Frohnmayer's Bad News For Oregon Higher Education

Dave Frohnmayer, the recently retired president of the University of Oregon, believes that Oregon needs to convert our largest universities into public corporations. This hoped-for flexibility is expected to help some schools raise funds, or so Frohnmayer says. Media reports talk about "revitalizing the state's stifled higher education system" by essentially privatizing these public services and institutions. It seems that the collective bureaucratic wisdom is that some of these state institutions need to compete with and aid the private sector and compete with other institutions all at once. We have been covering this on our blog for several years.

It amounts to "privatization lite," but for the sake of expedience and clarity I'm going to refer to this plan, and those in place in Oregon like it, as privatization. Critics will say that I'm exaggerating, but I don't think so. A diminished public role and presence for any state institution or service under these circumstances is privatization.

This is being spun as a new turn for the Oregon University System. In fact, this has been discussed and debated behind the closed doors of the State Board of Higher Education and in the hallways and offices of state higher ed decision-makers for some time. Higher ed in Oregon operates with a pretense of openness and accountability that is really a kind of manufactured or crafted secrecy. The more they tell you they're involving the stakeholders and working to hear and consider every opinion the more they have worked to make sure that their desired outcome will be realized in short order.

Frohnmayer's fabled urgency comes at a bad moment and we wonder if this is a ham- fisted attempt at lobbying or a means of grabbing revenue before another negative budget report comes in or an attempt to throw a few competing institutions under the bus. The Legislature can give the State Board of Higher Education authority to restructure the university system this February if Frohnmayer is able to create the panicked stampede he seems bent on. On the other hand, he may have just given the anti-tax people a great weapon to use in their fight to overturn the state budget. Higher ed could easily become the poster child of the anti-tax movement in Oregon. The let's-drown-government-in-the-bathtub folks could have no better model of what's wrong with public institutions and services than Oregon's higher ed system. If the budget is overturned there might not be much left to privatize. Or does Frohnmayer and his crowd really want to play off higher ed against the torn social safety net and social spending, the rest of the state's educational system, healthcare and law enforcement in a scramble for what's left after the anti-tax folks gut the state budget?

If the economic model here is Oregon Health and Science University, as is being seriously reported, someone needs to remind Frohnmayer of some of OHSU's costly mistakes and its special dependency on the healthcare economy. Even OSU's science, veterinary and natural resource programs don't operate with the kind of economic levers OHSU has at hand. The humanities, law and the technology programs cannot and should not be subject to the market forces and economies which privatization will expose them to. It's likely that they will either be sacrificed, folded into other divisions or subsidized if privatization continues. We have to question how much might really be saved in initial costs and over time in such a scenario.

If the economic model includes the Port of Portland and SAIF Frohnmayer is comparing apples to rocks. Nothing in higher ed matches the port or SAIF. Almost any injured worker can tell you what a hassle dealing with SAIF is. Should students and higher ed workers have to deal with similar problems because Frohnmayer made a bad call?

Frohnmayer's talk of Oregon becoming a "stagnant backwater" if he doesn't get his way is ridiculous. We're in the midst of a world economic crisis and it is that crisis and the fightback against it which will determine our social living standards. Higher ed cannot, by itself, turn that around. The past privatizing social services and institutions has made real economy more difficult, not less so. Considered in this light, it is Frohnmayer's thinking which may indeed push us back into the dark ages.

This is not some experiment, mind you. Privatize a public institution or service and its usually gone forever. Our tax dollars paid for these institutions but we will not get anything back when they're sold off.

Listen to Frohnmayer's attempts at stampeding public opinion. "There is no point in waiting until everything falls off a cliff to do something that could cushion the fall," he says. "We will fall if we don't do something dramatic."

One might ask where Frohnmayer has been while this alleged crisis has been evolving and why he is waving this particular flag now.

The Frohnmayer plan does not free the the largest universities from all public oversight. In fact, it sticks the state with some oversight or policing functions but does not give the state real control or the authority needed to make its diminished role quite meaningful. When the plan talks about giving the largest schools authority over tuition and teacher salaries--and does not mention classified staff--you know that tuition increases are coming in some programs and that salary cuts will hit some faculty while others will be specially rewarded or bought off. When it talks about these universities having control over admissions standards you know that we're going to end up with either profitable revolving door education or some kinds of exclusivity and the enhanced recruitment of international students from countries with favorable exchange rates and dollars on hand.

The best we get from the Democrats on this is Richard Devlin saying, "I don't think we should rush to judgment on something so big without consulting Oregonians about what direction they want to go."

Don't worry, Richard, OUS will get a fact sheet out and hold a few meetings. They will make it nearly impossible for anyone to check their facts. You will see a few faculty supporting this, a couple opposing this and student government people looking to cut a deal. The sports and military programs will sneak right by, the grant-dependent and industry-driven programs will get their lobbyists working, the public service programs will be held up as antiquated and inefficient and most of the non-teaching and non-tenure track faculty positions will survive any scrutiny or cuts using methods that would make Mayor Daley proud or envious.

Our Governor and unnamed faculty and student groups are supposedly studying the Frohnmayer proposals and withholding comment. In other words, they're testing the winds and looking for the necessary deals to be cut before they sign off on a deal which potentially puts all public services and institutions at increased risks of privatization. We have been playing this game with state services for quite awhile now, and with higher ed in particular since at least 1994.

Paul Kelly, the president of the State Board of Higher Education, shakes his head wisely and says that Frohnmayer is making a persuasive argument and is performing a public service by making his proposal. Kelly has had time to make the same proposal and perform the same public service, but you have not seen him stepping up until now. Either Kelly is being less than honest or he has been derelict in his duties.

We start hearing another agenda emerging as this glad-handing and chin rubbing continues. Kelly is being quoted as saying that "the challenge is broader than higher education. We've got problems in how we are dealing with K-12 public education, with the number of students who do not graduate from high school and the relatively small number who go to college." So, says Kelly, let's privatize our entire educational system.

Faithful to his semi-libertarian agenda, Frohnmayer is assuring us all that leading Oregon universities will be held more accountable to the public as they convert to public corporations. He spins this as if an exchange is being made. We have a proposal: keep the universities under public control and make them more accountable right where they are. What is it about handing over public resources to the private sector and investors that builds accountability anyway?

Establishing missions and mission statements, performance goals, academic standards and programs and allocating state money on the basis of performance is all pretty meaningless and irrelevant if favoritism, cronyism, bureaucracy, built-in and manufactured waste, control-and-command management, low pay and high tuition and artificial isolation from society continue on in higher ed. Nothing in Frohnmayer's proposals anticipates higher ed's dysfunctional organizational culture. The ability of universities to raise money by selling bonds, leveraging their own property and assets for borrowing, and creating a tax base subject to voter support is a recipe for economic chaos or a guantee that whiz kids like OSU's President Ed Ray get more power. In this case power is quantifiable: the more power they have, the less power the people have.

Jim Francesconi, vice president of the Board of Higher Education, wants to go even further. He supports the concept of converting universities into public corporations and thinks that any overhaul needs to include the state's four regional universities. You have to wonder if he, Kelly and our Governor are sharing the same Kool Aid or if they suddenly had a conversion experience. Maybe they have been nursing this dream all along.

This is at least the second time we have seen this proposal. State per capita spending on the Oregon University System may have declined by 44 percent in the past 15 years, but that is hardly a problem privatization will solve. If capitalists won't lend to other capitalists, and if taxpayers are being stretched as they lose jobs and incomes and homes, what makes anyone think that the wealthy or the poor will put their money into higher education?

If prison spending has climbed by 50 percent in this same period a commonsense solution would be to either change the justice system or give the prison system some part off higher ed so that the schools get money and inmates get education.

Frohnmayer finds state support for higher ed full of "stifling regulatory restrictions." We suggest that if he is troubled by government and regulation he is in the wrong job. There are many capable people who could do his job and not be so troubled. He could look to faculty and staff to find such persons.

OHSU may indeed have fared better economically since 1995, when it was privatized, but healthcare has its own economy and the state has not been better off for spinning OHSU off. OHSU's financial success is mythic in any case.

Frohnmayer also says that there is a crisis in in-state enrollment and getting in-state students degrees. We suggest more bilingual education, lower or no tuition, expanded humanities programs, less dependence on grant-driven private industry and military-related projects, better integration of higher ed into the K-12 school system, a regional educational system and making the rich and the corporations pay more.