UO E-clips, April 12-14

Delays, costs would hamper Eugene hospital plan (Register-Guard): A Eugene City Council dream of putting the new McKenzie-Willamette hospital in the Riverfront Research Park may be fading fast. University of Oregon officials say it would take at least five years to clear out the research park and make room there for a hospital. If that’s accurate, McKenzie-Willamette officials said Friday, they will concentrate their site search on properties in north Eugene, Springfield and Glenwood, where construction could occur sooner.

Parking trauma at Autzen (Register-Guard, editorial): Why, it’s almost enough to make a University of Oregon booster yearn for the return of wrestling. Turns out the return of baseball at the UO means about 500 parking spaces at Autzen Stadium will be eliminated to make room for a new ballpark. That shouldn’t have surprised anyone. When UO officials last January announced plans to build the $15 million facility, they noted that it could devour up to 1,100 parking places -- an observation that seemed to get lost in all the hoopla over the return of baseball and the dazzling prospect of a gleaming new ballpark rising up next to Autzen.

Oregon baseball park cuts parking for football fans at Autzen (Associated Press): Some tailgaters will have smaller kitchens, and fans in recreational vehicles will see the end of a tradition as the University of Oregon builds a new baseball park and throws a curve at game-day football fans flocking to Autzen Stadium. It used to be common for tailgaters to get multiple passes and snag two spots to set up tents, grills and other equipment. RV owners used to line up at dawn for first-come, first-served places. All that will end, and hundreds of spots will be eliminated this fall as construction begins on the ball park in the northwest corner of Autzen's primary parking lot.

Names of college venues rarely change (Desert News, Utah): While names of professional sports venues change with the economic fortunes of corporate sponsors, the identities of college stadiums and arenas in Utah are all but set in stone. Campus venues typically are named in perpetuity for wealthy donors to the athletic program or distinguished coaches like LaVell Edwards at Brigham Young University. … "So much of what we see in professional sports percolates into the college scene," said Dennis Howard, a business professor at the University of Oregon's Warsaw Sports Marketing Center. "They are starting corporatize."

Climate change spells coal phaseout (Register-Guard guest commentary by Bob Doppelt, director of resource innovations and the Climate Leadership Initiative at the University of Oregon): Taking swift action to solve climate change will cost only a modest amount and may even benefit the economy in the long run. Delay, on the other hand, could be disastrous. That was the message delivered in late March by James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the first U.S. scientists to sound the alarm about global warming. Hansen released a report stating that catastrophic climate change is now likely if we fail to promptly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The autism alarm (Register-Guard editorial): What if you lived in a country where one child out of every 150 was kidnapped? There would be national outrage on all fronts, and we would see unprecedented action. In America, one in every 150 children is diagnosed with autism, and the dreams that came into the world with these children are kidnapped from their parents. For many parents, these dreams never return. … Second, there are already strong potential partners in this community at the University of Oregon through the College of Education and through the UO’s developing partnership with Oregon Health & Science University.

Degree can't always open door to middle class (Beacon Journal, Ohio): The man Gov. Ted Strickland picked to develop a 10-year plan to upgrade the state's system of higher education preached a simple sermon at the Akron Roundtable last month. ''Most people know that the single greatest indicator of how much an individual is going to earn in their lifetime is their level of education, but this is also true of the state as a whole,'' said Eric D. Fingerhut, chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents. … That's because handing out more college degrees doesn't guarantee better-paying jobs, according to Gordon Lafer of the University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center and author of the book The Job Training Charade.

The first Oregon Trail (Register-Guard): The question of how and when the first people came to the Americas is one of the great mysteries of archaeology. A find near Paisley in Lake County appears to have supplied an important piece of the puzzle. It seems the trail to a new life of opportunity led to Oregon long before the pioneers left Independence, Mo., in their wagon trains. University of Oregon archaeologist David Jenkins and his students found material in caves near Paisley that has been dated to about 14,300 years ago. The discovery has attracted worldwide attention because for decades, the oldest pieces of evidence of human settlement in the Americas were 13,000-year-old artifacts found near Clovis, N.M., and 14,500-year-old artifacts in Chile.