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Stop by our office M-F 8-5 or Saturday 9-1, and check us out! 006496 3225 Kinsrow Ave., Eugene • 485-7200 www.ducksviliageupts.com WRC meeting continued from page 1 said. “And to have the student members of the organization say that monitoring is a long way away ... Well, if it’s not for monitoring, what is it? The timelines have be come extremely important.” The University Senate has set up a WRC review committee which meets twice weekly to discuss the issues, with a more thorough annu al review set for next April. A full report from Thursday’s meeting will likely not be submitted to the committee until sometime in Octo ber, Frohnmayer said, but the fate of the WRC and the University’s partnership could be in jeopardy. “There are members of the facul ty who, if they believe that the con ditions that we set forward are not being met, would be prepared to re view it sooner,” Frohnmayer said. ASUO President Jay Breslow ad mitted that he also has concerns about the WRC, but said any kind of wavering by the University now is a poor choice. “We want to make sure that we’re effective with the money that we’re spending,” Breslow said, referring to the University’s membership fee of approximately $3,000. “I think that it’s going to take more than a year to start an organization like the WRC, and to sign on for a year and then get out of it because they’re not where we want them to be, that’s not acceptable to me. ’ ’ Breslow has no decision-making power in regards to the WRC. Thursday’s meeting of the WRC’s governing board and advisory coun cil was focused mainly on organiza tional aspects, including the ap proval of its articles of incorporation and by-laws. But Vice President for Public Af fairs Duncan McDonald, who at tended the meeting along with Frohnmayer and business Profes sor Lynn Kahle, said several uni versity officials in attendance ex pressed concerns about the WRC’s governance arrangement, which was changed at the meeting. In fact, McDonald said that approving the articles of incorporation and by laws should not have been done be fore the issue of governance was handled satisfactorily. The WRC’s original governing board was six members selected by the WRC’s advisory council, three student representatives from Unit ed Students Against Sweatshops and three university representa tives. Several votes at Thursday’s meeting—attended by 10 of the 12 board members — ended up 8-2, with the university representatives casting the two losing votes. Now it stands at a five-five-five breakdown, a system that McDon ald said is still unfair to universities. “Some university representatives felt that in effect, universities would still not have much strength in this new setting because there would be voting blocs,” he said. “It seems to be a very minor improvement, but I don’t think it will serve the long term interests of the universities. It still portends 10-5 votes.” Frohnmayer, McDonald and Kahle attended the meeting only as observers and had no direct input. Rutledge Tufts, a University of North Carolina administrator and one of the current three university representatives on the WRC board, said he received a mixed sense on the issue of governance. “We got a bell curve, where there were one or two people interested in leaving it just as it was, and there were one or two people who want ed to get more university represen tatives,” he said. “It was fairly clear to us, however, that we did not have the votes to go beyond parity.” McDonald’s opinion that the arrangement will lead to voting blocs is not shared by the WRC’s treasurer and board member, Mar cella David. “One of the assumptions you make when you ask for more uni versity representatives is that the other members will not work to the benefit of the universities,” said David, a professor of law at the Uni versity of Iowa. “I don’t think there will be strict voting blocs.” The WRC’s lone full-time, paid staff person, Maria Roeper, called the eight-hour meeting a success and said she hoped universities are working with the organization in good faith. Although she admitted that she has not been up-to-date on Frohnmayer’s reaction to Thurs day’s gathering, she acknowledges Little Caesars MEDIUM PEPPERONI OR CHEESE PIZZA 1711 Willamette (next to Blockbuster) 343-3330 that the University is in a more visi ble place than some of the others. “Oregon has been the most out spoken against the WRC, which is understandable in light of the $30 million withdrawal of funds by [Nike CEO and President] Phil Knight,” she said. Knight announced on April 24 that he was ending his personal do nations to the University, including a reported $30 million pledge to help expand Autzen Stadium. Frohnmay er admitted that in hindsight, more should have been done to assess the group’s stability. “Considering how divisive it is has been for our community ... we owed it to ourselves to do a much deeper investigation into many of these questions than time permit ted,” he said. “Some people’s sense of idealism and passion got ahead of where the facts were. ” Those facts about where the or ganization actually is in regards to formation are also up for debate among WRC representatives. “Things are proceeding about the way it was hoped from the April meeting,” David said. “I’m quite pleased with the progress that has taken place.” She pointed out that the WRC will soon be turning in organizational and financial documents to the New York attorney general’s office for re view and that a nationwide search has begun to find an executive direc tor, a position she hopes is filled by the WRC’s next meeting on a to-be determined date in October. Tufts, the board member from North Carolina, said progress was made at Thursday’s meeting, but maybe not as much as the group originally intended. “There’s a ‘chicken or the egg’ question here — we have a few pieces of egg shell and a few feath ers, but that’s more than we had be fore,” he said. 1 he group s hnancing was an other concern for University offi cials. The WRC gets 1 percent of revenue from licensed products sold through the member universi ties, which could generate about $150,000. Other funding will come from future grants and gifts. The group’s $295,000 projected annual budget was approved at the meeting, and David said that ac cording to her calculations that fig- " ure matches the current expenses. Frohnmayer and McDonald, how ever, expressed doubts that the - funds would be enough to truly make the WRC viable. Industry representation on the WRC board came up as another contentious issue and no one con tacted for this story offered any hope for that becoming a reality. “To treat corporations as second class citizens makes no sense,” Mc Donald said. “I feel that universi ties may end up as second-class citizens here, too.” Students with ties to the Human Rights Alliance, the group that helped lead April’s protest at John son Hall, reacted to the news of ad ministration’s dismay with charges that the school is not doing enough to help the WRC get off the ground. “It just seems that President Frohn mayer and Duncan McDonald are not working with the organization to make it run, but publicly criticizing it,” said Chad Sullivan, who is the student senate University affairs co ordinator. “What good does publicly criticizing the pace of an organization do after its very first meeting, other than to disrupt the process and slow it down or destroy it?” McDonald said that perspectives such as Sullivan’s just aren’t true in his opinion. “I’m not surprised that a small group of students with a particular agenda would have that viewpoint, but we spend a lot of our time trying to be of influence and being helpful,” he said. “You can’t tear anything down that hasn’t been built. ”
