their current students are met. I think these students see a lot of wasted money go to lawyers and recruitment when it could be going to keep tuition low.”
The Emerald contacted UO administration with questions and an opportunity to respond, but did not hear back before deadline.

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Protest stats show students’ biggest problems with administration