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Wednesday, April 7,2004
Oregon Daily Emerald
COMMENTARY
Editor in Chief:
Brad Schmidt
Managing Editor:
Jan Tobias Montry
Editorial Editor:
Peter Hockaday
(EDITORIAL.
Thanks for
memories,
debts, Jarvis
Two months' worth of rent. One hundred fourteen
pitchers of Drop Top at Sakura. Two hundred twenty-eight
movie rentals from Blockbuster.
These are just a few of the things the average resident un
dergraduate, taking 15 credits per term, could pay for with
$682.32, the newest number in the latest of University tu
ition hikes.
The increase, likely to be approved and take effect this
fall, will raise annual tuition and fees to more than $6,000
a year. Just four short years ago, a student wouldn't pay a
cent above $4,000.
So what happened?
Well, the economy tanked and people lost jobs. Others
couldn't find work. Tax money the state expected didn't ex
ist. The budget the state planned to implement was useless.
Cuts needed to be made, and higher education became an
easy target. With less state funding, schools in Oregon had
to make ends meet. Tuition went up.
Around the same time, the incompetent State Board of
Higher Education hired its new leader, the soon-to-be-gone
Richard Jarvis.
Jarvis, who handed in his resignation a week ago and will
be out of his chancellor position June 30, was selected less
than two years ago to head the Oregon University System.
The board could have selected Warren H. Fox, who said his
main goal was to keep education accessible Or it could have
selected Peter S. Hoff, who said his main goal was to find a
balance between the access to and the quality of education.
Instead, the board hired Jarvis, who was chancellor of
the nation's only online university system. That system
went bankrupt.
Jarvis planned to increase OUS enrollment to 100,000
students by 2010 (Jarvis had been successful in his efforts
to increase Nevada's enrollment, where he also served as
chancellor).
He also quickly proposed "The Deal," an absolutely
absurd plan that asked the state — in the middle of gross
financial woes — to foot 50 percent of the costs of higher
education.
"It's the game in town right now," Jarvis said in Octo
ber 2002, somehow managing to keep a straight face.
"We're looking for this to be our campaign in the Legis
lature next spring."
Two weeks later Jarvis, while on campus, defended the
plan, saying, "We don't want to pre-judge and imagine that
bad things could happen."
In the winter of 2003, voters rejected Measure 28 and
tuition went up. Later, the Legislature made cuts to the
current biennium's higher-education budget. In the win
ter of2004, voters rejected Measure 30, and now tuition
is set to go up again.
While Jarvis can't be solely blamed for the increases (the
Legislature had a little something to do with the situation),
OUS in general should shoulder much of the responsibili
ty. The board hired someone with a suspect history in
terms of financial stability at a time when money manage
ment was key. Board members resigned late last year (an
essential firing by Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski).
Resignation was the only option for Jarvis, who stub
bornly stuck to his "innovative" ways and did nothing to
address his fiduciary responsibilities.
Here's what Jarvis had to say when he announced in
November that his vision, "The Deal," had died: "We're
doing the best we can because the state revenue picture
kept getting worse. That led to bigger cuts and bigger tu
ition to fill in those cuts."
Looks like, perhaps, someone should have done a little
"pre-judging." Looks like that "game" was a little wack, too.
Well, Mr. Jarvis, we'll be doing without shelter, enter
tainment and beer thanks to your lack of recognizing the
painfully obvious. Please — and we do mean this — don't
let the door hit ya where the good Ix>rd split ya.
With new leadership in the State Board of Higher Edu
cation and cuts planned at the Chancellor's Office, let's
hope we're headed in a new direction. Oregon's next
chancellor needs to be proficient in the art of belt-tight
ening, and he or she needs to understand and be com
mitted to doing what Jarvis did not. He or she needs to
listen to what students want more than anything else —
affordable education.
DIDN'T '#8U(4UYS
Learn from
PWJ\7'
...bring
VIOLENCE
To THE
lOCCUPIERS//
Steve Baggs Illustrator
a lack of
PROOF
I'm surprised and disappointed by
how many of my friends sincerely be
lieve that President Bush knew specifical
ly about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks be
forehand and still allowed them to occur.
These are smart and usually levelheaded
people, and I'm flabbergasted that they
give credence to such an outlandish ac
cusation.
The theory that Bush had some nefari
ous connection to the Sept. 11 plot has
gained a surprising amount of traction
among liberals. Former Democratic pres
idential candidate Howard Dean even
called the foreknowledge theory "inter
esting. "
One would think that if President
Bush knew about the attacks ahead of
time, he would have gotten his secretary
of defense out of the Pentagon before it
got hit. He would have squirreled away
his family and Cabinet before the arrival
of United Airlines Flight 93, which was
headed for Washington, D.C. and
crashed in rural Pennsylvania..
But it should be noted that the theo
rists do have some factual support for
their arguments. The Bush family has
deep interests in Saudi Arabia, home to
15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers, and
strong ties to much of the country's elite.
And it's an open secret that many of the
Bush administration's policies have been
handsomely beneficial to President
Bush's personal finances as well as those
of members of his administration.
There are also many bizarre and unex
plainable occurrences surrounding the
attacks, such as why the bin Laden family
was ushered out of the United States in
the immediate aftermath of the attacks
without thorough questioning by intel
ligence professionals. Yet I can't wrap my
head around the idea that Bush could be
quite so evil as to let 2,800 people die in
the most horrific and audacious terrorist
attack in world history.
It's true that President Bush has done
memorandum didn't receive close atten
tion at the highest levels of the FBI, nor
in Bush's Cabinet, may well be the
biggest bureaucratic blunder in Ameri
can history.
However, it might have to compete
with the CIA monitoring a terrorist meet
ing in Malaysia that two of the Sept. 11
hijackers attended. The CIA failed to put
the men, who were already linked to al
Qaida, on a terrorist watch list of people
barred from entering the country. The fu
ture hijackers entered the United States
one week after the meeting, The Toronto
Star reported.
Yet you can't blame Bush or his top ad
visers for the failures of lower-level bu
reaucracy. Even if they had gotten the
Phoenix memorandum, it's a long step
from having a notion that something's
afoot to knowing that an attack is
planned on a specific date with specific
targets and specific perpetrators. Like
wise, keeping two of the 19 hijackers out
of the United States would probably not
have prevented the attacks.
Revelations may be forthcoming from
National Security Advisor Condoleezza
Rice's testimony on Thursday or from the
final report by the National Commission
on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United
States. But barring any new information,
I'm inclined to give Bush the benefit of
the doubt.
Democrats face an extremely difficult
challenge in unseating President Bush
this November, and spouting conspiracy
theories does not give voters the impres
sion that Democrats are serious about
confronting the very real threat of terror
ism. If liberals want to have any chance
of winning this election, they have to
speak in terms to which moderates can
relate.
Contact the columnist
at chuckslothower@dailyemerald.com.
His opinions do not necessarily
represent those of the Emerald.
—IIP ill
Chuck Slothower
Taking issue
nothing to earn our trust. He and mem
bers of his administration exaggerated,
misrepresented and flat-out lied their
way into a war of choice that is turning
out just about as well as many liberals
thought it would.
Other examples of the administra
tion's selective honesty abound, includ
ing cherry-picking science that supports
the administration's agenda while ignor
ing stronger science that contradicts it.
It's also despicable that the administra
tion withheld the true cost of its
Medicare bill from Congress while
Bush's allies on Capitol Hill, according
to various media reports, exerted un
precedented pressure to get the bill
passed, including holding the usual fif
teen-minute roll call open for three
hours and allegedly attempting to bribe
Rep. Nick Smith, R-Mich„ a moderate
Republican who voted against the bill, to
the tune of $100,000 (which would be a
federal crime and deserves far more at
tention than it has received).
Of course we all wish Sept. 11 didn't
happen. But the attacks were the result
not of a mischievous plot by Bush, but of
a colossal failure of intelligence coupled
with a bureaucracy that moves at the
speed of molasses.
The best-known pre-Sept. 11 indica
tion of the impending attacks is the
memorandum written by Phoenix FBI
agent Kenneth Williams expressing con
cern about the presence of suspected ter
rorists at flight schools. The fact that this