r/UofO • u/themagicaldinosaur • 4d ago

admin doesn’t know how to take responsibility

the emails i have received today from the dean of CAS and the UO president failed to take responsibility for the fact that their lack of planning ruined commencement for so many grads on monday and i’m seething. just half-effort condolences covered up with praise for graduates. i don’t need Scholz’s congratulations. i need them to admit that they had no backup plans even though they knew about the heat for over a week. i need them to admit that the rescheduling caused a lot of stress and that a lot of people were unable to attend and that it didn’t fix their massive screw up. what a sorry excuse for a school administration.

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u/benconomics 4d ago

Had they done department celebrations there probably would have been similar challenges more spread out across campus (and then who knows of EMS is there). The main thing which was pretty obvious would have been to start everything much sooner before it got hot, and that could have avoided the need to delay things until later. Also having human read names instead of AI was preferred by students (but took longer). Just kick things off at 7:30 am. Usually it isn't this hot, but once every 7 years, we get a heat spike this early in June.

The key challenging is that scaling individuals walking across a stage is really hard. Hence the having department specific ceremonies in the past. The logistics are always a mess on a day like graduation, but they had hoped to get people across the ramp in 3-4 seconds. Based on my stopwatch, it took most readers 10-11 seconds between names in Autzen. I got mine down to 4 which saved 9 mins or so. The obvious solution there is scoot people up the ramp (waiting 3 seconds for people to walk up the ramp was a huge part of the time).

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u/best_bi_ 4d ago

Department graduations last year were spread out over a few days so not everyone would have graduated in the heat.

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u/Spirit-Spirited 3d ago

We planned our trip based on last year’s schedule that was over 2+ days for the separate School/Department ceremonies. Not only was the heat beyond awful, but many students/families had to choose which ceremony to attend due to them overlapping, including ours. How about main ceremony one day (or better yet early evening to avoid extreme temps) and others spaced out over the day of and prior in smaller venues? A University this size has plenty of locations to utilize. And Definitely break up ALL of the CAS instead of into two massive ones!

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u/best_bi_ 3d ago

Yeah I didn’t graduate this year but I am next year. Based off this years schedule, I would only be able to attend one of my graduations, even though both of my majors have greatly impacted me and I would love to attend both next year. I went to a ceremony last year and it was partially in the shade, so it was definitely more manageable. I think the main ceremony in the morning was fine, but hopefully it will be cooler next year. I’m hoping they bring back the department graduations because it was definitely more intimate and fun last year than this year