1. Introduction
Roughly one
month ago, a large group of students took over the stage in protest at the
University of Oregon before our university president, Michael Schill, had the
chance to deliver his yearly “state of the university” address. These students
were there for many reasons, among them a
letter which served as the last straw in a long history of his
demonstrating contempt for students at the U of O. In his letter, there is a
familiar sexual-assault-victim-blaming-narrative. In a paragraph about
commitment to addressing sexual assault and violence, he proclaims, “It means
respecting yourself and not abusing drugs or alcohol.” I presume that I do not
have to explain to the readers that sexual assault is never a victim’s fault no
matter how drunk or high they happen to be. In the next paragraph he parrots
the familiar centrist lines that universities are interested in “non-violent
free speech,” and university students should not shut down speech they find
reprehensible. This letter preempted the arrival of a disgusting anti-abortion
group (“Genocide Awareness Project”), who are known for displaying blown up
images of genocide in order to make a comparison to abortion. Michael Schill
and the administration were concerned with potential lawsuits from this
litigious organization, though they never mentioned that in the letter. His
focus on what he would likely call “preserving free speech” occurs in a context
where he fails to see that hate speech is violence. Hate speech punches down at
and calls for violence against already vulnerable demographics. Our “president”
refuses to understand that not all speech is equal and not all speech is
deserving of a platform.
This post
is meant as an exposé regarding recent “hidden” struggles between the students
at the University of Oregon and the upper administration. I will start this
piece from a student perspective on the most recent decision to increase
tuition costs at the University of Oregon (and other public institutions in
Oregon) by the Higher Education Coordinating Commission (henceforth: HECC).
This particular issue, to my mind, is a characteristic example of the struggles
felt by students at the University of Oregon. I will also point to disingenuous
testimony about us given by our administrators during this second HECC hearing.
In order to understand the full context of our decision to protest, I will then
give specific and unflattering examples of how students are treated by our
administration and our so-called president. This background will serve as the
context for our most recent student action against the upper administration and
our CEO (“president” Schill). I will then directly address Michael Schill’s
attention-seeking and show his writings (here and here)
for the whiny, self-righteous, unsophisticated swill that they are. In this
piece, I will show that our administration (especially Michael Schill) treat
those of us who are trying to advocate for underprivileged demographics, with
outright contempt for daring to oppose them. This contempt and suppression of
our voices occurs despite their public claims to the contrary. Our upper
administration is busy playing the victim (while not acknowledging the context
of their decisions nor their institutional power) and claiming they were
silenced (confusingly, on national platforms) once the students finally publicly stood up
for themselves.
Before
moving into the content of this piece, I want to draw the readers’ attention to
two other pieces (here
and here)
that have already surfaced from other protesters at the time of drafting this
piece. I also want to mention that in this post the readers will notice my
decision to frequently refer Michael Schill as either CEO Schill or “president”
Schill. This decision reflects the priorities of CEO Schill as understood by
our undergraduate and graduate student body leadership as well as student
activist communities. By priorities, I mean whose interests he serves in
decisions he makes (who these decisions affect and how), not what he says
publicly. Talk is cheap as the conventional wisdom goes, but for us U of O
students it is very expensive.
2. Second HECC hearing decision
We begin
with a student perspective on what happened during the second HECC hearing to
decide on raising tuition for public universities in Oregon. In
the previous HECC hearing, students made the case against raising tuition,
while the administration argued for it; the arguments against raising tuition
narrowly won. Leading into the first hearing, we had some time to organize and
present our case, but we almost lost then as well. For the second hearing, we
(members of student leadership) were informed only a few days before the second
hearing that it would take place. This second hearing took place away from
campus (in Salem) and during class times. I am sure the readers can imagine
that distance and time constraints left us little chance to mount a real
defense on our behalf and that very few of us were able to attend. I will
acknowledge that we did have students from the Oregon Student Association in
attendance, despite the severe disadvantage the students were dealt. Our
opposition (the upper administration) was able to construct their testimony
much further in advance and this alone should seem suspicious. It turns out the
members of the HECC and university officials had been in dialogue, but we
students were not included. During the testimony given by our administration,
fellow students and I noticed disingenuous testimony, some of which I will
explain in the following paragraphs. However, the most striking part of the
testimony (to me) during the second HECC hearing was the constant repetition by
all who represented the universities, that they felt bad but had no choice but
to raise tuition. This was said while plans were being made to expand
the U of O after a large gift. I suppose they would have us believe it is
impossible to put some of those funds toward the actual costs of running a
university. Are they telling us that there is no room for creativity other than
cutting student services and making students pay more? There is no possibility
of reprioritizing expansions and new buildings (which will add to the operating
costs on the university in terms of long term staffing/hiring and maintenance)?
I imagine some of this money
could have gone a long way, if it were not entirely reserved for expansion
(again, during a budget crisis).
If you listen
to the testimony at the HECC hearing, one will notice many mentions of the
PathwayOregon program. They claimed, at the time, that raising tuition would be
necessary in order to pay for programs like this. Before I complicate this
narrative, I want to be very clear that I am glad this program exists, as it
assists some very low-income individuals. However, the repeated concentration
on this program is more revealing than I think our administrators would care to
admit. Firstly, it helps less than 3% of U of O in-state undergraduates, if you
do the math (PathwayOregon
has assisted roughly 3000 students since 2008 ÷ in-state undergraduate enrollment since the
academic year beginning in 2008). Considerably more than 3% of Oregon
students live in poverty and are in serious debt due to rising tuition costs. It also does not cover housing costs. Programs like this do nothing to help students who do not meet the stringent
qualifications for financial aid but still cannot afford to attend. Secondly,
am I supposed to believe that nobody in either the UO administration or the
HECC understands what a self-fulfilling prophecy is? If you increase tuition
to pay for programs like this, you create more financial hardship among
low-income students, thereby creating more students who need these programs in
the first place. In other words, in order to help some people who cannot
pay for tuition, the solution has been to raise tuition. The logic here eats
itself, unless you don’t actually care about your students. This seems as nonsensical
and heartless as asking a group of starving people to donate food before you
will “donate” food to some of them. It is disingenuous to say that this is the
only way you can help.
Another
issue I took with the testimony is the litany of student-led activities that
the administration seemed to suggest would disappear if tuition were not
raised. One particularly gross example concerned the yearly Mother’s Day
celebration and pow-wow at the U of O, organized and payed for almost
exclusively by the Native American Student Union. If the concern was what the
tuition increase would fund, why was this mentioned? According to one member of
this union, the administration does and pays very little to make this happen.
However, when given as part of a list of student activities at the U of O at a
hearing about money concerns, it sounds like Native Americans students would be
unable to continue this tradition. The truth is that a loss of funding from the
administration would not seem to impact this event very much. This kind of
framing is purposefully disingenuous. One more example of disingenuous
testimony comes from CEO Schill during the question period. He was asked
specifically about what sacrifices the upper administration were making during
this time of financial hardship and how
his salary compared nationally. He answered by citing a statistic that
administrator salaries are slightly above the median. He was asked about upper
admin and himself and he answered with information which included all
administration. In other words he dodged the question like a politician.
Unsurprisingly,
the HECC voted to increase tuition 10.6% for the current academic year, though
the amount was reduced to 6.56% after intervention
by the state. The upper administration did claim they were hoping
that would happen. From the student perspective this seemed like quite the
gamble in a state which has a poor track record of supporting education. Any
increase in tuition is less than desirable, especially as it prices out more
students every time. To be clear to the readers, the funding issues our
administration has been trying to address by
making cuts and generating more revenue are real. This is thanks in large
part to continued cuts in support from the state. However, the cuts and revenue
generation have fallen on the backs of students, workers, faculty, and
especially on vulnerable groups among them. We have yet to see the so-called
leaders of this university sacrifice anything. We have yet to see the kind of
budgetary prioritization which we would expect if the deficit is as urgent as
it would seem. Some of my colleagues have pointed out that choices such as
purchasing expensive property, choosing to construct another large building
which will necessarily increase long-term staffing and maintenance costs, and
choosing to reallocate funding for previously dedicated full-time support staff
for vulnerable students, are odd priorities while we are in a budget crisis.
Rather, it looks like this university blatantly serves outside monied
interests. The readers likely know that this shift is increasingly common in
(American) academia where education is increasingly seen as a business, not a
learning opportunity nor a right.
Once
granted a
large sum of money to allocate as he would like, CEO Schill’s crocodile
tears at the HECC hearing seemed clear when he did not reduce tuition. This
money was donated anonymously “for an expanse of research and discovery, student
success, & faculty growth” (emphasis: mine). That description is
rather broad but I would assume that “student success” would include students
actually being able to afford to attend this university. It might include
students starting their careers with less of the crippling debt known to plague
U.S. students. I
am not the only person to observe this. Again, he did not use any of that
money to lower tuition costs for students, despite his many assertions during a
short HECC hearing testimony (he did seem to protest a bit much) that he hates
raising our tuition. In fact, students were not featured among his priorities;
we were more of an afterthought on one or two points. This decision affects
more than just our students, he could have earmarked some of that money for the
operating costs of this university instead of mandating that all departments
cut 10% of their budgets. If they wanted to support (and expand) research, why
not put more funding into supporting faculty and student research? There are
many things he could have done with that money, which would have had a
substantive impact on the faculty, students, and classified employees at the U
of O. He did none of these. Instead, once he had this money, he decided that
the priorities were: raising more money (matching funds), expanding data and
scientific infrastructure (but nothing about funding actual faculty and student
research), and patting himself on the back for his (incomplete) work with the Black
Student Taskforce. Only
meeting five of their twelve demands and poorly justifying his decision to
not rename a building currently named for a racist (the BTS’s number one
demand) is not much to brag about.
3. The tenuous relationship between UO administration and
the UO student body
This
section will give insight into how much power and say students actually have
regarding decisions which affect our everyday lives. We will examine a few
examples of students who were cast aside or bullied by CEO Schill, to give the
readers perspective on the student experience with him and the upper
administration. Recently, the LGBT Education
Support Services office has seen changes that significantly impact support for
students. Last spring, this office was left with inadequate staffing after the
previous Director had left in the fall and the Dean of Students did not renew
the Interim Assistant Director's contract for spring quarter. In addition, the
Assistant Director position was cut to begin July 2017, and the remaining
positions were merged into one, which offers less pay and less authority than
the Director position had offered previously. These staffing changes were
decided behind closed doors, despite students being publicly told by the
Department Finance Committee there would be no change to staffing the coming
year.
Students held a sit-in at Johnson Hall to
draw attention to the decisions affecting LGBTQIA+ students. Eventually some
students met privately with CEO Schill, and in this meeting it was pointed out
that the University Administration wields a lot of power over this office
despite a majority of its funding coming from student fees. 13% of funding for
the LGBTQIA3 office comes from the Office of the Dean of Students and that
funding is used to pay for staffing. When some of the very reasonable demands
of folks from the sit-in were brought to CEO Schill's attention (such as
increased access to counseling mental health services and reinstating the Bias
Response Team which previously provided student autonomy in dealing with
grievances on campus), he stated that he did not want to offer the support
students were asking for. When the lack of student power over these decisions
was brought up, CEO Schill simply stated that he is
the President and therefore only he has the right to make these decisions.
The paraphrased quote I received from the former LGBTQA3 Financial Coordinator:
"I am the President, I am the final decider on these issues and I don't
agree with your stances… don't expect many of these to be passed.” He then
promptly walked out of the meeting. Perhaps he forgot that LGBTQIA+ students
are already facing an increase in hate crimes as well as regularly being the
targets of discrimination. As a followup to this protest, the LGBTQA3 student
union met with Kevin Marbury (VP of student life) and Kris Winter (Dean of
Students). During this meeting Kris Winter denied that ESS staffing decisions
were made behind closed doors.
Other support for students has also
recently eroded, such as the Substance Abuse
Program closing, and student dining facility workers no longer receiving
free meals while working shifts (on which some students undoubtedly depended).
This university has an unfortunate track record of not prioritizing student
wellbeing. I would also like to remind the readers about the incident a few
years back where the
UO tried to sue a victim of sexual assault, though
they eventually backed down after bad publicity. Institutional memory of
such incidents and institutional habits do not simply disappear after the dust
has settled. In fact, the U of O has recently seen unflattering
press in Sports illustrated for allowing a player under investigation for
sexual assault on our basketball team. When The Daily Emerald (a UO student
newspaper) pressed him on whether he was aware that Bigby-Williams played the
whole season while under criminal investigation for sexual assault, CEO Schill
retorted: “‘I don’t have any awareness of that. In any event, I can’t comment
on an individual student. What if I was asked by another reporter about you
being obnoxious? Would you want me to tell them that?’” With tact like
that, he might feel more at home serving as a spokesperson for our current
White House administration.
Let's not
forget the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation had to strike a few years back
in order to get marginally better pay (a five percent increase, which is still
not at the cost of living in Eugene for many of us) and paid sick leave. If the
university cared about graduate students (who both receive an education and
work educating junior students), one should think that having sick leave and
adequate pay might be a priority, not a point of contention. After an agreement
was reached in our most recent bargaining, the GTFF and UO bargaining teams met
at CEO Schill's residence and officially signed the contract. When discussing
how departments would get funding from the graduate school, CEO Schill was
touting his infamous love of universal metrics. Two major examples of these
metrics are: 1) time to degree completion; and 2) graduate student
satisfaction. Leaving aside the fact that some disciplines and specialties
require extensive fieldwork (which makes a time-to-degree completion metric a
bad indicator of success); it would give funding to departments who push
students through quicker, thereby giving less support to departments who
arguably need more support. Danny Fielding (Sociology) explained to CEO Schill
in this meeting that every metric is an incentive to cheat. These metrics
resemble a graduate student version of No Child Left Behind. Time to degree
completion would be an incentive for graduate programs to lower their
standards. Graduate student satisfaction would be an incentive for departments to
pressure their graduate students to lie on surveys, otherwise their departments
(and therefore graduate students) would receive less funding.
"President" Schill's reaction was to call this graduate student a
jerk and refuse to engage with him for the rest of the gathering. You read
that correctly; with all the composure of a first-grader, Michael Schill
threw a tantrum when confronted about the potential consequences of his
decisions. This is the side of our “president” that the public does not see.
This side of him is reserved only for those of us he considers below him.
When attempting to understand how a
university administration thinks about its students, one way to do so is to see
what happens when they could/should work together. At the university of Oregon,
a couple/few students are part of the Tuition and Fees Advisory Board
(henceforth: TFAB). This board is appointed by the Provost and meets
approximately once per week every year until tuition for the next year is
decided. This board makes decisions via “consensus” and does not officially
vote. The meetings are ostensibly open to the public, however attendance by
non-board members is rare. I suspect that this is due to the student body being
largely unaware of this process. I only knew about it via connection to student
activist and student leadership groups. This
information is available, but students would have to know that this board
exists, know that the meetings are public, and know where to look for this
information. The meetings are also scheduled irregularly, different times and
days for each one, thus making it difficult for students to consistently
attend. Student attendees suspect this is not an oversight, since they have
mentioned this issue before, but there has been no change.
To my
understanding, the process of determining tuition and fees begins with a
proposal by the chair (Jamie Moffitt, VP of Finance and Administration &
CFO) for the next year’s tuition and fees and how to pay for it. The details of
this proposal are discussed during the meetings. The meetings are roughly one
to one and one-half hours and a lot of material needs to be covered. Due to the
amount of materials the board needs to cover, the plan does not get adequately explained
to board members. The proposals are necessarily complex and board members do
not have much time to understand the details. This is especially challenging
for faculty and students, who have to leave early and arrive late due to
classes which cannot be rescheduled. This means that the TFAB members must rely
on the expertise of Jamie Moffitt and Brad Shelton (Senior Vice-Provost of
Finance), the primary authors of the plan in question. This means that the
construction of the plan and the evaluation of the plan are in the same hands.
This, combined with some faculty who seem to implicitly trust Jamie and Brad’s
expertise, makes it nearly impossible for students to feel like we have a
voice. It is hard to voice dissent under these conditions. The process for
determining tuition and fees at the University of Oregon is non-democratic and
highly biased toward the desires of officials whose primary concerns are not
the students. The issue of student voices in the budget is perhaps best
exemplified by what happens when students are not present at the TFAB meetings;
major decisions have been reached without students at board meetings. For
example, According to the current ASUO president, Amy Schenk, two years ago the
budget was decided without Associated Students of the University of Oregon
(ASUO) representation. The students had to leave the meeting and after their
departure, a consensus on tuition was conveniently reached without them.
I will
conclude this section with another story about how our administrators treats
vulnerable students. This story begins last Spring as the Sister’s Coordinator
for the Muslim Student Association, Fama Gedi, and other Muslim women organized
a Friday prayer (Jumu’ah) in our campus Contemplation Room. This was a boon for
these students as many of them could not attend the only mosque in Eugene due
to class conflicts and transportation limitations. After distributing flyers
and organizing on social media, these students had a consistent group of about
10 women that attended every week. The flyers stayed up for weeks and their
organized prayer and discussions caused no apparent issues. However, one Friday
in late May, this group gathered to find the room occupied by folks doing
various meditation activities. The group of Muslim students waited patiently to
one side for those who got there first to leave or make room for others. This
did not happen, despite their flyers posted at the entrance which would have
alerted those in the room that others would be joining them at that time. Some
older White guy told them they were talking too loud and eventually left in
huff when the students minded their own business (read: did not engage). The
very next week, the Muslim students arrived to find a new prominently displayed
sign indicating that the room was not reservable and not for group activity. It
is worth noting that the students never reserved anything, they simply
advertised where/when they would be there. The students simply prayed together
as they had done before and after their prayer, a few stayed behind to discuss
the notice. The director of the student activities center (Laurie Woodward),
stormed in and accused the students of both kicking someone out and creating a
“toxic environment.” She never listened to the students’ side of this story and
she later denied accusing these students. The questions I will leave you with
are: 1) why was this man’s word given more weight than a group of Muslim women,
2) why was there a significant problem with these students gathering to pray,
and 3) If their presence was a truly disruptive problem why was this never
noticed before?
4. Why the UO Collective protested the way it did
The reality
is that student groups at the U of O talk to each other. We know the struggles
of our peers and we support each other. Many of us realized that our disparate
advocacy groups were not heard by the administration. As we began to realize
the need for collective action, and we discussed what mechanisms were impeding
our voices, some common themes in our various struggles emerged. The single
most common element in all our struggles for safety, equity, and representation
was (and is) Michael Schill (and other upper administration). There is a
history and a pattern of behavior with CEO Schill (and other administrators),
and he is (intentionally) leaving this information out of his versions of this
story. We formed our UO Student Collective, in part, because of Michael Schill.
We formed this collective because we had to do so. We were being ignored
regarding real safety, support, and financial concerns. Recall that he walked
out of our protest, thus demonstrating exactly our point; he does not want to hear
from us. This has been the experience of students since his arrival.
Maybe you,
the readers, will listen to us. Perhaps you care about rising tuition costs.
Perhaps you care that large donations to the university never seem to benefit
the students, faculty, and workers. Perhaps you care that we have a president
who traffics victim-blaming narratives regarding sexual assault in his public
addresses to the campus. Perhaps you care that our
students do not feel safe on a university campus which did nothing about actual
Nazis on campus, but threatens student activists with disciplinary action
for speaking out against this. If you do, then you are more of an ally to us
than our own so-called leaders. Perhaps then you can imagine why the UO Student
Collective needed to protest the way it did, because students are not heard
otherwise.
5. Reaction to CEO Schill’s framing of our protest
With this
background in mind, we move into CEO Schill’s reaction (his NYT Op-Ed) to our
coordinated effort to bring attention to the aforementioned, and other, issues.
He stated that although the protestors, were showing up against fascism, they were engaging in fascist-like action ourselves, in our protest. Let’s
explore this claim. Right from the start, he demonstrated that he hasn’t a terribly
sophisticated understanding of fascism (despite later claiming it is they who do
not understand history). He gave the most whitewashed definition of fascism I
have seen: “Fundamentally, fascism is about the smothering of dissent.” He did
say that fascists threaten violence in order to silence dissent, but he left
out something rather important. Fascism specifically promotes violence
against the vulnerable and silences less powerful demographics through the
threat of violence. That is to say, fascism is about power and violence not
just about dissent (though he, as the “president,” would be the one smothering
dissent in this scenario, anyway). Fascism is not about the already
powerful getting their feelings hurt because they didn’t get their big day in
the spotlight. Folks who are not in positions of power (us students) cannot be
engaging in fascist tactics against the powerful; that is a contradiction.
He goes on
to say that, “Historically, fascists sought to silence, imprison and even kill
university professors and other intellectuals who resisted authoritarian rule.
So the accusation that American universities somehow shelter or promote fascism
is odd and severely misguided.” Michael Schill is an administrator and his
previous job in Chicago was also that of an administrator. His is not currently
an academic. The history of academia in decades past is not somehow a defense
against the charges levied against him specifically. He seems to
think that the fact that actual intellectuals were threatened in past, somehow
means universities are not capable of reproducing such structures, even though
universities are incredibly hierarchical. He also appears to conflate
professors and intellectuals with universities. Academics are employed by
universities, but universities can have other agendas and are certainly subject
to non-academic influence (for example: the U of O). He does not get to co-opt
the very real violence against academics, especially when he is not an academic
himself. I will point out that fascists have historically sought to silence
(student) activists as well. CEO Schill trying to imply that the students resemble
fascists as his administration tries to silence activists is a bit like the pot
calling the stop sign black.
In this
piece, he also says, “[we, the students] are fed up with what [we] see as a
blanket protection of free speech that, at its extreme, permits the expression
of views by neo-Nazis and white supremacists. I am opposed to all these groups
stand for, but offensive speech can never be the sole criterion for shutting
down a speaker.” That said, he entirely missed why allowing Nazis to come to
campus is dangerous: white-supremacist speech is violence. This kind of
speech specifically calls for a white ethnostate, which necessarily means removing
non-white folks. Allowing them a platform and ability to recruit and organize
among us is supporting them and it is very dangerous. In case our CEO needs
reminding, we live in a country that is seeing white nationalists emboldened,
and an increase of violence against people of color, Muslims (and folks who
“look Middle Eastern”), LGBTIQA+ folks, and immigrants. Allowing such discourse
on a university campus is a disgrace to any community that would claim to value
less privileged members. Allowing White Supremacists on campus is a threat
to our community. The ACLU is clear that hate speech is legally
protected. There has to be a clear and immediate threat to students for our
administration to do something and not violate U.S. law, as I understand the
situation. I would argue that White Nationalist speech and organizing is
exactly that. It is an imposition on some of our most vulnerable students. We
are seeing the ugly effects of this kind of organizing all over our country.
Does anyone honestly think that this kind of organizing
has no behavioral consequences? I ask the readers, are you actually fine with
allowing this threat to our community to proselytize on campus?
If the
administration chooses not to interpret the law in such a way that they can
protect students from these violent demagogues, I have to wonder how they
justify other behavior. I have certainly seen the University of Oregon Police
removing unhoused people from our campus, despite no clear danger. I also find
it odd that I have yet to see CEO Schill denounce the recent bomb
threat targeting a building which serves international students (Agate
Hall). He should have immediately promised our international students that our
university would protect them. His silence regarding actual xenophobic/racist
threats of violence speaks for itself. I wish he would fight against white
supremacists as hard as he fights against us students.
CEO Schill
did say in his
earlier public message that he would “teach all of our students and members
of the community the value of free speech and tolerance.” This sounds vaguely
like a threat. I think it important to point out that an undergraduate
organizer for this protest was the first to be threatened by the university
administration. When the UO Student Collective went as a group to the requested
meeting, the administration refused to talk to them. I will also point out that
more undergraduate and graduate students were recently threatened with
disciplinary action. Hilariously, one former student who was present also got a
letter of their “violation of the student conduct code.” I know one graduate
student who was not present who also received a letter of violation of the
student code of conduct. These errors call into the question the
administration’s procedures of making their allegations in the first place. The
commenced this process during midterm season, which does result in a lower
academic performance of these students. This adds undue stress on us while the we have to consult outside legal representation and worry about what the
administration will attempt next. The administrative official dealing with us,
Katy Larkin (Associate Director, Student Conduct and Community Standards),
refuses to talk to us as a group. She is also claiming to not understand why
this targeted approach would be viewed by us as threat and as intimidation. The
administration are individually charging us and giving us very little time to
respond on purpose. This way, the ASUO legal services for students cannot
represent all of us, due to conflict of interest laws. Understand that this
means we do not have enough time to contact outside legal representation.
The
techniques they are using are remarkably similar to when they tried to hold out
against the recent GTFF strike. During this strike, the UO administration they
sent out messages in order to turn undergraduates against graduate students
(similar to the current national media smear campaign) and they even threatened
people’s visas. The administration is trying to individually intimidate us and
it will not work. Thankfully
our senate is on top of this, and seem to have our backs. Unike CEO Schill,
our UO Senate wants to hear from us. The UO Senate voted for more time during
their open forum on November 1st, 2017, to specifically hear from us students.
We are scheduled to talk with them again on November 15th, 2017. The UO Senate
president, the faculty union president, the graduate student union president,
and the ASUO State Affairs Commissioner have sent a unified letter condemning
the administration’s attempt to target and intimidate student activists. As of
drafting this piece, the university administration has not backed down, but
they cannot fight all of us. Us students have the overwhelming support of our
community and we are grateful for this support every day as we fight against
the administration for suppressing student voices who pointed out (among other
issues) the suppression of student voices.
The
administration made the choice to come after us, nobody forced them to do so.
Nothing I have read in the
Student Conduct Code leads me to think they must pursue us. They
have the right (but apparently not the ability) to exercise discretion. In my
opinion, the fact that it came to us disrupting him in order to be heard would
be a wakeup call for anyone else with an ounce of compassion. Someone who cared
about what students have to say would have stayed. Instead, we can clearly see
through CEO Schill’s actions both at the time (he quickly left) and in the
aftermath, that he is more concerned with his ego and publicly protecting his
reputation. Perhaps that is why his writings on the matter seem to always
neglect a discussion of the power he wields and our concerns. He never even
mentions the concerns and demands that the Student Collective raised. He always tries to shift focus to
our methods (which I consider fully justified under these circumstances) and
tries to act like he was silenced, even though he has enjoyed more media
attention due to this event. He is threatened by us students demanding justice
and he has responded by threatening us.
I will also
point out that in his earlier message to the entire campus, he tried to claim
that “The vast majority of our students understand the value of free speech.
Indeed, they understand that the reason many of the protesters today are at our
institution is because of the courageous speech of others throughout the years.
They also understand that the right way to express their views is not to stop
others from expressing their views.” Allow me to correct this statement. Michael
Schill, you do not speak for us. You do not get to claim to understand what
the majority of us understand when you will barely engage with us. You tried to
claim all of us in defense of what you consider a personal attack, but you
don’t get to shield yourself from us by using some vague appeal to our peers.
Despite your claims that the students don’t understand the nature of what is at stake
here, we students do have an understanding of what it is like to be silenced.
You have been doing this to us all along.
I will also
address other strange points made in this hot garbage take that somehow made
its way into the New York Times. We can see what he thinks of us students
taking even a small amount of power and how afraid of us he is in his Op-Ed. I
have every reason to think that his word choices are intentional (he is a
lawyer). He refers to us “armed” with a megaphone (which was needed because they
cut the mic on the stage), which to me is a term generally used for weapons. He
literally talked about a megaphone as if it were a weapon. Seeing students
organized and standing up for themselves can only be seen as a threat if you
are pitted against us. This rhetoric occurs as our university police were just
recently armed with high-powered
rifles and armor piercing bullets (conspicuously soon after our protest,
though I do not know if this is a coincidence). Who exactly do they suddenly
think they need to shoot? From the article linked above: “‘The new program is
intended to be used for critical and active threats on campus and provide
increased accuracy and distance,’ according to UOPD.”
Our CEO
also said that the students were upset about “a perceived corporatization of
public higher education” (emphasis: mine). His use of the word perceived
here struck me as rather odd. Perhaps he forgot that he works at Nike
University. Corporatization is a well-recognized issue in academia (examples: here, here,
here,
here
and here), so I wonder why he is
attempting to make it seem as though we are making this up. This position he
has taken is especially strange since the University of Oregon recently adopted
a governing model with a
board of trustees, some of whom represent monied interests at this
university. Just before adopting this model a PAC for Higher Education
Excellence which includes some of the same monied interests (example: Columbia
Sportswear) whose stated goal was to lobby for increased university
independence (read: less state oversight). That is to say, due in part to
frustration at the State of Oregon, people with influence pushed for structural
change (and they won) to attract more funding from large corporate donors (eg.
Nike). I do not think this was the right call, though they were dealing with a
real problem (or perhaps taking advantage of the situation). In either case, we
have a word which is used to describe this process: corporatization.
In this NYT
Op-Ed, his previous campus-wide message, and in
a radio interview, he refers to our protest as “small.” I will point out
that the UO Student Collective filled the stage and then some. He is blatantly lying in order to
continue his trend of dismissing our concerns. During this radio interview, he
was as dismissive of our grievances as he was in the NYT Op-Ed. He again tried
to suggest that the students don’t really understand history (though I pointed out above
that his understanding of fascism could use a bit of work). He said that our
grievances are not about him, he was just a convenient power figure (at least
he now recognizes that he is in a position of power). However, the claim that
he was just a figure of convenience is also a lie. This protest is merely the
latest instantiation of an ongoing battle between student leaders and
“president” Schill (and the upper administration), and it has been very
specifically about him (among other issues). We have been accusing him of
ignoring student needs for some time. He demonstrated how much he cares to hear
what the students have to say during the protest when he walked out shortly after the
start. He knows exactly what the UO Student Collective are upset about. He even said during that
interview that he expected something might occur. Of course he did, we had a
public Facebook event and we distributed flyers. With this understanding in
mind, I ask: if he expected that students are upset with him and if he actually
cared about us, one must ask: why did it even come to this? People do the kind
of action these students did when people feel that they do not have other choices. It’s not
like us students are looking for extra responsibilities and hardship. We have
gone through official channels and have met with CEO Schill plenty of times.
But he did not listen to us before either. As the readers have no doubt
noticed, he conveniently failed to mention those details.
6. Closing Remarks
It may be
hard to imagine that a university president could be so manipulative. It may be
hard to imagine that our board of trustees could allow this to occur. The
readers might think that I am exaggerating. Perhaps all the UO students who
have experienced the suppression of our voices and outright lies on behalf of
the administration are all mistaken? In order to help cement the reality of our
relationship with our upper administration I will point out that directly after
the second HECC hearing: CEO
Schill took fellow administrators out for ice cream. They had just finished
saying in the hearing that they felt so very bad to raise tuition. What were
they celebrating?
Many
questions remain from the student perspective. Why did the administration take
this gamble in which we would be the ones who pay, especially in the face of
student opposition? Why did the administration push a dishonest narrative
regarding their support and care for students? Why did they continue to falsely
claim there was no alternative? Why could they not sacrifice anything
themselves? Why is our “president” so hostile to us when we raise our voices,
and why does he act like he is the victim when he is the one punching down? Why
does our CEO act like he is being silenced while he emailed the entire campus
with his message,
penned an
Op-Ed in a national publication, and appeared
on Think Out Loud? Do students generally have this power? And most
importantly, why doesn’t our upper administration care enough about us to
listen to us? As is likely evident by the tone of this writing, I am angry and
I am no longer going to be shy about it. I cannot watch another one of my
bright students start to perform poorly in their classes because they have to
work two jobs to afford tuition. I cannot watch as undergraduate and graduate
students who care about social and economic justice are ignored. I cannot do
nothing as undergrads I have met no longer attend this university because they
simply cannot afford to do so.
In order to
leave the readers with what I think is important perspective, I have chosen a
quote from James Gilligan (author of the book series Violence, in which
he draws on 25+ years of experience working in U.S. prisons). “Poverty kills
far more people than all the wars in history, more than all the murders in
history, more than all the suicides in history. Not only does structural
violence kill more people than all the behavioral violence put together,
structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence.” Our upper
administration (especially our “president”) and board of trustees are
participating in the structural violence of poverty against us students, while
patting themselves on the back for “helping,” and meanwhile threatening those
of us students who dare to point this out. This is not a productive way to move
forward.
All that
being said, I do want to clarify something as I close out this piece; the
impediment toward changing the priorities of this institution is not Michael
Schill alone. To be frank, I am not clear that other presidents in his position
would have made radically different decisions. I was hard on him in this piece
because his general disposition toward students and critique is less than
helpful. I was especially hard on him due to his participation in the national
media smear campaign against student activists. However, the underlying issues
at this university are structural. Since we have moved toward a more privatized
funding model, the president, other administrators, and the board of trustees
must consider donors when they are making decisions. I disagree with them
prioritizing that over students, though I understand why they do. However,
there is a fundamental issue that the leaders of this university have yet to
grasp. If they want to improve the profile of this university and attract
donors, a stronger community will have greater long-term effects than a new
building. Prioritizing the needs of faculty, workers, and students, rather than
squabbling with us, will go much further than cosmetic changes and publicity
stunts. Ensuring that tuition is affordable, students are safe, and their needs
are met is what keeps the student body happier and minimizes protest (which is
the kind of instability donors are wary of). Making sure that workers here are
adequately compensated will always produce workers who are more productive and
care more about their jobs. Investing more in the research interests of our
faculty and students is what improves scientific advancement, not shiny new
toys. The truth is that reprioritizing the members of this community would be
the best way to move forward both from an ethical standpoint as well as a
financial one. I wish our leaders had the courage and vision to do so.
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In writing
this piece, I want to acknowledge the input I received from many student
leaders and activists, as well as the input from classified employees,
administrators, and faculty. Some of the wording in this post comes from these
contributors. For their protection, some remain anonymous, but their work to
make this university and our community a more equitable and just place is an
ongoing inspiration from which I draw strength.
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