Oregon daily
emerald
Wednesday, November 21, 1984
Eugene, Oregon
Volume 86, Number 59
Final arguments presented
Discrimination trial ends
PORTLAND (AP) — Attorneys for faculty women
and the state System of Higher Education presented
closing arguments Tuesday in a mammoth sex
discrimination lawsuit believed to be the longest
federal civil trial in Oregon history.
U.S. District Judge Helen Frye said she hoped to
rule on the case by late December or early next year
before becoming “lost” in the mountain of documents
and evidence presented in the nine-month trial.
A class of 1,000 or more women is seeking tens of
millions of dollars on behalf of women faculty members
at Oregon’s eight public universities and colleges. It is
the first class-action lawsuit in the United States cer
tified against an entire state system of higher education.
The lawsuit charges the women were victims of
bias in pay, tenure, promotions and other areas.
"The statistical proof is bolstered by a tremendous
pattern of individual instances,” attorney Don Willner,
who represented the women, said Tuesday.
State officials repeatedly denied responsibility
‘ Women of the state system want a
fair salary without the anxiety and
pressure of having constant checks
on what that salary is.'
— JoAnn Reynolds
when accused of discrimination in personnel deci
sions, he said. Some college officials admitted they
haven't followed state requirements for developing
plans for compensating their academic staffs, he
argued.
Women have received fewer promotions than men
with comparable experience, education, ability and
productivity, he said. Disparities in pay have grown
worse over the years because most pay increases have
been in percentages, not dollars.
At one University department where a department
head tried to equalize salaries, a dean found discre
tionary funds to award to four white males and main
tain the disparity, said JoAnn Reynolds, Willner’s
associate.
“Women of the state system want a fair salary
without the anxiety and pressure of having constant
checks on what that salary is,” Reynolds said.
Jerry Casby, an assistant Oregon attorney general
who argued the state’s case, said claims of discrimina
tion amounted to a relative handful.
Of women who testified, only one claimed to have
been denied advancement to an administrative position
unfairly, 12 claimed discrimination in promotion, and
42 claimed discrimination in salary, he said.
“He simply doesn’t have the numbers,” Casby
said, gesturing at Willner. “When you look behind the
numbers and look at the substance of his claims, you
don’t see substance at all — you see gossamer.”
The range of academic disciplines in the eight
schools is so great that it is unfair to lump the programs
together, he said. Studies submitted by the women
omitted consideration of teaching quality, whether
research had been published, how faculty members had
served their institutions, and other factors, he said.
Willner, who challenged Casby’s figures, said “we
showed discrimination everywhere.”
Although not all the bills are in, officials saiys the
state has spent more than $2.7 million in defense
against the women’s claims since April 1980, when the
lawsuit was filed.
More than 2,200 women sought about $40 million
in the case, but Frye reduced the size of the class last
summer by barring some non-teaching personnel.
Despite numerous negotiations prompted by
repeated requests from Frye, the two sides failed to
reach an out-of-court settlement.
Both sides cited statistical evidence to bolster their
cases. Attorneys for the women also cited individual
accounts, and state attorneys tried to refute them.
Some 692 documents and thousands of exhibits
were filed, and an estimated 400 witnesses were called
during the trial.
Workers watch as the electric-blue tarp is
stripped from the Science I building Tuesday.
The covering was put in place to keep asbestos
particles from escaping as workers removed
the substance from the exterior of the building.
‘Yummie’ rebels unite
but cause is uncertain
By Stasia Scarborough
Of the £merald
With a name like Yum
mies, it’s difficult to imagine
that this is a group of people
with some pretty gloomy
predictions.
But they are also a political
group that is not without
hope for the future — and
that’s why they’ve organiz
ed. Sort of.
The Yummies, holding
their “second official” but
first real public meeting
Tuesday night, discussed
just what their goals and
philosophy should be. But
like many open political
discussion, just about every
point remained unresolved
after discussion.
John Fike, one of the Yum
mie founders, said the group
would call itself “left-wing,
yet all-encompassing."
“We definitely don’t want
to label outselves,” Fike
said.
But later, during the
group's discussion on
whether they would like to
have a particular political af
filiation, a large group of the
some 20 persons in at
tendence said they didn’t
want any type of label, in
cluding Fike’s suggestion.
Born in the emotion of
election night, the Yummies
were started by five students
who said they want to re
educate the student popula
tion to the realities of the
modern world. The
democratic process and the
state of modern society, they
said, are not in the best of
shape.
Their audience goal is a
big one: they would like to to
re-educate the students who
voted for the current
Republican ticket, and to
motivate those students who
are not yet actively interested
in the world around them,
Fike said.
The group has declared a
hatred for U.S. intervention
in Nicaragua, what they call
the foolishness of current
defense and military policy,
and investment in South
Africa, “a country pro
moting modern-day
slavery,” Fike said.
They have gone so far as to
Continued on Page 8A
Project was a ‘no choice’ issue
By Paul Ertelt
Of (he Emerald
He was a young graduate student working
with the greatest scientific minds of the time to
develop the most destructive weapon yet known
to man.
“It was an unbelievable, wonderful ex
perience in a terrible, terrible atmosphere,”
University President Paul Olum said Tuesday of
his experience with the Manhattan Project that
developed the first atomic weapon.
More than 250 people gathered at the Eugene
Community Conference Center to hear the
University Forum lecture sponsored by the
‘It was an unbelievable,
wonderful experience in a terri
ble, terrible atmosphere. *
— Paul Olum
University’s Center for the Humanities, the Fail
ing Lecture Fund, the National Endowment for
the Humanities and the City of Eugene.
Olum discussed the research in physics that
made nuclear fission possible, recounting the
discoveries of pioneering physicists such as
Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi.
Albert Einstein was one of the first to realize
the implications of this new knowledge, Olum
said. In October, 1939, Einstein wrote to Presi
dent Franklin Roosevelt warning him that if the
United States did not begin work on an atomic
bomb, Nazi Germany might develop the weapon
first.
So in October, 1941, systematic work began
on the bomb. “The first office happened to be in
Manhattan,” Olum said, but work was carried out
throughout the United States.
Olum said the nuclear age really began when
Fermi produced the first self-sustaining nuclear
chain reaction in a Chicago laboratory in
December, 1942. Prof. Aaron Novick, director of
the University’s Institute of Molecularbiology,
assisted on that project.
In April, 1943, Olum went to Los Alamos,
N.M., and became part of “the greatest gathering
of scientists ever,” which included Fermi, Bohr,
J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller.
Although he is concerned about the implica
tions of the project and is today an avid supporter
of the nuclear freeze movement, he and the other
scientists on the project believed the work was
necessary in order to win the war and save
American lives.
“I felt then, and in retrospect I feel today, we
had no choice but to work on it,” he said.
But even at the time, Olum opposed the use
of the bomb on a populated area, recommending
first a demonstration detonation, followed by an
ultimatum demanding a Japanese surrender. That
idea was rejected and on August 6, 1945, the first
atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Three
days later, a second bomb was dropped on
Nagasaki, Japan.
“That was an unconscionable thing,” Olum
said. “They should have given the Japanese more
time. They did not have to drop a bomb on
Nagasaki and kill tens of thousands of people.”
Olum said we now have the capability of
destroying all life on earth with nuclear weapons.
Yet we have a president who has opposed every
nuclear arms limitation treaty produced by his
predecessors, he added.
A nuclear freeze is a required first step in
removing the threat of nuclear destruction from
the earth, he said.