Frohnmayer gets OUS gig

Dave Frohnmayer will stay on the Oregon University System payroll for another six weeks, according to Greg Bolt’s article in Tuesday’s Register-Guard, for the sake of “brainstorming ways to get college degrees into the hands of more people in a state with perennially weak funding for the task.” His title, Bolt wrote, will be special assistant to the chancellor.

Gov. Ted Kulongoski promised when he campaigned for governor that “forty percent of our state’s adults will hold bachelor’s degrees or higher by the year 2025, and an additional 40 percent will have earned associate degrees or professional certification.” (it’s point VI of his plan in the link) Kulongoski said he would do that by appointing a committee to create a plan and by expanding the Oregon Opportunity Grant financial aid program.

“The Governor believes Oregon must stop shifting an ever-larger share of the cost to college students and their families,” Kulongoski’s platform statement read. “Because tuition and fees have grown faster than Oregonians’ incomes, too many families cannot hope to send their children to community colleges, universities, or work-training programs.”

However, as Bolt points out, state funding for higher education has continued to fall during Kulongoski’s term, as has since the passage in 1990 of Ballot Measure 5, which changed the way education is funded in Oregon.

Frohnmayer told Bolt he’d like to change that:

Those are likely to be at least part of what Frohnmayer looks at. But he said the only thing he would rule out is continuing things as they are now.
“I think the status quo with less money is not very attractive,” Frohnmayer said. “What we’ve got now is not a sustainable model. The point is, the state university in both its classical and modern incarnations is so critical to future development and well-being that we’ve got to find a way to make it work.”

Frohnmayer has called for increased independence from OUS for the University, just as Oregon Health and Science University has become more independent, and Bolt’s article seemed to suggest that might be part of the model he would construct.

Further down in his article, Bolt also writes that “Pernsteiner said he asked Frohnmayer last year to stay on for six weeks after his retirement because it wasn’t certain then when his replacement would be able to start and when the legislative session would end.” In other words Frohnmayer would have stayed on the payroll one way or the other. He will be paid a total of $28,000 for the six weeks, according to Bolt.

The blogger who runs UO Matters is upset about that. He wrote in a post reacting to Bolt’s article:

How about giving the money back Dave – that’s enough to pay in state tuition for one student, for 4 years! Or at least you could agree to take one of those voluntary furloughs you’ve been pushing faculty to sign up for.

An anonymous poster writes in response to the UO Matters Blog:

Ah, come on. Dave is going to figure out how to get more money for Oregon higher education. After all, he’s done a great job of that at UO, right? Wait a minute, doesn’t the current provost complain that UO has the lowest state subsidy per student of any campus in OUS? Is there something wrong with this picture?