Don’t give up control

Former University of Oregon President Dave Frohnmayer proposed that Oregon’s four-year universities should be governed by public corporations to preserve the economic future of Oregon’s higher education.

This is not the right way to go to preserve our educational system.

In a paper released last November, Frohnmayer made suggestions to change the way that Portland State does business—by handing it over to corporations and moving away from the politics of the Oregon Legislature. If you’re anything like me, your ears perked up and the hair on your neck bristled as soon as you heard the words “university” and “corporation” in the same sentence.

Though he almost certainly means well, Frohnmayer’s suggestions for restructuring the university system seem misguided. We obviously have a funding problem: Funds for higher education have fallen steadily in Oregon over the last 20 years. This problem, however, cannot be fixed by simply being ignored.

The problem is that state legislatures, for some reason, have undervalued the importance of providing more of the budget to higher education. Frohnmayer notes in his report that only one-seventh of PSU’s funding comes from the state. Compare that with community colleges’ 59 percent, and a clear source problem begins to emerge.

To Frohnmayer, it therefore follows that the budget and funding would be handed over to a public corporation. Some believe it’s better to scrap the whole program and go for a new one instead of appealing to legislatures for more funds by using cogent arguments based on the importance of universities to boost morale and economic growth, or raising more funds by—horror of all horrors—raising taxes for schools.

This is problematic due mostly to the interests of a public corporation, even though in this case, the corporations created would be university corporations, the consequence of separating further from the state is the possibility of interest groups acting with profits in mind and not necessarily for university gains.

Though the system proposed would create corporations that are official government agencies, the leaders of these corporations will have the power to act with relative freedom—as long as it is claimed to serve a public interest—and will effectively control university assets and income. This serves to further separate decision making about funding, tuitions and salary from a democratically elected body. The odds of democratic deficit would effectively be raised.

If part of the problem is inefficient bureaucracy—which, according to Frohnmayer’s report, it is—it doesn’t exactly follow that creating more agencies would help mitigate the problem (agencies, in this case, meaning public corporations independent of the state system created by the State Board of Higher Education).

On that note, bureaucracy may get a bad rep, but oversight is not necessarily a bad thing. The state should have oversight privileges on entities that serve the public good. I think we can all agree that higher education is indeed a public interest. We should be focusing on making the current system more efficient and articulating the need for a bigger budget than going in a direction that may prove disastrous.

Finally, the timeline needs to be considered on a topic so vital to such an important public interest. The Frohnmayer Report was issued in November, yet Frohnmayer is pushing the Independent Public Corporation Act to be passed this month. A decision such as this should not be considered lightly. Time is needed to flesh out details and figure out who will be running what before a responsible decision can be made.

Though I appreciate the effort by Frohnmayer to better our university system, handing the reins of a public university to independent corporations is not the answer we need. What we need is awareness, and for Oregonians who value education to elect officials who will fight for higher education in the Legislature.