Tek was gentlemanly in an old-fashioned sort of way, a company that seemed to always try to do the right thing. Earl Wantland, Tek's current president, told a venture capitalist inquiring about the three men who had just left to start Mentor Graphics that they were three of the best people Tek had ever had. There were no lawsuits, not even threats. And the former employees responded in the same gentlemanly way. Metheus resolved not to call any Tek employees, unless, of course, they contacted Metheus first.
Tek even set up one former manager and practically his entire department in the flat-panel display-screen business. It was a case in which some of the engineers had been working on the technology for seven or eight years, and in the last couple of years, it had become apparent that Tek wasn't going to take the product to market. Finally, Jim Hurd, the project's manager, went to his boss and said that he and his department would like to buy the technology and start a company to manufacture the products. Not only that, he said, they didn't want to put up any cash right away, because they didn't have any, and they would like to continue to manufacture the product at Tek until they got their own place built.
And Tek agreed. The deal took a year and a half to work out, but Tek guaranteed the start-up's loans, backed its service agreements, and generally put itself on the line to give a group of former employees a chance to reap the rewards of their work. It also gave Tek a chance to recoup some of its investment in the technology, if and when the start-up, Planar Systems Inc., turned profitable. Here was a futuristic example of just how open-minded an employer could be. Tektronix, an industry giant, was demonstrating how far it was willing to go to help make something happen in the Northwest.
It was a step in a direction Howard Vollum could be proud of.
There were other ways Vollum and Tektronix were helping to shape the Pacific Northwest, other areas that a lot of people had abandoned to the government. Education was one of them.
"Oregon is an environment in which you can still make it big." -- Paul Carlson, president of the Oregon Graduate Center
A couple of farms away from the Sunset Highway, the state's main road west, a wood sign announces that the low-flying wooden-and-glass building across the lawn/mud is not a campus-type industrial building, but actually a campus, the Oregon Graduate Center, "a private center for education and research." The description makes OGC sound like a boarding school or a science-oriented think tank, but this building with the large American flags out front houses what private industry in the Portland area hopes will be the area's answer to Stanford and MIT.
Back in 1963, long after most of the world had abandoned the struggle for academic preeminence to the handful of institutions already near the top, Mark Hatfield, then governor of Oregon, proposed building a graduate research institute that would address the lack of advanced applied scientific research and engineering education in the Portland region. Reed College was one of the top undergraduate institutions in the United States, but it had no graduate school. The University of Oregon and Oregon State University (which was then called Oregon State College) didn't have money to expand advanced electrical engineering or computer science programs. Besides, they were three hours away from Portland, where most of the state's high-technology development was taking place. Even in the early '60s, before the SRI report had announced that Portland's weakness in advanced education put it at a disadvantage when compared with North Carolina, before high-technology industry leaders went around saying that Oregon State was not a world-class engineering institution, before the percentage of state revenues available for higher education had shrunk from 24% to 12%, Hatfield and a group of local businessmen started talking about what they could do. Howard Vollum was one of the members of that group, along with Doug Strain, founder of an instruments company called Electro Scientific Industries Inc.; and John Gray, vice-chairman of the board of Omark Industries Inc., a company that had revolutionized the chain-saw business.
What they envisioned was a new concept in education. They saw a hybrid institution that would provide graduate training in academic areas that seemed particularly suited to the needs of local industry, as well as the resources for academicians to continue basic research in those areas. They also envisioned contracts research for particular basic or applied projects, and an intellectual stimulus at an advanced scientific and technical level they felt the area lacked.
The vision was ambitious -- some said ludicrously so -- but people had said the same thing about the companies these men had started, and Vollum, Strain, Gray, and Sam Diack, a physician who was instrumental in OGC's founding, weren't used to thinking small.
By 1966, the Oregon Graduate Center had a president and a faculty, and research had begun in rented space on the outskirts of Portland. Three years later the school moved to its real campus, in Beaverton, about half a mile from Tektronix, and started enrolling students. In 1971, OGC awarded its first degree, a master of science in chemistry.
Now, there are 60 full-time and 20 part-time students hanging around the halls and the warrenlike labs in OGC sweatshirts. They research such things as the operating frequencies of gallium arsenide, the biodegradation of lignin, and the migration of herbicide residues in groundwater. Thirty-three faculty members, with PhDs from places like Stanford, the University of Chicago, Cornell, Princeton, Berkeley, and Cal Tech have been persuaded to risk their career tracks in academia or industry for the money, time, and equipment to research their dream projects and teach a few graduate students at this embryonic research and educational institution.
It seems to be working. In the past 10 years, OGC has awarded 80 graduate degrees, including 37 doctorates, and 90% of the full-time students get full tuition grants or scholarships. The average student at the center is 26 years old, has knocked around for a while, and has a fairly good idea of what he or she wants to study.
