The University could own stock in its own research if voters approve a state ballot measure that would legalize the practice.
Ballot Measure 10 on the May 21 primary election ballot would allow companies to purchase and market university-developed products with company stock instead of cash, a transaction currently barred by the Oregon Constitution.
Supporters say passage of the measure would not only increase revenue for universities but would also encourage small business growth, which could create jobs and help stimulate the struggling Oregon economy.
“Most of the job growth in the U.S. has come from small companies,” said Jim Coonan, Oregon University System director of business alliances. “They’ve got terrific ideas, but they don’t have the cash to acquire those ideas.”
Measure 10, Coonan said, would give start-up companies lacking capital more access to potentially profitable ideas and inventions, and universities would stand to profit along with successful new businesses, Coonan said.
Though nobody wrote an argument against the measure for the state voter pamphlet, an opponent of the measure, tax activist Don McIntire, said the proposal has drawbacks.

“If a university starts angling to participate and receive stock from research they help develop, I know there will be an impulse for the school to turn away from pure research and go after profits,” said McIntire, president of the Taxpayer Association of Oregon. “Also, I don’t like government in business.”
But Don Krahmer, co-chairman for the political action committee supporting the measure, argued that the measure is narrowly written to prevent excessive government intervention in business and that so-called pure research won’t suffer. Nearly half the nation’s universities own stock in companies using scholarly research, and noncommercial research has not declined, he said.
Though not directly, the University has for years owned stock in companies using its research.
The University Foundation, an independent corporation that raises funds for the University, receives, manages and controls the stock in a “blind trust” relationship with the school, said Don Gerhart, director of the University’s technology transfer office, which brokers agreements between researchers and businesses.
The foundation has complete control over the stock, and the University administration is unable to make recommendations.
Though this arrangement allows the University to profit from the success of businesses using its research, Measure 10 would help universities attract more businesses and “would make it much more straight forward for us,” Gerhart said.
“Because we can’t take equity payments directly, at some point we have to negotiate transfer of equity to a third party,” he said. “Understandably, that confuses things.”