Private gifts, grants, and contracts provide about 50% of the school's revenues on a year-by-year basis, and the federal government supplies another 40%, mostly in the form of grants restricted to specific research projects. The faculty is involved in both basic and applied research; federal grants and contracts provide about 40% of the school's research budget. Another 40% comes from such companies as Tektronix, Intel, Omark, Weyerhaeuser, Crown Zellerback, and Eyedentify, a start-up that makes equipment for identifying people by prints of their retinas. Weyerhaeuser sponsored a project to add qualities to trees by cloning. Another genetics project is involved in an attempt to produce a colorless alder so that paper products won't have to be bleached.
Cooperative study programs have been set up with Reed College, Portland Community College, and the University of Portland to allow students to do two or three years of training at one of those institutions and then graduate work at OGC. In addition, OGC coordinates Saturday science classes in computing, electronics, and other fields for 6th-to-12th-grade students. One of the professors, Larry Murr, organized a "distinguished lecture" series in Graduate Materials for anyone in the community who wanted to come, and 80 people from the area's small steel mill, casting companies, and a titanium mining company attended.
There are voices raising concerns that the Oregon Graduate Center is tapping federal, state, and private support that otherwise would have found its way into the state education pool, that efforts should have focused on building up already existing institutions, rather than raising a new one from the mud. But Paul Carlson, OGC's current president, and OGC's supportrrs disagree. The federal grant money that the center gets is mainly in areas of research not offered at other Oregon institutions, they say. Private money might have been more difficult to raise for a public institution over which the donors had less control. In fact, Carlson thinks, there is something about a public-private duality in education that is healthy. Call it competition or intellectual tension, or just stimulus, but he points to Stanford and Berkeley, and to the University of North Carolina and Duke University as evidence that the existence of two schools in close proximity can be healthy. There is also a renewed interest in education in Oregon, manifested by the $1 million raised by the AEA Oregon High Technology Education Consortium and the state legislature.
Besides, Howard Vollum, John Gray, Doug Strain, Paul Carlson, and Sam Diack weren't going to sit around waiting to find out if the state would come up with more money for higher education while companies were deciding to settle in North Carolina. Across the state, the momentum of Oregonians doing something about their future was building. Some people in Washington County, west of Portland, were even building their own roads.
"The county said, 'OK, you can develop this land. However, the road is deficient, and the cars you generate out of your development will load the road to a point where it would be unacceptable. You, the developer, have to mitigate those problems by other means, because we, the county, don't have any money.' "So, we got together with our neighbors, and we collectively assessed ourselves through an LID [a local improvement districtl something like $1.7 million to get a nice road built where a very inadequate road had been, thereby eliminating the last hurdle for development. The public put no money into that road. The county really likes that. The National Association of Counties gave us a "Good Neighbor" award. -- John Rees, vice-president and general manager of The Quadrant Corp., a Weyerhaeuser subsidiary
The road is just two miles long. It has three bridges, no traffic signals, two lanes with turnouts, wide shoulders, and provisions for five lanes (wide shoulders and utilities placed out of the path of future expansion). A former cow path that had been oiled and then asphalted over the years, it was dug up two years ago, straightened, leveled, graded, and surfaced until it became the nice new road it is now. There is nothing physically exceptional about it. Still, it is an indication that maybe things really are different in Oregon. After all, developers don't go around building public roads everywhere. The county didn't even say that they should. But the three largest of the companies -- Quadrant, Standard Insurance, and Edwards Industries -- that owned the land bordering the deficient road had a choice between taking a role usually filled by the county (building roads), or sitting on the land paying interest while they waited for the county to get some money. Local governments were broke, and people just weren't passing levies to fund short stretches of road that happened to go by a piece of property some developer wanted to develop, even if it was a public road. So the developers went around to their smaller land-holding neighbors -- a nearby church, a school, and some private citizens -- and got the go-ahead from them and the county to put together their own LID. And a year and a half later, they had their road. It was a textbook case of the way things were supposed to work in Oregon.
Relations between the public and the private sectors were not always so sanguine. There was a time in the early and mid-'70s when the agencies and the rules were newer, when the mechanisms, and even the relationships to resolve differences of opinion, were not in place.
Five years ago, Floating Point Systems, a Tektronix spin-off, ran into problems when it wanted to build a new plant. Although the area in which Floating Point planned to build was zoned for light industrial use, the state's Department of Environmental Quality refused to allow the company to build there, because of concerns about air quality. The problem, the agency said, wasn't chemical emissions -- Floating Point is primarily an assembly operation -- but increased auto emissions from people traveling to and from the plant. And in a bureaucratic catch-22, the areas where the air was OK for commuting weren't zoned for light industry. Floating Point had had to appeal their case all the way to the Governor's office. The whole process took about six months, and, says Jack Carveth, formerly of Floating Point, "when the building time is a year, that's a problem."
