Today’s front page is giving you a story about a political action committee in Oregon: Oregonians for Higher Education Excellence. It was started by some high-profile Oregonians, including Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle and a former member of the State Board of Higher Education, James Von Schlegell. The PAC is a lobbying group seeking to encourage legislation to create institutional governing boards in Oregon. @@https://secure.sos.state.or.us/orestar/cneSearch.do?cneSearchButtonName=search&cneSearchFilerCommitteeId=15708@@ @@http://www.columbia.com/Tim-Boyle/Officers_Tim_Boyle,default,pg.html@@ @@http://www.uomatters.com/2011/12/2011-presidential-search-committee.html@@
Specifically, according to a page on Secretary of State Kate Brown’s website, wealthy University donors Charles Lillis, Pat Kilkenny and Phil Knight have each ponied up $65,000, which along with a $62,500 contribution from Boyle and some other contributions has totaled their efforts up to $324,500. It’s clear what this is about — a comment from Interim President Robert Berdahl at Wednesday’s tuition sit-in made that especially clear. @@http://www.sos.state.or.us/@@ @@http://www.uoregon.edu/findpeople/person/Robert*Berdahl@@ @@https://secure.sos.state.or.us/orestar/cneSearch.do?cneSearchButtonName=search&cneSearchFilerCommitteeId=15708@@

“Institutional boards will enable us to have a good deal of private philanthropy,” he said, “because there are a lot of our major donors and donors who believe that an institutional board that cares about this institution … will inspire confidence in donors.”
Translated: Knight and other wealthy people will give us more money if the body in charge of us is an institutional board. So they’re putting money into this PAC with the hope they can donate more to the University in the future. And it seems weird for us to complain about donors giving us more money, but given the already high level of influence Knight and those others have on things at the University, we feel a bit uneasy about them starting a PAC to influence government action.
Beyond that, it’s important to point out that such actions are not going to decrease tuition — inflation and other factors are going to make sure of that. The least former President Richard Lariviere ever said about his New Partnership plan to start an institutional board for the University and an endowment for its funding was that it would be able to stabilize what the increase in tuition would be. @@http://lariviere.uoregon.edu/@@
(Not that that would be a bad thing. I don’t think this year’s resident undergraduate seniors would dislike knowing they’d be paying $2,000 more in their fourth year as much as the current scenario.)
We need to look at this situation more holistically. Phil Knight giving a couple chunks of change to a PAC in support of institutional boards might help us stabilize tuition, but it might set him, Boyle and Kilkenny up with a bit too much power.