OHSU board agrees to take more time selecting next president

The board at Oregon Health & Science University will take more time to select a replacement for resigning president Danny Jacobs.

The board had planned to vote Friday on appointing Dr. Nate Selden to the role for a three-year term, less than a day after Jacobs announced he was stepping down.

Instead, after private deliberations, they agreed to table their vote and take more time, leaving Jacobs in place until a replacement is named.

Gov. Tina Kotek had expressed reservations about the vote, saying it would be a mistake to approve a new president without due diligence. Kotek, a Democrat, said in a statement Friday she appreciated the board taking her feedback.

At the meeting, board chair Chad Paulson thanked Selden for stepping up.

“I have no doubt he will continue to be a top candidate for the position,” Paulson said.

Jacobs has not explained his decision to resign, aside from saying it was for “personal reasons.”

“I am pleased to have had the opportunity to work for and with you,” he told the board.

The announcement came shortly after a faculty member sued the school, accusing OHSU of defamation and retaliation.

The lawsuit alleges that in 2023, OHSU‘s senior leadership, including Jacobs, scapegoated Dr. David Jacoby for the university’s mishandling of a student’s complaint that a professor was secretly and inappropriately photographing their classmates.

Jacoby, who was dean of the OHSU Medical School at the time, alleges in the lawsuit that the school’s civil rights office lost and then inappropriately dismissed the student’s complaint. When the media learned that the professor had been awarded a large bonus after he’d been accused of misconduct, Jacobs and his advisors tried to force Jacoby to say he’d been at fault, the lawsuit claims.

Biden apologizes for country’s boarding school policy of

Native American children

On Friday, President Joe Biden issued a formal apology for the federal government’s decadeslong policy of placing Native American children in boarding schools as part of forced assimilation.

The apology is a first. No other sitting U.S. president has publicly apologized for the federal boarding school policies that began as early as 1819 and lasted until at least the 1960s.

“After 150 years, the United States government eventually stopped the program, but the federal government has never — never — formally apologized for what happened until today,” Biden, a Democrat, said Friday to the cheers of a crowd assembled at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona.

“I formally apologize, as president of the United States of America, for what we did. I formally apologize and it’s long overdue.”

Throughout the boarding school era, the federal government took tens of thousands of Indigenous children from their homes and communities, forcing them into institutionalized residential schools usually operated by churches or government employees.

Children, sometimes as young as toddlers, endured rigid lives of strict discipline and harsh punishments as schools tried to erase students’ Native American culture and identity.

— Oregon Public Broadcasting