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A CONVERSATION ABOUT CAMPUS SAFETY
A CONVERSATION ABOUT
CAMPUS SAFETY CAMPUS SAFETY BY GAVIN GAMEZ • TWITTER @GAV_GAMEZ
ORIGINALLY PLANNED FOR THE FALL, ASUO CONTINUES PLANNING ITS COUCH TALK, WHICH IS SET FOR WINTER TERM.
Originally planned to be a town hall, ASUO’s “couch talk” — a less formal alternative — has shifted its focus from the University of Oregon Police Department's Community Service Officers to the wider topic of campus safety. ASUO plans to hold the couch talk at some point during winter term for students to discuss the campus safety issues they’re most concerned about.
“There are a lot of students on this campus that have issues that they feel like need to be addressed that relate to campus safety that don’t connect to CSOs,” ASUO President Isaiah Boyd said.
He said it would be a disservice to students to focus solely on CSOs when there are other campus safety issues. “Students might be concerned about features of the campus where lighting is terrible,” he said, “or some students might say, ‘I don’t feel comfortable seeing a police officer with a gun.’”
Boyd said he thought town halls offered a limited amount of time for speakers and audience members. “There is not really a natural conversation, it's more of a ‘we are just going to give you all of the information that we know, and you have to take it and do with it as you please,” he said.
The couch talk is meant to create an interactive space for students to feel their ideas are being listened to, Boyd said. He hopes the talk will provide a framework for students to have their questions heard.
ASUO Communications Director Sam Simonett said the structure of the talk will have a traditional questions and answers section that will shift into a more candid conversation.
“We’ll be moderating to make sure the conversations remain on track and productive, but the central goal of the couch talk format is to make a space for students to express their concerns and feel heard,” Simonett said.
Simonett said this and future couch talks will be in conjunction with different departments on campus. “There will likely be messaging within their department as well, to faculty and students alike,” Simonett said.
ASUO will release a survey during the winter term to determine what topics they want to discuss during the couch talk. “If we get a lot of feedback around UOPD specifically, it’ll be a UOPD lens” Boyd said. “You have concerns about UOPD? We are going to get them into that space so you can talk to them.”
He said the survey will examine campus safety from a variety of different angles — including UOPD. “The theme I’m trying to push forward is UOPD isn’t the end all be all solution for safety on campus,” he said.
Boyd said ASUO is working with groups like the Multicultural Center, the Black Cultural Center, the Ethnic Studies Department, the Dean of Students and the University Health Center.
“If students relate or express concerns around mental health, I want to make sure that we get a counselor from the University Health Center to say, ‘Hey, look, your students are telling you this is an issue,’’’ he said.
While ASUO is communicating with campus groups for the couch talk, they aren’t a big part of the planning process. “Right now all of our partners are kind of on the outside of the project,” Boyd said. “We want it to be very student driven and student built so haven’t let them dive deep into the planning phase.”
Following UOPD Chief Matthew Carmichael’s departure from UO, Captain Jason Wade said he plans on attending the couch talk as acting chief and is eager to hear student feedback. UOPD also has an online feedback form for students to share their thoughts about CSOs.
Boyd said he hopes to have the couch talk in the middle of winter term before students become too preoccupied with finals.
“I want to give our team enough time to where after the couch talk we can then reassess and coordinate another event or smaller events or even just take the data we get from the couch talk and take it to administrators,” he said.
Simonett said students should be on the lookout for posts on the ASUO Instagram page as well as future ASUO newsletters containing information on the couch talk.
ASUO President Isaiah Boyd is helping organize the couch talk about campus safety. (Will Geschke/Emerald)
NEWSROOM DEMOGRAPHICS AND NEXT STEPS
The Emerald’s second census shows that, like in spring 2021, our average employee is a White woman in an unpaid role.
BY THE EMERALD ETHICS BOARD
Daily Emerald staff, students and other community members gather at Falling Sky on Oct. 9 2019 (Madi Mather/Emerald).
The Emerald’s second census results are in, reflecting our newsroom from fall 2021. One of the biggest findings: The Emerald is still too White, with a racial demographic gap between our newsroom staff and the student body who we strive to represent and serve.
This is concerning because when a newsroom doesn't reflect its readership, it reports with more blindspots and less awareness of the breadth of issues affecting its communities. For example, reporters and editors may weigh White issues more heavily and miss stories that matter to community members of color.
On June 1, 2021, the Emerald conducted our first census followed by an editorial reflecting on the results. With fall term behind us, the Emerald Ethics Board, a body of student staff who address ethical issues facing the newsroom, reflects on our newsroom’s demographics and sets goals moving forward. We aim to hold ourselves accountable in creating a newsroom that is not only more diverse by the numbers, but is a space where people of all backgrounds feel comfortable expressing themselves and their viewpoints.
We conducted the census in October 2021, and 67 out of about 95 employees responded, a rate of about 70%. The statistics mentioned in this editorial represent the demographics of respondents, but not necessarily our newsroom as a whole.
Key Findings:
Here are the key findings and how they compare to the spring 2021 newsroom census:
More than four out of five respondents (83.6%) are White. This means a greater percentage of our respondents are White compared to the spring term census where 78.8% identified as White.
Half (50.7%) are women, with another 6% identifying as nonbinary and 4.5% identifying as transgender.
About half (52.2%) identify as heterosexual, meaning more of our respondents identify as LGBTQ+ than in the spring.
The majority (83.6%) do not consider themselves to have a permanent or temporary disability. The number of respondents who identify as having a disability has grown.
Similarly to spring term, nearly two-thirds (65.7%) of respondents identified as “very liberal” and few respondents (4.5%) identified as either “very conservative” or “slightly conservative.”
About 39% of respondents have UO need-based scholarships or grants, 10.4% are not using financial aid and 65.7% have some kind of loan.
Over three-quarters (77.6%) of respondents do not receive a regular paid stipend. 13.4% of respondents identify as non-traditional college students.
About 18% of respondents identify as firstgeneration college students.
Some of this data aligns with the student body, based on the University of Oregon’s own demographic data. Some are difficult to compare because the university’s Demographics and Diversity report includes information on fewer demographic categories and only has categories for people who identify as male or female, excluding people whose gender identity does not fall into one of these two binary categories. The Emerald does have a similar amount of female-identified employees as UO which reported 55.4% of the student body to be female.
While UO as a whole is predominantly White, with over half (about 60%) of the student body being White, according to the Demographics and Diversity report, the Emerald is about 23% Whiter than the school as a whole. This is something that the Ethics Board is striving to change.
So where do we go from here?
It is not enough to simply reflect upon the data. The Ethics Board is committed to creating a more diverse newsroom, and that means setting goals and holding ourselves accountable.
Currently, White students are overrepresented in our newsroom in comparison to the UO student body. Our goal is for our newsroom staff to represent the diversity of the student body, including racially, as closely as possible, so we can thoroughly tell the stories that matter to our readers.
One way we plan to do this is by forming relationships with a diverse range of organizations around campus and using those relationships to share opportunities at the Emerald and recruit staff. Cultivating these relationships is important for working together and creating a newsroom that people want to write for. When we are not in the process of hiring, we want to encourage more letters to the editor so we can highlight the voices of those outside of our staff and welcome feedback for the newsroom.
Change also starts with the culture of our newsroom. Throughout the year, we plan to hold trainings related to diversity and bias. During fall term, we held a training session on the importance of newsroom diversity led by former-Oregonian reporter Eder Campuzano. In winter and spring terms we want to expand on this with trainings about implicit bias and engaging community members of different backgrounds.
Our newsroom is overly White which is easy to blame on the makeup of the UO student body, but we must also take accountability. It is our job to change the culture of the newsroom and make it a more diverse space that is more diverse in all aspects – and make the Emerald a paper that People of Color want to write for.
In writing this editorial, we hope to hold ourselves accountable to the community at large. We will write at least one more editorial during spring term to check our progress.
Editor’s note: Emerald style capitalizes all ethnicities, including Black, Brown and White when they refer to ethnicity. This decision was made by Emerald editors with consideration of outside perspectives, such as the National Society of Black Journalists, which recommends this approach.
UO’S DINING HALLS GRAPPLE WITH A SHORTAGE OF STUDENT EMPLOYEES
Staff of UO’s dining halls amp up hiring efforts with incentives amid a student employee shortage. Remaining employees said the shortage makes work stressful and that UO needs to increase their pay to attract more workers.
BY ALEXIS WEISEND • TWITTER @WEISEND_ALEXIS
Editor’s note: The Emerald interviewed eight current or former UO dining student employees for this story, and five current employees wished to remain anonymous. In cases where employment or housing could be impacted by someone telling their story, the Emerald allows the use of anonymous sources to avoid retaliation.
University of Oregon dining services faces a staffing shortage and has amped up efforts to attract student workers. However, students working in the dining halls said the lack of staffing combined with lower-than-average pay has created stressful work conditions.
“UO dining has been operating with fewer employees this fall amid a staffing shortage that has been noted locally and nationwide,” UO Director of Dining Services Tom Driscoll said.
About 750 students were employed by dining services prior to the pandemic, Driscoll said. At the start of fall term, dining services had about 100 student employees. That number increased to 550 over the course of fall term.
During the staffing shortage, student dining service workers said the dining halls have been high-stress environments. They said UO needs to increase its pay to attract more student workers.
A strenuous workload
Many student employees said that Unthank Hall, which has nine dining venues, especially struggles with the staffing shortage.
A student employee working in Unthank Hall said her job was more stressful fall term than during remote learning last year.
“A lot of people quit before starting, which they probably expected,” she said. “But, within the first month, people were dropping like flies.”
Another student employee who works in food preparation at Unthank Hall said she feels like she is doing multiple people’s jobs due to the staffing shortage.
“The reason I stayed in the dining halls for so long is because of the friends and the connections I made,” she said. “Because Unthank is just so big, and we are poorly run and just disjointed, I'm kind of separated from my friends who really made this job a lot more fun.”
UO junior Harrison Wood worked in Hamilton’s dining hall for two years before he became a student shift lead at Unthank Hall during fall term. He left to pursue another job after working three shifts. But those shifts involved extremely long work hours in a stressful environment due to the staffing shortage and student excitement over a new dining hall, he said.
“Everybody wants to eat there, and we don't have enough people to serve them,” Wood said. “Venues would just close once they ran out of food for hours until more food was cooked, and then they would reopen again, run out of food and close again.”
Wood said staff had difficulty fitting in breaks because of the staffing shortage. Student workers would often have to stay past their shift to wait for another worker to come in, he said.
A student employee working in Unthank’s dish room said keeping up with dishes is one of the main problems to arise from the hall’s staffing shortage. In the weeks before fall term began, he routinely worked 40 hour weeks, he said.
He said things are smoother now. “Previously, there would be mountains of dishes that were left for the next day or things would not be able to get cleaned that should be cleaned,” he said. “People would leave at 2 a.m. because they had no way of getting all the work done.”
Driscoll said three venues in Unthank Hall’s new PNW Public Market have not yet been opened due to the staffing shortage.
The student employee in Unthank Hall who works in food preparation said Unthank has more new hires than workers with previous experience in the dining halls.
She said the new hires cannot always cook on the line or produce food quickly, which slows operations down.
“You can hire all the people you want,” she said, “but if you don't hire the people that I actually need, then that doesn't help me.”
Driscoll said hiring efforts have been centralized so dedicated staff can work full-time hiring students.
The student employee in Unthank’s dish room said not allowing individual dining halls to hire students leaves certain areas in more need of staffing than others.
“One of the problems that we faced in the middle of the term was we had a lot of new hires, which we desperately needed, but they were all being sent to places where it made no sense for them to be,” he said. “They would just stand around and do nothing because there was no work to do. They would send them to the venues that weren't visited frequently.”
He said the dish room is essentially the backbone of Unthank, but it was left understaffed with about three workers on a good day. “There’s a complete disconnect in how things would flow and move from
Fresh Coffee, located in Global Scholars Hall, is one choice for food for on campus students. Dining halls on the University of Oregon campus struggle with understaffing. (Serei Hendrie/Emerald)
one place to the other,” he said.
Leaving for higher pay
UO increased the minimum starting wage for student employees from $12.75 an hour to $13.25 an hour to retain and attract additional staff, Driscoll said.
The university also offered various incentives to increase staff numbers, including a $200 student staff retention incentive for students who joined on or before Nov. 1, 2021 and worked through Dec. 4, 2021, up to three $50 payments for referring friends to University Dining and a $50 bonus after joining if students meet certain employment requirements.
Driscoll said the hiring, referral and retention bonuses offered to student employees will continue in winter term.
UO dining will also hold a student job fair Jan. 7 from 3 to 6 p.m. in the EMU Crater Lake room, and all new hires will receive a $100 signing bonus.
Michael LaQuay, a student employee at Unthank’s dining hall, said the perks UO offers have helped improve the staffing shortage and will continue to help as time goes on.
Driscoll said dining hall positions offer reduced price meals for student employees on every day they have a shift, as well as significant flexibility to accommodate their class schedules.
Many University Dining student employees said they want their wages to be increased to attract more workers and to be compensated for the amount of work the staffing shortage puts on them.
Multiple student employees said their co-workers have left for places like Target and McDonald’s because they can receive higher wages.
“I think pay and just simply not wanting to put yourself through an unnecessarily high-stress environment are probably the two main reasons why I would say a lot of people are leaving and trying to find work elsewhere,” a student employee working at Fresh Marketcafé said.
She said she tries to work as many hours as she can to compensate for what she could be making elsewhere.
Eliza Reyes said she quit working in Hamilton’s dining hall last year, and pay played a large factor
in her decision to leave. “I wouldn’t have been able to afford food and groceries this year if I was still working at the dining halls, so I left,” she said.
The student employee in Unthank’s dish room said, despite the wage increase, his co-workers have been attracted to jobs offering $15 an hour so they can make rent and pay for food.
“No one showed up, and everyone was surprised. They thought, ‘We’re only paying $13.25, and then you have to do double the work that you would expect to do and take up everyone else’s work.’ To me, it didn’t really make sense why they’d be surprised,” he said.
Students employees in the dining hall work alongside classified employees — full time, unionized employees.
The Oregon union SEIU Local 503’s higher education bargaining team, which negotiates contracts between unionized higher education employees and some public universities including UO, reached a tentative agreement with the universities on Dec. 3, 2021.
The tentative agreement includes a selective salary increase of one salary grade for classified food service workers and a $15 an hour minimum wage for all classified staff. Members of SEIU 503 are in the middle of voting whether or not to ratify the new contract, which will go into effect the first day of the month after ratification. The contact wouldn’t directly affect student workers, who aren’t unionized.
A level two classified food service worker currently has a salary that ranges from $13.73 to $16.49 an hour, while student employees’ wages range from $13.25 to $15 an hour.
“They essentially do the exact same work,” the student employee in Unthank’s dish room said, “although our compensation is quite different.”
Wood said he does not think the classified workers’ wage increases will lead to wage increases for student employees in the dining halls because students are not equipped to organize like a union to demand more pay. “They might be afraid of losing a job or whatever because they might need it to survive,” he said. “It might be difficult to try and demand something like that.”
HARRISON WOOD UO Junior
Dux Bistro, located in the Living Learning Center dorm, is one option for students to get food on campus. Dining halls on the University of Oregon campus struggle with understaffing problems. (Serei Hendrie/ Emerald)
Dining halls on the University of Oregon campus struggle with understaffing problems. (Serei Hendrie/ Emerald)
A sign in the Living Learning Center advertises work for students. Dining halls on the University of Oregon campus struggle with understaffing problems. (Serei Hendrie/Emerald)
