The University’s eight-person Academic Council officially endorsed University President Richard Lariviere’s New Partnership after deeming the proposal’s aim of improving academic quality to be feasible.
Drawn up by request of University Senate President Nathan Tublitz, the council’s “Academic Implications of New Partnership Proposal” concluded that a long-term stabilized funding stream would have an “indirect but highly significant” positive impact on the University’s academic mission.
According to the report, Lariviere’s New Partnership would keep the state from occasionally redirecting University student money to fund other state agencies unrelated to education.
Local control and sufficient funding, the council decided, would enable the University to allocate resources and capital according to academic priorities rather than the “vagaries of budgeting in Salem.”
“We simply cannot maintain the academic quality of the institution, much less improve it, without stable funding,” the report stated.
Under the New Partnership, this stable funding would hinge on the interest gained from the University Foundation’s investing of new endowment money in the private financial market.
When Lariviere penned the document last May, the foundation had projected a 9 percent average annual return on the massive principle.
The report came on the heels of a similar inquiry from the Senate Budget Committee released last November, which examined the financial benefits and risks associated with creating the $1.6 billion endowment the New Partnership calls for.
Considering the prospect of flagging support from the state, the SBC report found the New Partnership’s plan to be the best antidote to past decades of fiscal uncertainty.
In terms of the New Partnership’s proposed governance reform, the council sees a localized governing board as “more responsive to the University’s academic needs” than the Oregon State Board of Higher Education currently is or has the capacity to be.
The prospect of wrestling University control away from the state has been highly controversial as of late, with ASUO President Amelie Rousseau even going as far as to call the plan “a new divorce.”
However, Ian McNeely, Academic Council interim chair and University history professor, said he views the governance restructuring as a necessary freedom for the school.
“The New Partnership would replace what many regard as micromanagement by both the State Board and the State Legislature with “performance benchmarks” that would ensure that the UO remains accountable to the state,” McNeely said. “The main difference would be that the State Board would set these benchmarks and then leave it up to the UO leadership to determine how best to meet them.”
These criteria could pertain to anything from breadth of academic programs, to degree requirements, to admissions standards and tuition affordability.
McNeely said the specific goals are still largely up in the air, but remained confident that leaving the performance paradigm unchanged would be the worst option.
“The details are still sketchy, as we tried to signal in our report,” McNeely said. “But the hope is that the standards of accountability binding UO to its public mission would, if anything, be clearer under the new scheme than they are now.”
The council’s analysis concludes with an open-ended assurance that the proposed plan will hold flexibility tantamount to accountability.
“No one knows what new ideas and innovations in teaching and research will drive universities in 30 years, or even in five — much less how to measure them,” the report states. “Over the long lifespan of the partnership envisioned by the New Partnership plan, flexibility will be at least as important as accountability in ensuring that (the) UO lives up to its role as a public flagship research university.”
The Academic Council was created last year amidst a broad push for reexamining campus governance.
Charged with advising the University Senate on academic matters, the new institution is composed of University professors, chairs of faulty-led committees and top-level administrators.
Other Academic Council members include chemistry professor Paul Engelking, architecture associate professor Peter Keyes, counseling psychology professor Benedict McWhirter, mathematics associate professor Hal Sadofsky, English professor Gordon Sayre, Teaching and Learning Center Program Director Gail Unruh and Special Education Practicum Coordinator Michael Young.

[email protected]