Subject: withdrawal of motion

To: Gordon Sayre and Paul van Donkelaar

From: Franklin Stahl

Date: Fri, 23 May 2008 15:58:34

Dear Colleagues,

On May 19, I received word from the Department of Justice stating that UO Counsel Melinda Grier had released to me, on May 13, 2008, all the documents in her possession that elicited AAG Denecke's opinion of November 14, 2003 regarding quorum issues on campus. I sought such confirmation because the documents released by Ms Grier did not include any letter requesting an opinion from DoJ.

For the record, DoJ as well as University Counsel Doug Park and President Dave Frohnmayer have attested that no such letter exists (even though the letter has been repeatedly denied to me) and that the request for clarification from Ms Grier to Ms Denecke was made orally.

Consequently, I hereby withdraw the Notice of Motion made at the Senate meeting of May 14, 2008.

Unfortunately, the lack of information regarding the content of Ms Grier's request leaves us unable to identify the origin of the confusion in AAG Denecke's response of November 14, 2003. That memorandum asserts, apparently on the basis of incomplete or faulty information, that the Assembly cannot change any of the rules of governance, in flat disagreement with (pre-2008) section 6.6 of the Senate Charter, and with the memorandum of 8 March 2007 from AAG McKeever.

We lack also any indication of the grounds upon which AAG Denecke assumed the applicability of Oregon's Public Meetings Law to the internal governance of Oregon's Universities. Given that neither the Assembly nor the Senate has ever complied fully with the Public Meetings law, this important point is especially in need of clarification and needs to be addressed by the UO Senate, along with several other Faculty Governance issues, during the coming year.

The Denecke letter, with its explicit statement that the Senate may not alter the quorum requirements for either the Assembly or the Senate, was not made public until 28 November, 2007. On that day, President Frohnmayer delivered the letter to the Senate President within hours of the Senate meeting. On the agenda was a motion to establish a realistic (less than 50% plus one) quorum for the Assembly, scheduled to be voted on after months of failed attempts to obtain an opinion from University Counsel Melinda Grier on the legality of the motion. Apparently the President considered the Denecke letter, with its conspicuous inadequacies, to be a valid objection to the motion.

Franklin W. Stahl
Molecular Biology
1229 Univ. of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1229
TEL: 541-346-6096
FAX: 541-346-5891