On March 27, attorney Don Shelley Willner of Trout Lake, Wash., passed away at the age of 85. Although his name may not be immediately familiar to students and staff at Portland State, Willner was a major force in getting Portland State College recognized as a university in the 1960s.
On March 27, attorney Don Shelley Willner of Trout Lake, Wash., passed away at the age of 85. Although his name may not be immediately familiar to students and staff at Portland State, Willner was a major force in getting Portland State College recognized as a university in the 1960s.
In 1963, near the beginning of his term as an Oregon state senator, Willner was part of a committee that proposed to the Board of Governors at the City Club of Portland that Portland State College become a university.
The establishment of a major university in Portland had already been discussed as a way to address the need for graduate studies in science, engineering and math, but the exact location was still up in the air.
The committee suggested that because so much of Oregon’s population was concentrated in the Portland metropolitan area and so much money was collected from the area to support higher education, there was a responsibility to provide more opportunity for higher education to Portland-metro residents.
Portland State College’s faculty, location and facilities, the committee argued, made it “an obvious base on which to build a university for the metropolitan area.”
The committee ruled out private colleges in the area, namely Reed College, Lewis and Clark and the University of Portland, because the addition of graduate studies were thought too overwhelming at the time for the private funding on which those colleges relied.
Besides being a part of the committee behind the written proposal, Willner also took the issue to a Ways and Means educational subcommittee meeting in 1965. Accompanied by a multitude of scientists to help him argue the need for more programs in graduate level technical sciences, then-Sen. Willner discussed a $2.3 million bill to transform Portland State College into Portland State University.
Willner’s efforts, along with those of his like-minded colleagues, led to the establishment of PSU in 1969.
In 1980 Willner assisted PSU again by representing five PSU faculty members in a discrimination case. According to The College that Would not Die: the First Fifty Years of Portland State University, 1946–1996 by Gordon Dodds, the case Plenk v. Oregon State Board of Higher Education, was brought to the board by “twenty-two female faculty members of the system, on the grounds that they had been discriminated again in the violation of the Civil Rights Law of 1972 prohibiting discrimination in employment on the grounds of gender.”
Willner was from New York City and moved to Portland soon after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1951. Willner, a liberal Democrat, fought legal battles for the environment and labor unions and was a fierce advocate for civil rights in all their forms.
During Willner’s term as senator, he drafted the Oregon Scenic Waterways Act of 1970 and the Oregon Bottle Bill of 1971, which requires drink containers to be returnable for a minimum refund value. It was the first of its kind.
In 1985–86, Willner was part of a legal team that convinced the Oregon district court to overturn the 1943 conviction of Minoru Yasui, who had been found guilty of defying the curfew imposed on Japanese Americans.
Willner was a lawyer for various Northwest unions, chaired the Committee on Migratory labor and championed farm workers’ rights alongside Cesar Chavez. In 2010, the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association named him “Person of the Year,” and he was active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League.
Though Willner often supported causes through his capacity as an attorney, he also recognized the limits of the law. In a 1961 news commentary he called “Discrimination,” Willner wrote about the refusal of a Caucasian homeowner to sell to an African American home buyer, a decision that the Washington State Supreme Court stood behind despite a state law prohibiting racial discrimination.
He wrote that even with laws in place to create more equal opportunities, creating these opportunities was the duty of “every Oregonian.”
“Law alone does not solve problems,” Willner wrote in his commentary. “It can help create a climate of opinion, which makes progress toward human dignity more possible.”
Willner’s life was filled with travel to places like Bhutan and Patagonia. He was nationally ranked in men’s singles and doubles tennis, even in his 80s, and hiked and biked regularly. He is survived by his wife, Marjorie Burns, and by four daughters, a stepdaughter, three stepsons and nine grandchildren.
