Reports in newspapers and on local television stating the University might suddenly be reconsidering its membership in the Worker Rights Consortium are misleading, said University President Dave Frohnmayer.
In a statement Frohnmayer released Friday morning, he said “The University action has always included establishing a process for internal review in cooperation with the University Senate during the next academic year to evaluate whether the WRC can meet the terms of our conditions for membership.”
Frohnmayer said the University Senate will establish a process for reviewing the WRC memberships and is currently establishing how this process will look and how exactly it will work.
Frohnmayer said this review process has been planned since he signed on April 12 and is not new but might be the reason deceptive reports appeared in Friday’s newspapers.
“Maybe that’s where the misleading headlines came from,” Frohnmayer said.
Frohnmayer did not completely exclude the possibility that the University could back out of the WRC before the expiration of its one-year membership in a phone interview Saturday. However, he added that option simply is not on the table right now.
“I don’t foresee that at the moment,” he said. “I think we just have to wait and see.”
Duncan McDonald, the University’s vice president of public affairs and development, who has been representing the University in WRC issues, said he did not know what Friday’s reports were based on.
“I had no idea where that was coming from,” McDonald said.
However, both said they think the misleading reports stem from stories early last week rather than from new information.
McDonald said he suspects reporters simply rehashed and misinterpreted previous news stories — specifically a May 1 Emerald article about his attendance at a recent WRC conference in Chicago, where university representatives met and discussed concerns about the lack of industry representation on the WRC board.
Frohnmayer signed on with the WRC, an apparel industry monitoring group, for a one-year term on April 12, after the University Senate had recommended the University join. At the same time, however, Frohnmayer expressed some concerns with the organization, which is still in its infancy, and said the University Senate will re-evaluate how those concerns are addressed.
The University’s concerns include ensuring more influence for university members of the group, more clarity regarding the composition of group’s governing board, industry participation and ensuring WRC meetings are open to the media and non-media observers.
Frohnmayer said the review process will start immediately, giving the University Senate a chance to keep up with and evaluate WRC developments which are expected to take place after the group’s governing board is elected in June.
One crucial aspect the University and a number of other university members are concerned with is industry participation in the WRC, a point that some WRC representatives are adamantly against.
McDonald said as of right now, the University is a member for a year and whether its membership will be extended beyond that is simply a matter that will have to be determined after reviewing the terms of membership and the progress of the WRC.
“We just need to see what’s going to happen,” he said. “Everything is so new.”