The University’s final presidential candidate Richard Lariviere addressed members of the University community Tuesday on issues affecting campus. Topics ranged from funding and the budget crisis to sustainability and the necessity of intellectual passion.
Members of the presidential search committee told the Emerald last week they were excited to present Lariviere to the campus. “As a member of the search committee, I am proud Richard was the finalist, and I think the University and Eugene community will celebrate his arrival,” said ASUO President Sam Dotters-Katz.
“Richard’s story is one people will really find compelling,” he added.
The crowd’s reaction to Lariviere on Tuesday was mainly positive. Most in the audience were members of the faculty and administration, and they asked nearly all of the questions.
One of the few student attendees, senior Joe Volpi, said, “I thought he was really good – articulated the needs of the University really well,” and he thinks Lariviere would bring a great deal of knowledge and experience to the University.
Lariviere said building a new funding model for public higher education is one of his priorities, and said he is coming to the University because it is a leader in a new kind of model. This is one of the highest quality universities in the U.S., he said, and “you all have been doing that on a bread-and-water diet for years.”
The bare bones budget of the University means a 30-percent budget cut from the state has less effect here than it does at a university more dependent on state funding, he said. It reduces the likelihood of layoffs, Lariviere added, because there are no positions that can be cut while maintaining quality of teaching and research.
However, the University’s lack of dependency on the state of Oregon makes it more dependent on alumni, Lariviere said, and the challenge he sees for the future is to convince all alumni – not just the most successful or wealthy – that they have a responsibility to the University after they leave.
“We must take a page from our friends in the private university sector,” he said, and recognize that “we all have an obligation to give back.”
Sustainability, Lariviere said, is the current generation’s civil rights movement – an issue that is “transformative, good for everybody and it’s a pain in the neck.”
It’s also an issue students won’t drop, he said, and “they’d better not, because it’s absolutely crucial.”
He talked of the immediacy of climate change and the importance of the University being responsible in its building practices, and the temptation to build cheaply rather than sustainably. To that end, he asked for “the sustained, clear demand from the community that we don’t make that compromise.”
And while funding and sustainability are among Lariviere’s priorities for his future time at the University, it was the discussion of intellectual passion and the pursuit of it that not only kept him talking, but left his voice choked and shaking with emotion.
A liberal arts education, he said, is important because students today have no way of knowing what their careers will be. He estimated that 50 percent of the current generation’s careers will entail jobs that don’t exist yet.
Therefore, it is useless to plan a major based on projected career or salary, he said, citing a more important criterion: passion. People become good leaders because their enthusiasm for their chosen expertise shows through to others, he said, adding that the same passion makes for good faculty.
While at the University, he said he hopes to “create an atmosphere in which people are free to indulge that passion,” because “it’s irresistible.”
Lariviere spoke the same way about study-abroad programs. One hundred percent of students should study abroad, he said, because it teaches students about themselves more than almost anything else. “Nothing does that quicker, more intensely, more dramatically, than study abroad,” he said.
Lariviere has studied, researched, taught and traveled in many countries and was a professor of Sanskrit at the University of Texas at Austin.
Lariviere will give another public forum, this one open to students, staff and faculty, in the EMU Ballroom today at 11:30 a.m.
And while the crowd seemed to like Lariviere, the feeling appears to be mutual. In fact, he finds his comfort with the University almost unsettling: “I don’t know if you’re hiding the crazy uncles away from me at this stage.”
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