Oregon State University, Ed Ray & The Corporate Money Machine

Oregon State University President Ed Ray took another step forward in what looks like a plan or process for handing education over to corporate interests yesterday. According to Ray, in 2025 OSU will be as much as 60 percent larger, more focused on specific research areas, more international and "built upon goals of student success and faculty achievement."

Ray's annual State of the University addresses to the OSU Faculty Senate rarely contain surprises. The speeches confirm direction, draw some media attention and announce to the world that the OSU administration is fully behind or in step with big business and government and not particularly interested in anything that may be associated with critical thinking. Thursday's speech announced that the University will adopt the divisional structure used by corporate America and bigger university players elsewhere who are focusing more on world markets and seeking more corporate support. It is a kind and gentle means of telling Oregon's parents and students to kiss off and signalling to the relatively few faculty still in the liberal arts that they should be churning out their resumes. It also signals to staff that there will be more job cuts, or perhaps a few more dead-end jobs.

“If we are successful in setting and sustaining a course toward greater excellence, I believe that Oregon State University can be among the top 15 land grant universities by 2025,” an OSU press release quotes Ray as saying. “Consequently, we will be an international research university that attracts the very best students and faculty from around the world to our education and research programs.”

We wonder why a university must plan to be "built upon goals of student success and faculty achievement." What is OSU based on now if not that? And we wonder what adopting and furthering this vision of becoming an "international research university" means to an institution which is (or has been) paid for by Oregon's taxpayers and is one of only two U.S. universities designated a land-, sea-, space- and sun-grant institution.

Defenders of the status quo remind us that OSU is not really a public institution at this point, and has not been for some time. Privatization and grants have made the University dependent upon other sources of income and support. We respond that OSU grew as a public institution and that it should remain fully so. This move, as with so much of what has happened in higher ed in Oregon over the past 20 years or so, continues a trend which takes education and educational resources away from the state, pays for private industrial research and development with public dollars, enriches cliques of administrators and contractors and does little or nothing to meet the state's needs.

Ray and his administration are on a roll and corporate America and the military-industrial and sports industries are paying for part of it at our expense. OSU won a record $252 million in external research funding in 2008-09, and private giving of $82 million. The Campaign for OSU has raised more than $534 million toward its goal of $625 million, with almost two years left to go. What influences and trade-offs come with such funding and funding sources is a fair question. OSU's adoption of the corporate model is an obvious sign of a shift in direction and desired results, but what else is being bought with this money?

We are not comforted when President Ray notes that this money came in "during the worst financial year since the Great Depression.” Given the state's high unemployment, the housing crisis, the problems with the state budget and the need for elusive social services we can think of many other uses for this money. Higher ed classified staff just accepted a contract with furlough days. Could none of this money be used to offset the hit staff and faculty just took?

Ray is telling us to get used to it. "This kind of fund-raising success will have to become the norm not the exception," the OSU press release quotes him as saying. “As great as these efforts have been, we must more than double the value of our annual awards of research grants and contracts by the year 2025...And we must more than double the annual fund-raising level achieved through our campaign, which will require at least one and perhaps two additional campaigns over the next 15 years.”

It is a kind of "Let them eat cake" remark if understood in its proper context. President Ray waited until union negotiations were concluded to announce his plans and shout with joy about what's in his wallet. His announcement now also gets OSU out of the target sights during the January vote and the coming legislative session. We can easily picture OSU opening campus call centers and hiring work-study students to do the needed future fundraising, but it is more likely that such work would be either contracted out to the Third World or left to the administrators who seem to be hitting the cocktail circuits more frequently these days.

Get worried when any OSU administrator talks about "a year-long transparent process," as President Ray did. It means that the OSU administration spent good time and money talking to themselves and buying consensus and silence while checking which way the winds were blowing and pushing a corporate agenda. It also means that someone is about to get pushed into the oncoming traffic. The "year-long transparent process" and the needed "strategic investments" to pay for that process and what will follow have created university divisions which now look like this:

Division of Earth Systems Science: College of Agricultural Sciences, College of Forestry, and College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences;

Division of Health Sciences: College of Health and Human Sciences, College of Pharmacy, and College of Veterinary Medicine;

Division of Business and Engineering: College of Engineering and College of Business;

Division of Arts and Sciences: College of Liberal Arts, College of Science, and College of Education.

It is probably no accident that Arts and Sciences has been listed last. The OSU administration sees them as bottom feeders, I'm sure, but an organizational flow chart could also picture an evolutionary process with the strongest wolves representing the Division of Earth Systems Science thinning out the academic herd and the vultures roosting at the Kerr Administration building.

The Oregon University System administrators continue to struggle with problems of administration, centralization, managing and navigating a unified state higher ed system and funding. They have a tendency to play the liberal side of the street when needed to get funding, to use privatization in creating a patchwork system of education and resources, to close the barn door after the stock has left and to turn on one another when all else fails. The OSU Loser of the Week is OSU-Cascades Administration Vice President Becky Johnson, who was clearly hoping to get something more for her campus than she did and lost out. It's not hard to detect the move to toss this campus overboard, even with the vague plans to increase enrollment there, but Johnson has some political allies as well. Next in line may be the Extension program, but that program also has its allies. In a struggle between Johnson and Extension for what resources or carrion Ed Ray has to chuck their way, I'll bet on Johnson for now and on Ed Ray later. The Cascades' days, at least as a part of OSU, are numbered.

OSU needs lots of students fast--something like 30,000 to 35,000 by 2025--in order to pay for all of this. Contracting out, privatization, low-wage contracts, program cuts, restructuring and the cycles of centralization and decentralization which afflict higher ed in Oregon can only save so much money. International students pay the highest tuition and bring with them additional funding and resources, or so President Ray and his administration hope. The plan, therefore, is to double the percentage of OSU’s international students enrolled in graduate or professional programs and to graduate something like 6,000 students each year. The Bridge to Success program, which pays tuition and fees for thousands of students now, will likely be expanded. This doesn't translate into more opportunity for Oregon's students, however. OSU will look more like an assemblyline and Corvallis will be quickly overwhelmed. If you think housing in Corvallis is now unaffordable and hard to find, imagine what it will be like in 5 or 10 years.

Did Ed Ray talk to anyone involved in urban planning in Corvallis or Benton County as plans to change the area's demographics and living standards moved forward? Does OSU administration now have favored candidates in the company town's political races? And what if some of the good citizens of Corvallis object to plans to jack up their rents and change their town?

OSU currently has just less that 800 tenured and tenure-track faculty. They may begin hiring some permanent faculty in order to reach their goals, but it is also easy to imagine that President Ray's administration will attempt to share faculty with other state institutions, use visiting faculty, increase faculty workload and move some faculty through the tenure track processes at the expense of other faculty. The administration's plans certainly have the potential to pit classified staff, tenured and tenure-track faculty and the non-teaching, research and administrative "faculty" against one another in fights over salaries, resources, benefits, space and support.

Sabah Randhawa, OSU’s provost and executive vice president, is allegedly leading an effort to find the money and means to add 25 to 30 faculty members in arts and sciences over the next two years. I doubt that this is so, or that it means much in the real world, but we can also question the wisdom and politics of putting forward an over-reaching OSU plan and adding this as an afterthought or as a sop. In fact, OSU is cutting positions and depending upon retirements "and other natural attrition" to make its nut. In rightwing speak, these are "death panels." The OSU Human Resources department will have its hands full with acting classes as they learn the Stanislavsky System of Acting as the preferred means of dealing with disciplinary cases, layoff notices and terminations. At the end, this HR need may be the only way of saving OSU's theatre department.

When we hear President Ray say, "We have reworked our base budgets to provide additional resources to the colleges most centrally engaged in delivering undergraduate education" we know that there will be job losses. In the long run, I think, increasing OSU dependence upon the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI) is a guarantee of job loss and wasted funds.

“We also must significantly increase our direct partnerships with industry,” President Ray said on Thursday. “Right now, only 2 percent of our annual research funding results from industry partnerships. We must increase this to 4-8 percent of our total even as we more than double our annual research portfolio by 2025.”

The "unseen hand" of capitalism, is picking our pockets. OSU has taken public money, and continues to do so, but shows little loyalty to the state; the University is doing research and development for the corporations at rock-bottom prices; Oregon's students and workers are not the priority; OSU jobs are being eliminated and workers there are getting nailed; the University is getting rich fast off of grants, gifts and international students---and President Ray only wants more buy-in from industry. I think that any public official should be immediately accountable to the people of Oregon.