The Oregon Capitol building in Salem. Lawmakers have been unable to agree on how to free some of Oregon’s public universities from the control of a statewide higher education board.
The joint Special Committee on University Governance has met 10 times to determine how local university governing boards would function, and it has been unable to answer fundamental questions such as when the boards would be formed, who would sit on the panels and what connections would remain with
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The Oregon Capitol building in Salem. Lawmakers have been unable to agree on how to free some of Oregon’s public universities from the control of a statewide higher education board.
The joint Special Committee on University Governance has met 10 times to determine how local university governing boards would function, and it has been unable to answer fundamental questions such as when the boards would be formed, who would sit on the panels and what connections would remain with the state.
“I won’t say it’s a conundrum,” state Sen. Mark Hass, D-Beaverton,told The Register-Guard newspaper. “But it’s still vexing. It’s too many moving pieces that we still have to, frankly, coordinate better.”
Oregon’s seven public universities are currently governed by the State Board of Higher Education. It hires and fire presidents and sets budgets and tuition.
University of Oregon and Portland State University officials want local control of those decisions. The officials contend the universities can’t reach their full potential while so many key decisions are made by the Legislature or the State Board of Higher Education.
They’ve asked the Legislature to create new governing boards specific to each institution that would take on oversight of many of their most important affairs. Administrators at several of the other schools, however, worry that the universities will end up competing instead of collaborating.
The joint special committee composed a rough draft of a bill to be submitted to the full Legislature next year. Lawmakers concluded the state may benefit from university-level governing boards if the panels:
— Operate transparently.
— Are closely focused on the individual university.
— Do not hurt universities that opt not to create boards.
— Lead to greater access and affordability for Oregon students.
— Have a dual fiduciary role to the university and to the state as a whole.
But the details are sketchy.
“There are going to be gaps, and there’s still some work to be done once it gets into the hands of the Legislature as a whole,” said Rep. Mike Dembrow, D-Portland. “But we think we’ve created a framework here.”
According to the bill, the university-level boards should hold annual tuition and fee increases to the Portland consumer price index, and never more than 5 percent.
But the 5 percent should not be assumed, said Rep. Mark Johnson, R-Hood River.
“Five percent a year is, frankly, too high. Five percent a year as far as the eye can see leads to doubling (of tuition) in a pretty short order,” he said.
Another area of confusion is what universities should keep doing together to gain efficiencies of scale and make it easy for students to transfer between them. And the most elusive decision seemed to be how the newly independent universities would be connected with the state.
“What we really did was try to find that sweet spot of letting these two universities (UO and PSU) reach their highest potential, yet also maintaining the integrity of the state system,” Hass said.
— The Associated Press