The Moais of Oregon

The plan is to submit this for consideration as an op-ed piece.
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A perfect storm is brewing in the Oregon public policy environment. When that storm makes landfall, Oregon’s higher education system will be devastated beyond recognition.

For years, it has been a struggle to fully fund the state’s public universities. Taxpayer dollars pay for less than ten percent of the research universities’ operations, and the regional universities--like Western Oregon University, where I teach--manage with a quarter of the operating expenses paid for by state allocation.

This is bound to worsen when the next recession hits.

Economies go through a period of growth, followed by stagnation. The Great Recession of 2008 was particularly hard. Since the end of that recession in June 2009, we have had steady growth in the economy over the past nearly nine years. However, growth cannot happen for ever; while any recession is difficult to predict, it will arrive sooner or later.

The coming recession will make state dollars scarce, and public higher educational institutions cannot even dream of balancing their books on the shoulders of students. Students already graduate with debt that many of the old-timers did not have to bear back when the public vigorously supported investing in higher education. To subject students to even higher debts will be outright robbery.

Students from other countries are willing to pay for an American education--they pay much higher fees than our residents do. However, the Trump administration is increasingly making it difficult for them to come here, which does not make any economic sense leave alone the benefits of greater understanding across cultures. And, because Oregonians are having fewer kids than before, the current K-12 student population in Oregon will not translate to increasing numbers of native students at higher educational institutions. All these will further complicate the coming budgetary battles.

Further, over the past couple of years, the political rhetoric in the country has turned intensely anti-intellectual. “We need more welders and less philosophers” has become a mantra. Politicians have virulently attacked various fields of inquiry that they deem wasteful. This means that when the recession hits, voters have already been primed for chopping down public universities.

Tragically, even as public higher education heads to a collapse, we are behaving similar to how the people at Easter Island did. Easter Island is located in the Pacific Ocean, and about 2,000 miles from the Chilean coast. There, as the population faced ecological crises, they--the Rapa Nui--spent more and more resources erecting stone statues--moais--hoping for divine intervention. The gods did not help, and the civilization ultimately collapsed about 400 years ago.

On college campuses, we have been constructing moais in plenty over the years. Athletic stadiums and facilities are our modern day moais, which we continue to build despite the financial urgency. Unfortunately, the massive spending on athletics, including the astronomical salaries for coaches, finds support across the political spectrum, even from the ultra-left faculty on campuses.

Like at Easter Island, these modern day moais too will merely bear witness to the collapse of public higher education in Oregon, unless educators and political leaders begin to prepare for the coming storm keeping in mind the best interests of the state’s future.