The new draft of the diversity plan and a public hearing regarding U.S. Department of Defense funding on campus will be part of the University Senate’s agenda sometime next term.
At its meeting Wednesday, the senate watched a presentation about the diversity plan, heard an update on the state of the University by President Dave Frohnmayer and passed three motions. One motion calls for public hearings about DoD funding – at least one to be held in front of the senate – and the others call for the University to close the school for University Assembly meetings and waive the fees for a records request by the Westmoreland Tenants Council.
The diversity plan
The Diversity Executive Working Group submitted a draft of the Five-Year Diversity Plan to Frohnmayer on Nov. 22, Interim Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity Charles Martinez said, and copies of the draft should be available next term after all revisions are made.
Martinez discussed the reasons for the diversity plan and presented statistics detailing inequalities between minority groups and white people at the University level.
The original draft of the plan was released last spring and caused a great deal of controversy. A group of professors sent a letter to Frohnmayer denouncing the plan as “Orwellian” and “frightening.” Frohnmayer appointed the diversity working group in June to pen a new draft.
Martinez said none of the issues being addressed in the plan are new to the University, and it’s crucial for the University to recognize those issues and work to become more open about them. He said the rapidly-changing racial demographics of the state and entire country make it all the more necessary to urgently address those issues.
“Even the term ‘diversity’ is often not very well defined. ‘Who’s included? – Who’s allowed to be diverse?’ is a question we’re not many times sure about,” Martinez said.
Diversity is much more than just race, ethnicity and gender – it’s sexual orientation, life experiences, social class and much more, Martinez said.
Many people are reticent about diversity issues, he said, and don’t understand that they’re something with which everyone should be involved.
“This is not an issue that certain people on this campus have the market cornered on,” Martinez said. “We all have a voice to give to this.”
The data Martinez presented showed the increasing Oregon population, breaking it down by the following groups: White, Latino, black, Asian/Pacific Islander and American Indian.
All groups are increasing, but the non-white groups are increasing at a much faster rate than whites.
“We are in a time of massive change in Oregon,” Martinez said.
Martinez showed the high school graduation rate for each race, highlighting the discrepancy between the number of high school graduates and the number who enroll at a university. He then showed graduation rates for each race. Graduation rates for minority groups were drastically lower than the rates for whites and showed no considerable increase. Martinez also had data relating to only the University, showing the same thing.
This is why the need to address diversity is so crucial, Martinez said.
Students must be prepared for the world around them, and if the minority population is increasing but enrollment rates and graduation rates are still drastically lower and disproportionate to the population, something is wrong, he said.
Martinez discussed the process the working group went through when writing the draft and shared the group’s goals for the plan. The first was to develop a culturally responsive community, which he said means the same as the term ‘cultural competency’ that was in the first draft and criticized for being vague if not impossible to define.
Community activist Zachary Vishanoff asked Martinez to discuss how selling Westmoreland Apartments – where 87 international students hold leases -might go against the University’s fundamental ideas of diversity, but Martinez said it’s difficult to connect such a complex issue to data about student experiences on campus.
Westmoreland update
President Frohnmayer updated the senate on the Westmoreland sale prior to Martinez’s presentation. A task group has formed to address the needs of international students living at Westmoreland, and two other groups are addressing how to help students whose children attend the Westmoreland Childcare Center and how to help students financially in their search for new housing.
Beginning in January, the groups will be surveying each student at Westmoreland about their individual needs, Frohnmayer said. The financial aid office is currently working to obtain updated financial information for each tenant, he said. He emphasized that until a buyer has been chosen it’s difficult to pinpoint specific needs of tenants because it’s not known what will become of the 404-unit apartment complex after it’s sold.
“We have no firm way to estimate those numbers of persons who might be displaced in addition to those who would vacate the premises through normal turnover,” Frohnmayer said. “We will make plans on an individualized basis so that we don’t have to resort to guesswork, but I think that you know that there is some difficulty before we have a firm proposed buyer to know exactly what the nature of displacement – if any – might be.”
Frohnmayer also defended the decision to sell Westmoreland and the reasoning behind it.
“This is not a cold, calculated, hard, bottom-line, business decision,” he said.
The University is aware of the consequences of selling the apartments, and “we will deal with them as best and humanely as we possibly can,” Frohnmayer said.
“I wish to assure you that we make our decisions on the basis of the future best interest of the University’s students and faculty, and we will continue to pursue that objective,” he said.
The search for a provost
The search for a new senior vice president and provost to replace John Moseley, who will retire in June, is nearing completion, Frohnmayer said. The search committee has met with the three candidates, and all have given public presentations about their plans for the University and the state of higher education.
Many who attended the presentations submitted their views about the candidates in writing.
“I will pledge to you that I read every single one of them,” Frohnmayer said. “That was hours of reading.”
Frohnmayer said he is confident he and the new senior vice president and provost will work exceptionally well together.
“As some of you may know, the way the management style of Dave Frohnmayer works, it’s basically two in a box,” Frohnmayer said. “The provost and the president must be alter-egos.”
He said the selection should be announced soon.
The motions
The motion to close campus for meetings of the University Assembly passed with one dissenter.
The University Assembly includes every faculty member. It used to be the governing body for the University until the University Senate was formed in the mid-1990s, and classes weren’t allowed to be scheduled during the assembly’s monthly meeting in order to facilitate attendance.
Biology professor emeritus Frank Stahl spoke in favor of the motion and said the assembly is mandated to meet with full legislative power, and it doesn’t have that power without a quorum. The University hasn’t been able to close for meetings of the assembly since the senate formed, and Stahl said that discourages faculty from attending the meetings because many are teaching class or are busy with other duties.
“If the University closes, these people will be enfranchised,” Stahl said.
Stahl said it was concluded during the last academic year that closing the school for such a meeting would cost between $6,000 and $8,000. Closing is obviously expensive, but having to continue scheduling assemblies because the last did
n’t have enough attendees to meet quorum is even more costly and inconvenient, Stahl said.
Assembly meetings are rare, but the assembly is the supreme governing body of the University and needs to have quorum to be effective, Stahl said.
Renee Irvin, an assistant professor in planning, public policy and management, asked whether meetings could be held via the Internet because “shutting down the University strikes me as rather archaic,” but Stahl said it’s not possible.
Senator Mike Pangburn of the college of business asked what would happen if a test had been scheduled for the day of the assembly meeting, but others stressed that assembly meetings require 30-day notice and that it should be permissible for professors to reschedule class activities.
The motion calling for public hearings about U.S. Department of Defense funding passed unanimously, though Biology professor Michelle Wood warned against pushing to eliminate such funding because it would be instigated by political views and could set a precedent that could be used to question other sources of funding.
During the final minutes of the meeting, senator Jon Jablonski introduced a motion calling for the University to waive any fees to fulfill a recent public records request to the University from the Westmoreland Tenants Council. The request asked for all documents relating to the financial state of Westmoreland Apartments as well as, among other things, documents that mention the decision to sell the property.
Randy Geller, director of policy and legal affairs for the University, responded to the request by saying the cost for producing such a large amount of records could be substantial.
The motion to waive the fees passed unanimously.
Also at the meeting, University General Counsel Melinda Grier updated the senate about the Patriot Act’s presence on campus, saying she had received no inquires from the federal government that cite the act and ask for student information.

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