Once again it is a privilege to address this body on behalf of IFS. Let me begin by conveying to you our thanks for your work over the last academic year and during the legislative session for the system, the institutions, the students, the faculty and staff--and for the people of Oregon, the ultimate beneficiaries of an excellent system of public higher education. We are aware of the sacrifice you make to devote your valuable time to this enterprise and we appreciate your efforts. Without your work, our attempts to advance the cause of OUS before the Legislature, in the media, and to the general public might seem to be special pleading, but your forceful and articulate advocacy makes it apparent to everyone that this is more than a routine government service; that it is, instead, a fundamental building block of the culture and society of Oregon.

At the same time, we want to be sure also, and not incidentally, to thank the OUS staff for all their hard work to support your efforts. Sometimes we take too lightly the dedication and day-to-day planning, thinking, and trench work behind the polished performances of board members and the academic leadership that put our best foot forward in hearings, in the newspapers, and in TV sound bites. We know that it is the board and staff, the public and behind-the-scenes faces of OUS that enable us to do what we faculty do best and to do it better than we might without such support. Once more, thank you.

Of course, I can't let the opportunity pass to convey IFS's thanks to Dr. Cox for his service. IFS deeply appreciates your seven years of hard work and commitment to the betterment of the system, especially your determination to make the institutions accessible to all deserving students and your understanding of the needs of faculty. Your leadership will be missed.

Having said that, let me also welcome you to my campus and introduce you to some ghosts. This campus sits on what for me is hallowed ground, because it is right here in what was old South Portland that I essentially began my life. In 1966, The vestiges of that old eastern European Jewish cultural enclave began to be lost to the wrecking ball of urban renewal. To be sure, some of it survives in PSU's buildings, indeed, I have taught in the very rooms in Lincoln and Shattuck Halls in which my mother, my aunts, my uncles, their cousins and friends were themselves taught during their grammar and high school days. There is something strange and wonderful about that. When I step into a classroom, I feel as if I'm passing on an extraordinary legacy of those sons and daughters of emigrants: their passion for learning and their sense that it could make for them a place in America denied to their old world parents. The point is, it all began with the sense that the foundation of their dreams was, as they said with reverence in those days, a college education.

The two eldest children in my mother's family went to work early in a garment factory so that the others could get such educations. One of the younger ones was so committed to a career in medicine that he went to the medical school after his high school classes to watch operations, or so family legend has it.

But it wasn't just my family that had education fever. I think of a highly successful man, a multi-millionaire, a man of tremendous stature in our community whose philanthropy and leadership are legendary. He spoke to a class I taught about the Jewish community of Portland and recounted to us that the saddest day of his life was when his father told him as a teenager that he would have to work so that his younger brother, the intellectual star of his family, could go to college. He wept for what he had missed, in front of my students and me, this accomplished individual who had built a major company from scratch, but who never had a college education.

I wish we could somehow measure the striving and the results achieved by those from South Portland who did succeed in getting to college. I'm confident we would find they produced the greatest efflorescence of talent and accomplishment emanating from one place--over forty or so years between the teens and the late 50s' in the history of the state. But the important point is that the scientists, doctors, lawyers, CPAs, teachers, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists, journalists and others from that subculture were, for the most part, the beneficiaries of the public higher education system, Oregon, Oregon State, Vanport, the University of Oregon School of Medicine and of Law.

This past Sunday, the New York Times cautioned in its editorial page that with the drop in state support of public higher education the public universities across the nation were, in a sense, risking the loss of their souls to the big corporations and large scale individual givers who have stepped forward to make up some part of the shortfall. The editorialist said that although this private money has financed research, scholarships, bricks and mortar, and all the many things strapped universities need, it sometimes comes with strings attached in terms of academic policy and warned presidents to be vigilant about academic freedom. Although we have seen instances of such difficulties in Oregon, that is not what worries me.

Rather, I am concerned that by accepting the decline in public support for higher ed, we are devaluing the role of what we might call "public enterprise" in our society and economy. Yet the development of the public dimension in our national life and in the life of this state is one of the great stories in the evolution of American democracy.

If I may cite two homely but resonant local examples, think of what our state would be like without free access to our marvelous public beaches and think of health care without the Oregon Health Plan for our poor. These are instances when Oregonians said the interests of the broad public trumped narrower, if perfectly legitimate, private interests. We are, I think, a different, more humane, and more vigorous state for those decisions than we would be without them.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the emergence of the public universities, not just as vectors of culture or as petri dishes of scientific innovation or as engines of economic development, but as gateways of opportunity. The egalitarian mechanics of public higher education has created a series of open doors through which persons who, in an earlier day, would have been consigned to lesser social and occupational roles in the society and economy, have passed, as in the cases I've already described, to the everlasting benefit of the state and nation.

We may continue to have places we call public institutions. But we seem to keep pushing tuition higher and higher, because we as a people have come to believe that we simply cannot afford significant subsidies, since a college education is merely a privilege of the person with enough money to pay for one. Yet we used to believe it to be a right or a good in which society had a legitimate interest and a tuition subsidy was an investment with a positive public outcome. This new reasoning, in any case, will eventually lead us to a pass at which the institutions will be little more than de facto private schools enrolling only the economically advantaged. In a state which could easily employ double the number of engineering graduates its institutions can turn out, that would be a totally unacceptable public outcome, yet we struggle in every legislative session to make lawmakers and their constituents understand it.

We have traveled the arc of that current quip in the blink of an eye: from publicly supported to publicly assisted to publicly encouraged. What is the next step? Giving kids a bus pass? Whatever it is, we seem already to have concluded that society gains little by supporting students. This will be, if it is not already, a profound and dispiriting reversal of 139 years of social and educational policy since the passage of the first Morrill Land Grant Act in 1862, but also a ridiculous denial of the economic history of that same period. "The career open to talent" may be a shibboleth invented in the Napoleonic phase of the French Revolution and later refined by utilitarian philosophers like Mill. However, it has reached its apotheosis in the lived experience of the United States, with its unprecedented widespread affluence, and its enormously well educated work force.

Likewise, we do a grave disservice to public education when we allow the compensation of our faculty to fall below acceptable levels which, it appears, will be the case when the new PEBB benefits package is announced in the late Fall. We cannot have a strong system if we don't solve this problem, because we will never be able to attract good young people who can command merely reasonable salaries elsewhere. Everyone knows that the system is only as good as its faculty. If we allow this trend to continue, we will quickly reach an ironic ground on which we need not support the institutions well because they aren't much good anyway.

We have all fought valiantly to hold the line against this rising tide of indifference among our citizenry and our political leaders to the public sector over this decade. But if the predictions about the poverty of the 2003 Legislature hold true, we will be fighting the most intense battle ever on behalf of the system. I respectfully submit, therefore, that we must grasp now that this is not merely a struggle for money, but also a great philosophical clash over what it means to be an Oregonian and an American and the importance of the public realm to those names. I say that if we as board members, institutional leaders, faculty, staff, and students believe this fight is bigger than the next budget, then we should begin now to make the case that Oregon cannot afford to allow its public education system and its political culture to erode further if we wish them to continue to be egalitarian.

When I stand at a lectern in Shattuck Hall today, I often see many of the same kinds of students in my classes that the teachers at Shattuck and Lincoln faced sixty and seventy years ago; emigrants with big dreams-- Romanians, Russians, Ukranians, Iranians, Mexicans, Cambodians, Vietnamese, not to mention all the others: Native- and African -Americans. I also see ordinary citizens who are the first in their family to go to college--in need of a chance to learn. I believe we should commit to building a future in which they have the same educational opportunity as the ghosts of South Portland. I hope for the sake of all Oregonians you agree.

Thank you.