University President Dave Frohnmayer is preparing to retire June 30 after 15 years in office. He will be succeeded by Richard Lariviere, who takes office July 1. Frohnmayer sat down with the Emerald to discuss his presidency’s successes, struggles and criticism, and respond to questions about campus controversies, from rising tuition to the Diversity Plan to the role of intercollegiate athletics. In the first of a three-part
series, Frohnmayer discusses the financial difficulties the University faces, developments in the president’s office during his tenure and his most challenging tasks, and the prospect of separating from the Oregon University System.
Allie Grasgreen: In your eyes, as you depart, what are the two biggest challenges facing the University?
Dave Frohnmayer: Well, it’s always financial. I mean, one of them is always financial. And that’s to get sufficient flexibility from the state and other people who actually hamper us, even though they think they’re trying to help us so that we can find our own way, freed of state restrictions. Example: The state takes all the interest payments on the tuition that you pay and they never come to us, they go to general state purposes. That’s an outrage. We’ve been trying to change that for a decade. For example, even if we were able because of it to give greater financial aid by increasing tuition and then adjusting according to family income, it’s pretty hard to get tuition freedom in order to set it to our own market. And just those two things alone would give us much more capacity. We’re held back by state rules on our overall compensation package and how it’s funded. If we were given freedom, we could both save money, protect our employees and operate more efficiently. So just, three quick things that come to mind.
The other is more subtle, it’s more magical, it’s more elusive. And that is for the campus to have the sense of self-confidence that is justified by how good it is. And our students are stronger than they’ve ever been, our faculty are more energetic, productive than they’ve ever been, but sometimes we seem inhibited by a sense of not trying to be as strong, as grand, as confident, and behave as well as we could … the self-concept needs, I think, continuing reinforcement.
AG: What do you mean ‘behave as well’?
DF: You know, we’re sometimes caught up by excessive infighting, when we needn’t be, when that really is distracting to everybody. Much more of a sense of building things together.
AG: So, you mean different constituencies on campus?
DF: Yeah, yeah.
AG: OK. So have there been any significant developments in your office since you announced your retirement last year? What have you guys been working on?
DF: We made a long master list of things that ideally would be done by the conclusion of my tenure so that they wouldn’t carry over and be distractions in the next. And some of them, actually some of them have gone quite smoothly: the succession in athletic director, the succession in coaches in major sports. Those are things that can eat a new president alive, if they’ve not been done or not been done properly. So getting the arena started on a path that’s gonna end up with construction on that building rather than cost us maybe tens of millions of dollars more if we had to wait. You know, we’ve got to replace Mac Court. It’s an accident waiting to happen.
AG: So what about on the academic side?
DF: (Pause.) The Big Ideas Plan that the campus is engaged with is, I think, one of the great successes of this academic year even though it hasn’t come to a conclusion yet. We’ve had greater, broader participation and engagement with deciding what the next intellectual themes are that will really drive collaborations on this campus. I’ve seen more productive energy about that this year than I’ve every seen in any planning exercise in my entire career in higher education. Credit for that needs to go to the provost, Jim Bean. But it’s something that we decided upon last year and knew that we needed to implement, and we’ve done it in a more shorter time frame than would have ordinarily have been the case at other institutions, and I think the time frame has actually accelerated and broadened the interest in it because it’s really not shown any sign of flagging. If anything, people are even more interested in it. So it’s been a good participatory process and one that I really think is going to serve the campus in the future.
AG: So when you announced your retirement, you told me that you were planning to continue teaching your freshman seminar and to write a book about theories of leadership.
DF: Yup.
AG: Is that still the plan?
DF: It’s still the plan. I mean, I have – I’m a tenured law professor. So my academic home is the law school, but I’ll be working with the honors college and I’ll be working with certainly developing that seminar, maybe even to a broader audience – hopefully to a broader audience. The thing that hurts every year is to see the waiting list, which is at least as long as the class list. And while that’s gratifying, it also means that students who were motivated enough to want that experience didn’t get it.
AG: So what do you think is the biggest challenge you have faced during your presidency?
DF: (Pause.) Trying to sustain hope while scrapping to find money to do the things that we needed to do. I guess what I’m proudest of is that we’ve never given up hope. And we’ve done the things we needed to do to break out of the victim mold, if you will say. You know, rather concretely, we started planning our current capital campaign in the depths of the dot com post-9/11 recession. Most institutions … of our size or capacity were saying, ‘Let’s just weather this out.’ We were trying to figure out a coiled spring approach, so that when things did get better, we’d already be poised to capture it. And we did. I mean, we raised more money than anybody thought was possible in our campaign. By a lot. $853 million and counting. And this year we’ll raise $100 million, even though the campaign is over. So, you know, I think maintaining a sense of optimism and momentum. Depression and cynicism never build anything. All they are is energy sucks. And so that’s why I work really hard to make sure people don’t fall into those all too easy patterns.
AG: OK. That kind of leads into my next couple of questions. You have called for independence from Oregon University System a couple of times in setting fee policies and tuition. In October of 2007, you said that we needed more state funding to continue fulfilling our academic mission. Back then, the state provided 13 percent of the University’s funds, and next year it’s looking like it’s going to drop to below 10 percent.
DF: We don’t know, but it’s probable. I mean, it’s likely.
AG: Mm-hmm. So my question is, is it a feasible move to separate from OUS or to move in that direction, and if so, what would the UO lose and what would it gain?
DF: Well, what it gains is greater power to navigate what is a very uncertain financial future for the state in the immediate future, anyway. We’d want the ability, probably, to grow a bit in size because that will help as long as we can maintain the quality of undergraduate education. Growth will actually help us survive because of the revenue that represents. We have to keep Oregon as a hot brand, and it is a hot brand right now, but that means you can’t relax quality standards. If we have greater flexibility, then we can move more nimbly, rather than waiting for six other institutions and the state legislature every two years to decide what they want to do. And that doesn’t mean we don’t care what happens to other institutions, it means that each ship ought to be able to float and sail on its own bottom and not be towed by others.
What you may lose is that old adage, out of sight is out of mind. So if people think you’re free, you know, freer, I hope they don’t think you’re also less worthy of state support
at some appropriate percentage of effort. Or that you don’t give – I mean, we’re willing to be held to performance standards. We almost always meet them, anyway. When we meet our performance standards, we would expect to have an appropriate state appropriation that’s equal to the value added that we represent to the students and the people of the state.
AG: So would that mean we wouldn’t be completely separate from the state?
DF: Well, being completely separate doesn’t mean that we forgo state appropriations. I mean, I think that’d be toxic. Even (Oregon Health and Science University), which is an independent public corporation, still has a requirement that they be funded, and there’s an inflationary adjustment to their funding.
AG: So it would be more like following OHSU’s model than a private institution’s?
DF: Yeah, but so many people don’t like that model. I think we ought to explore something that fits the University of Oregon, not that just copies OHSU. But the notion of greater independence, I mean, that’s certainly one model where it’s happened.
AG: OK. And with state funding going down, it’s also likely that tuition is going to go up, of course. But that would also happen if we tried to move away from OUS, correct, because we would want to raise scholarships?
DF: It’s going to happen anyway. But bear in mind, we raised $100 million for student scholarships in our campaign. So we have resources of a kind I wouldn’t have dreamed of; I didn’t think we could raise $100 million. And you know, we’re not done there either, because there’s more potential scholarship gifts in the pipeline.
But the other thing is that if you are sufficiently nimble, you can raise your tuition and give financial aid out of the increment that you raise. Remember the surcharge that you are so politely paying this term, but which students urged us to adopt? The first 30 cents on every dollar goes to financial assistance, of any of the surcharge money. So any tuition increase would always be accompanied by a financial aid component so as to keep it family-income neutral. That’s our objective.
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