Ron Saxton draws his experience from 23 years as a lawyer and two years serving as the chairman of the Portland Public School Board. He graduated from Willamette University in 1976 and received his law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1979. Saxton founded the Ater Wynne law firm in 1988 and was elected in 1997 to serve on the Portland Public School Board. He and his wife Lynne live in Portland.
Q: Why should students take an interest in this primary election?
A: The person elected governor this year, if they’re re-elected, will be governor until 2011. The window in which students are going to both be finishing their education and entering the workforce is going to be under the leadership of the next governor. So I can’t think of anybody who should care more about it than current students.
Q: Would you back initiatives to raise tuition at Oregon universities beyond the 3 percent a year cap?
A: I don’t have a yes-or-no answer to that because the challenge is that we want to keep the university system as affordable as we can for students – I’m the first in my family to ever have a college education, and I understand how critical it is to succeed in life; and I don’t want to do anything that interferes with access to it. On the other hand, we have to find ways to finance the education system. I don’t want to first look at raising tuition. I want to look at how we can have a better investment of state funds in higher education and how we can deal with some of the cost issues. So, I don’t start out saying, “Let’s raise tuition,” but I also can’t completely rule it out.
Q: Do you support higher pay for
university faculty?
A: Yes. I think this is a matter of being competitive. Oregon needs to be attracting and keeping the best faculty. A lot of wonderful faculty members stay in our system because they like being in Oregon, but you can’t build a system based on people who take less pay because they like it here. We have to make our pay scale for our university employees at all levels competitive with other states.
Q: How do you plan on helping students afford college when scholarship funding in this state is being cut?
A: By not cutting it. I think we have to grow the scholarship funding. It’s the flip side of the tuition question. We have to make sure education is affordable for all students and I want to make sure every single Oregon student has access to a college education. That means adequate scholarship funds. It’s about growing the Oregon economy so instead of 8 percent unemployment we go down to 4 percent. We’d have a lot more revenue in the state that we could deal with, and make education our top priority.
Q: Oregon universities are facing record enrollment rates, and at the same time funding is being cut. How do you propose Oregon Universities keep a high quality of education?
A: We can’t keep on cutting the funding of it and expect them to keep a high quality of education. We have to look at higher education as one of the most important investments we make. It is an investment in our economy as well as an investment in our students. As we grow the economy, we have to invest more in education, and even before we grow the economy we have to treat higher education as a top priority. I think that’s the right attitude.
Q: How do you plan on making yourself accessible to students if you’re elected?
A: I would expect to continue visiting university campuses, I would expect to appoint students to serve on various boards and commissions, I would expect to regularly seek out opportunities to meet with students and I would expect to have a very aggressive and significant internship program that got students active in working in my offices.
Q: Do you think Oregon’s education system is adequately preparing students for college?
A: I think there’s a lot of wonderful teachers doing a good job. But we are not doing a good enough job. All around the state you have teachers who I think are doing heroic jobs to prepare students. And I think the result is: Many, many students come out of our system very well prepared. We have high SAT scores, on average, and there’s a lot of things we should be proud of. So individually, many schools are doing an excellent job of educating students. But overall, we are leaving too many students behind.
Q: What should this state do to keep Oregon’s top students at in-state colleges and universities?
A: It has to offer the programs that make people want to go to school here. We have to have a university system that offers the range and quality of programs that make students believe this is the place they want to choose. You can’t force people to come here; you have to convince them they want to be here.
E-mail reporter Brook Reinhard at [email protected]
Candidate wants to increase student scholarship, faculty pay
Daily Emerald
May 7, 2002
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