Student leaders talk Frohnmayer with president

Representatives from student government and the university president met last Friday to talk about the Frohnmayer Report and how the two parties can work together to educate the Portland State community about the possibility of a financial restructure of the university.

President Wim Wiewel, his Chief of Staff Lois Davis and professor Melody Rose met with ASPSU President Jonathan Sanford and nearly a half-dozen other students, including other ASPSU members, to talk about the possible implications of the Frohnmayer Report.

The report, commissioned by the Oregon University System of former University of Oregon President David Frohnmayer, suggests that Oregon’s largest universities should be restructured into public corporations.

“[A restructure] doesn’t mean that there is no guidance from anybody or that there are no constraints,” Wiewel said in response to Sanford’s concerns that under a public corporate model, PSU would be free to charge exorbitant tuition rates and could be governed by a board of directors instead of the State Board of Higher Education.

Wiewel explaine that most nonprofits are actually considered public corporations and the idea of changing the financial restructure of a university is not a novel one.

“The state of Virginia recently gave more autonomy to schools in exchange for certain performance and success rates,” Wiewel said.

He also noted that the Frohnmayer Report is not a guideline for change, but serves as a conversation starter for how to solve the problem of the underfunding in higher education.

Student representatives present said they were concerned with PSU mirroring a public corporation model like that of Oregon Health and Science University, which Sanford claims recently experienced financial trouble as the economy took a downturn.

“OHSU never got a state-funding floor,” Wiewel said. A floor is a tenant in the president’s white paper—a draft document outlining the basic principles he believes are needed to make any kind of financial restructure successful.

Wiewel said a funding floor, or a minimum amount of state money to be provided every year that can be adjusted for inflation, would have to be guaranteed by the Oregon Legislature in any kind of restructuring agreement.

Sanford expressed the concern that students will lose the ability to lobby the Legislature for low tuition rates under a public corporate model.

Wiewel said that students could still affect tuition rates through the Legislature by lobbying to have the Oregon Opportunity Grant fully funded and for other types of financial aid to be increased.
“If we could solve it all with money from the state we would,” he said.

Formerly, students in Oregon paid one-third of the total cost of their education and the state covered two-thirds. That model is now reversed, Wiewel said.

“The challenge I’m faced with is that students are hurting now, and the current model isn’t working,” he said.

Sanford said most students don’t know about the restructure recommendation and suggested that administrators and ASPSU co-create a public campaign to get the word out about the topic, which will likely be a major issue in the 2011 legislative session.

“We’ve identified a number of areas for further discussion, and should move forward from here,” Wiewel said.