From Kitzhaber to Kotek: The Managed Demise of Oregon Public Higher Education

How Oregon’s university crisis was planned long before it was declared

The Blueprint

In a crisis, one looks for proximate causes to determine the best approach for resolution. When it comes to the fiscal plight of Oregon's “public” universities, however, it's necessary to look back nearly 30 years—to the real start of the decline.

Though some point to the 2008 recession as the catalyst for higher education restructuring, the fact is that the plan to institute “reform” was devised in 1997 as a proposition of corporatists.

Their vision emerged from the Governor’s Task Force on Higher Education and the Economy, a panel of executives from banking, construction, health care, and technology, which argued that universities should no longer be treated as public agencies but as independent vendors.

This Task Force recommended that Oregon regard its institutions “as independent entities from which services can be contracted,”¹ rather than as state agencies. This shift in terminology carried major institutional and political consequences: a state agency is funded, while a vendor is paid for results. Much of what followed grew out of that redefinition.

Later described as a response to a crisis, these reforms are better understood as the adoption of an earlier policy. The 2008 recession is often treated as the cause of Oregon’s higher education reforms. The timing of enactment may make that interpretation plausible. After all, in this time, enrollment surged, tuition climbed, and state revenue fell, prompting legislative action. Each element of that account is supported by evidence.

The fiscal strain, however, predated the recession. Measure 5, the 1990 property-tax limitation,² had been reducing the state’s capacity to fund education for two decades. The recession deepened an existing strain; it did not create the reforms so much as provide the opening to enact them. The plan had been drafted, funded, and circulated for years, and the downturn simply created the political opportunity for implementation. Read alongside the restructuring bills passed in 2011, the 1997 report reads as a detailed policy blueprint.

The Imported Doctrine

The 1997 report reflected a national education doctrine that was already well established. In 1986, the National Governors’ Association, under the chairmanship of Lamar Alexander, published Time for Results,³ which urged states to tie school funding to measurable outcomes, develop sanctions for institutions that failed to meet goals, including state takeover, and strengthen coordination between K–12 and higher education so both could be directed toward common benchmarks.

Three years earlier, A Nation at Risk supplied the doctrine's founding rationale.⁴ The report itself never ranked the variables; the reformers who invoked it distilled it into a single claim: that teacher quality outweighs every other factor in student achievement, including class size, household income, and school resources. By the time the Oregon Task Force convened, these ideas had already become policy orthodoxy.

The Network Behind It

These ideas were advanced and sustained by a coordinated network of business groups, foundations, advocacy organizations, and private vendors that supplied money, publicity, and political influence.

Oregon’s corporate reform agenda can be traced to 2004 and 2005, when the Oregon Education Roundtable, a project of the Oregon Business Council, produced a set of white papers funded by the Oregon Community Foundation and the Lumina Foundation. The Roundtable concluded that the state’s education system “must be funded and structured differently,”⁵ proposed tying expenditures to performance outcomes, and introduced the goal that became known as 40-40-20. The 40-40-20 law (SB 253 in 2011) absurdly demanded a 100% high school graduation rate and an 80% post-secondary completion rate—unrealistically untethered from reality and misaligned with the predicted future workforce needs.

This theme surfaces at every stage. Lumina set its own national goal in 2008: 60 percent postsecondary attainment by 2025,⁶ advancing a similar completion agenda on a national scale. Advocacy organizations such as the Chalkboard Project and Stand for Children brought the message into the public arena, arguing that more money was not the answer and that schools should be audited, monitored, and held accountable for results. The American Legislative Exchange Council supplied a model for legislators. Pearson supplied the tests. What appeared to be homegrown common sense was, in fact, supported by a coordinated policy network.

The influence was not subtle, and the network has acknowledged it. The Oregon Business Council credits its Roundtable white papers with laying the conceptual framework for the reforms the legislature enacted between 2011 and 2014.⁷ A similar pattern appeared lower in the system. The Chalkboard Project, funded by a consortium of private foundations, saw its CLASS model for evaluating and paying teachers adopted into state law and supported with public funds, with an additional $16 million in 2015.⁸ In both cases, privately funded initiatives were translated into public policy.

Just as important as the network promoting these reforms was the rhetoric it used to make them appear necessary and reasonable. One of the most consequential changes was the shift from speaking about public funding to speaking about investment.

The Roundtable’s agenda was evident in the rhetoric of its white papers. The white papers borrowed the language of critical education, transformation, liberation, and empowerment to describe a managerial vision of schooling. They warned that an Oregonian without a postsecondary credential would face “a precarious existence” in an economy that punishes the uneducated. They recommended that funds be “organized around students, not institutions.”⁹ In this usage, “institutions” meant labor and the unions that defend it. The Roundtable approached public higher education primarily as a workforce training ground and, therefore, as a major budgetary expense.

From Funding to Investment

The most important change was rhetorical because it redefined the state’s obligation to public universities. Reformers increasingly described higher education as an investment expected to produce returns rather than as a public good deserving support.

Calling it funding suggested a public commitment; calling it investment implied that support depended on measurable payoff. A state that funds its universities recognizes a public obligation to support them, while a state that invests in them reserves the right to demand proof of return before committing more.

It also recast the relationship among the state, students, faculty, and institutions in more market-oriented terms. As Bridget Burns, then chief of staff of the Oregon University System, told a 2011 symposium, “what you fund shows what you value.”¹⁰ She was correct, and the budgets that followed made clear that the state was willing to support higher education less robustly.

This redefinition was translated into policy and governance, where the state redefined its relationship to higher education in concrete institutional terms.

In 2011 and 2012, that language was written directly into Oregon’s education governance structure. Senate Bill 909 created the Oregon Education Investment Board, chaired by the governor, and Senate Bill 242 established the Higher Education Coordinating Commission. The following year, Senate Bill 1581 introduced achievement compacts, annual contracts that required institutions to report their progress toward state benchmarks. Meanwhile, the chancellor’s office of the Oregon University System was dissolved. Portland State, the University of Oregon, and Oregon State were granted their own boards of trustees, which assumed authority by 2014.

The governor also converted the elected Superintendent of Public Instruction into an appointed assistant officer, and the governor became the superintendent, at least in name.¹¹ The direction was consistent: the state centralized political authority over education in the governor’s office while reducing its financial obligation to institutions. It no longer functioned primarily as the direct steward of public higher education, instead positioning itself as an investor that retained authority to set terms while reducing its financial commitment.

This shift in Oregon was not unique. Scholars of higher education had already seen the writing on the proverbial wall. Michael Peters described the entrepreneurial university as one that shifts the cost of attendance onto students, courts international enrollment for revenue, treats knowledge as a private commodity, and installs a class of administrators hired to run public institutions as though they were private businesses.¹² Peter Eckel and his colleagues gave the result a name: the quasi-public institution, severed from the state and redefined from a public good into a private one.¹³ Oregon was not improvising; it was implementing a recognizable model.

The University as a Revenue Model

Portland State University offers a clear illustration of how the statewide program was implemented. Responding to declining state support, it adopted performance-based funding measured in student credit-hour production. It introduced flexible degrees completed largely online, offered accelerated programs, and gave credit for prior learning.

In 2013, it launched Rethink PSU, a $3 million pool of student fees from online courses, awarded to departments that competed to streamline their operations.¹⁴ It convened an Academic Program Prioritization committee to sort programs into the healthy, the promising, and the challenged. It pursued out-of-state and international students as a deliberate revenue strategy, setting a target of 3,000 international students enrolled. The 1997 report had recommended this approach years earlier, urging Oregon's public universities to compete for out-of-state learners as a source of tuition revenue.¹⁵ The university's response followed the recommendation closely.

University administrators stated the rationale in planning documents. Portland State’s strategic plan for 2011 through 2014 set the goal of expanding online and hybrid courses partly because doing so would limit the impact on the university’s physical space. The reasoning was primarily fiscal: more students, fewer buildings, and a lower cost per credit. The same plan presented the recruitment of international and out-of-state students as a means of raising revenue. Enrollment had been recast as a source of income, and the plan made that explicit.¹⁶

If the strategic plan outlined the university’s revenue rationale in broad terms, the committee’s plan demonstrated how that calculus operated more narrowly within the institution, ranking programs by administrative and financial value.

The Academic Program Prioritization process exposed the institution’s preference for administrative and financial metrics over measures of teaching and learning. Although its criteria appeared comprehensive, in practice, they were mostly fiscal.

The committee evaluated every program according to its relation to the university mission, student demand, quality, productivity, financial performance, and trajectory.¹⁷ Each unit was required to file reports that measured graduation rates at four and six years; time to degree; revenue generated by grants, contracts, and gifts; instructional expenditures per student credit hour; faculty salary benchmarks; and average class size.

Measures that might capture what a program teaches, or what a student gains from it, were nearly absent. The rubric’s only gesture toward quality asked to what extent students participated in scholarship, creative work, community engagement, or internships beyond the classroom—a question the form could pose, but the spreadsheet could not score.¹⁸ The remaining criteria translated teaching and learning into financial data points.

From the outset, the administration described Academic Program Prioritization as a process that assessed a program’s value in line with the institution’s strategic priorities. It presented the process as a means of guiding “strategic investment in programs that best support institutional goals.”¹⁹ In that formulation, a program’s worth is measured by whatever advances the institution’s strategy, while the institution’s strategy is itself shaped by the same budgetary logic used to evaluate the program. The result is a circular framework in which value is determined by the priorities it is supposed to justify. In this construction, the evidence strategic priority is reduced to economic survival, not an educational mission.

Under this model, credit-hour production became the basic currency of academic worth. Courses with strong enrollment were treated as financially justifiable, while those with lower enrollment were increasingly framed as liabilities, regardless of what they taught or whom they served. Academic Program Prioritization was presented as a means of directing investment toward the programs that best supported institutional goals, not inherent educational value. In practice, it gave administrators a defensible framework for deciding which programs to reduce, along with rhetoric that cast programs as healthy or challenged and made such reductions appear to be neutral triage rather than administrative choice.

To be fair, this model gained support in part because it coincidentally addressed other legitimate concerns. Frustrations with inequitable student outcomes and institutional stagnation gave added validation to this model. Outcomes funding and the 40-40-20 goal drew genuine support from equity advocates who saw that the old model rewarded universities for enrolling low-income and first-generation students without ever answering for whether those students graduated.

While these concerns were valid, so too were the other pressures on enrollment: a shrinking college-age population and a post-2008 flight from the humanities toward business and engineering. A fair account grants all of this, but none of it exonerates the framework.

A funding model built on credit-hour production needs no administrator with particular ideological hostility; its structure alone will turn any enrollment decline, whatever its cause, into a rationale for elimination. Equity entered the same system and emerged as a metric. The promise to graduate underserved students became a number to be optimized, and the disciplines that examine power and inequality became line items that failed to clear the minimum. The system did not need to target those disciplines explicitly; its design was sufficient to disadvantage them.

The implications of this structure are clearer when it is taken to an extreme conclusion. West Virginia University offers a useful comparison because it illustrates what can happen when the same governing rationale is carried even farther.

What the Model Produces

The model’s consequences are not hypothetical. The clearest cautionary case rests in a state that carried the model to its endpoint.

In 2023, West Virginia University, the only research flagship in one of the poorest states in the country, declared a $45 million deficit and announced a restructuring it called Academic Transformation. The Board of Governors approved it that September, cutting 28 majors and 143 faculty positions and eliminating its entire Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics. They kept only a handful of instructors to teach Spanish and Chinese as electives.²⁰ The cuts were shaped by a new state funding formula, written into law that same year, that rewarded degrees tied to workforce development.²¹ The Modern Language Association noted that no other state flagship had abandoned language instruction on such a scale.²²

One detail makes the underlying logic especially clear. The world languages department was profitable, returning roughly $800,000 a year. The university cut it anyway.²³ A program need not be failing in substantive terms to be judged unsuccessful under the formula. It has only to teach what the formula cannot readily price. As a substitute for its language faculty, the university floated a partnership with a digital platform, reducing the discipline to a subscription-based substitute.²⁴

The sorting process that began under names like Academic Program Prioritization can, when carried to its logical end, result in deep institutional cuts, and the first disciplines to go are often the ones the metric cannot read: languages, the humanities, and other liberal arts fields whose worth is not easily quantified.

Seen in that light, the rhetoric of crisis begins to look less like an explanation and more like a political instrument. What appeared to be emergency reform was, in fact, the continuation of a much older agenda—one might say, “the Shock Doctrine” of higher education.²⁵

The natural progression of this agenda is visible in Oregon today, where the governance structure created during Gov. John Kitzhaber’s tenure remains largely intact under Gov. Tina Kotek. The Higher Education Coordinating Commission (HECC), established in that period, still directs funding, and Ben Cannon, who advised Kitzhaber on education and became the commission’s first director, continues to lead it.²⁶

At the same time, the state’s commitment to its public universities has not meaningfully recovered. Under Kotek, appropriations have risen only marginally, increases university presidents describe as reductions in real terms; Oregon ranks 32nd nationally in public investment in higher education, and tuition now supplies more than half of university revenue.²⁷

In 2026, with several campuses facing multimillion-dollar deficits, the Oregon legislature directed HECC to study how to make the system “financially sustainable,” an administrative phrase that now reads less like a plan for renewal than a strategy for managing permanent austerity.²⁸

Taken together, these patterns make clear that the crisis functioned less as the cause of reform than as the occasion for implementing it. Reformers often said as much themselves. Sue Hildick, once president of the corporate-reformist Chalkboard Project, stated the position plainly: “Getting more money is not a goal.”²⁹

A movement that spent two decades demanding accountability from public universities while accepting, and often rationalizing, the steady withdrawal of public support was never confused about funding. The ambiguity was politically useful because it redirected attention away from disinvestment and toward institutional blame.

The plan was launched before the crisis, and much of it has now been realized. What remains of Oregon’s public universities may best be understood as the residue of a public system after a long program of managed retreat.

1. Governor’s Task Force on Higher Education and the Economy, Higher Education and the Oregon Economy (Portland, OR: Oregon Business Council, 1997).

2. Oregon Ballot Measure 5 (1990), property-tax limitation, codified at Oregon Constitution, art. XI, sec. 11b.

3. National Governors’ Association, Time for Results: The Governors’ 1991 Report on Education (Washington, DC: National Governors’ Association, 1986).

4. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 1983), https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/index.html.

5. Oregon Education Roundtable, Raising the Bar white-paper series (Portland, OR: Oregon Business Council, 2004–2005), funded by the Oregon Community Foundation and the Lumina Foundation. The OBC confirms the funding and dates and credits the white papers with laying “the conceptual framework” for the 2011–2014 reforms: “Policy Papers — Education and Talent Development,” https://orbusinesscouncil.org/policy-papers/policy-papers-education-and-talent.

6. Lumina Foundation, "Goal 2025" (Indianapolis: Lumina Foundation, 2008), https://www.luminafoundation.org.

7. Oregon Business Council, “Policy Papers — Education and Talent Development,” https://orbusinesscouncil.org/policy-papers/policy-papers-education-and-talent. The OBC states that the Oregon Learns reforms were “promoted by Governor Kitzhaber and enacted by the Legislature between 2011 and 2014.”

8. Oregon Senate Bill 290 (2011); Chalkboard Project / Foundations for a Better Oregon, CLASS Project (Creative Leadership Achieves Student Success). On the 2015 appropriation: Stuart Watson, "Chalkboard Boosts Students with Strong Foundations for Better Teaching," Oregon Business, August 31, 2016, https://oregonbusiness.com/17155-chalkboard-boosts-students-with-strong-foundations-for-better-teaching/, reporting that the 2015 Legislature appropriated $16 million for district-driven CLASS plans.

9. Oregon Education Roundtable white papers (see note 5).

10. Oregon University System, From Goal to Reality: A Report on Strategies to Meet Oregon’s 40-40-20 Education Goals (Portland, OR: Oregon University System, May 2012), 9. Remarks of Bridget Burns at the November 1, 2011 symposium.

11. Oregon Senate Bill 909 (2011), Oregon Education Investment Board; Senate Bill 242 (2011), Higher Education Coordinating Commission; Senate Bill 1581 (2012), achievement compacts; House Bill 4086 (2012), governing boards for the University of Oregon and Portland State University; Senate Bill 270 (2013), governing boards for the remaining universities; Senate Bill 552 (2011), Superintendent of Public Instruction. Searchable via the Oregon Legislative Information System, https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov.

12. Michael A. Peters, “Managerialism and the Neoliberal University: Prospects for New Forms of ‘Open Management’ in Higher Education,” Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice 5, no. 1 (2013): 11–26.

13. Peter D. Eckel, Lara Couturier, and Dao T. Luu, Peering Around the Bend: The Leadership Challenges of Privatization, Accountability, and Market-Based State Policy (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 2005).

14. Portland State University, "Portland State ReTHINKing an Urban University" (Office of University Communications one-pager, distributed via the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, 2015), https://www.aplu.org/wp-content/uploads/Portland-State-University-TCC-One-Pager.pdf. The document describes the ReTHINK PSU initiative and the Provost’s Challenge, through which Provost Sona Andrews awarded $3 million in one-time grants to faculty and staff in 2013 for 24 projects.

15. On the recommendation: Governor’s Task Force on Higher Education and the Economy, Higher Education and the Oregon Economy (1997) (see note 1). The report names tuition as the largest source of operating income and urges public universities to "compete more aggressively for learners (tuition revenues)" and to compete for out-of-state learners. On the 3,000-international-student target: Portland State University Strategic Plan 2011–2014, Goal 2.2 (see note 16).

16. Strategic Planning Development Team and Portland State University, Office of the President, "Opportunity and Competitiveness for the Region: Portland State University Strategic Plan 2011–2014" (November 18, 2011), https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/strategicplan2020_resource/8. The plan makes enrollment-as-income explicit: it records that state support had fallen from roughly 48 percent of operating revenue two decades earlier to about 13 percent, that students and families had come to cover two-thirds of the cost while the state covered one-third, and it commits to a budget model that "ties funding more closely to enrollment" and aims to "empower the Deans as effective entrepreneurs." The nonresident and international recruitment targets appear under the plan’s diversity and internationalization goals; the revenue purpose follows from the enrollment-tied budget model rather than from the plan’s framing of recruitment.

17. Academic Program Prioritization Committee, Portland State University Faculty Senate, “What is Academic Program Prioritization (APP)?” November 14, 2014, https://pdxappc.blogspot.com/2014/11/what-is-academic-program-prioritization.html

18. Academic Program Prioritization Committee, "Criteria, Metrics, and Questions: A First Draft," November 16, 2014, https://pdxappc.blogspot.com/2014/11/criteria-metrics-and-questions-first.html, linking the seven-page draft "DRAFT Criteria, Metrics, and Questions for the Academic Program Prioritization Process at PSU" (APPC to Faculty Senate, November 3, 2014). The draft pairs quantitative metrics with qualitative questions because, in the committee’s words, numeric data alone would not capture the context and nuance needed to assess a program.

19. APPC, “What is Academic Program Prioritization (APP)?” (see note 17).

20. “West Virginia University's Unprecedented Proposed Cuts Become Clear," Inside Higher Ed, August 11, 2023, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/tenure/2023/08/11/west-virginia-universitys-unprecedented-proposed-cuts-become; "Despite Public Outcry, WVU Will Cut 28 Majors, 143 Faculty Jobs," West Virginia Watch, September 15, 2023, https://westvirginiawatch.com/2023/09/15/despite-public-outcry-wvu-will-cut-28-majors-143-faculty-jobs/

21. Amelia Ferrell Knisely, “’It’s Been Chaos’: WVU Nears End of Tumultuous Academic Year After Jobs, Programs Unexpectedly Cut,” West Virginia Watch, April 23, 2024, https://westvirginiawatch.com/2024/04/23/its-been-chaos-wvu-nears-end-of-tumultuous-academic-year-after-jobs-programs-unexpectedly-cut/.

22. Paula M. Krebs, Executive Director, Modern Language Association, letter to E. Gordon Gee, President, West Virginia University, August 11, 2023, quoted in "West Virginia University’s Unprecedented Proposed Cuts Become Clear" (see note 20).

23. Knisely, "'It's Been Chaos'" (see note 21).

24. “West Virginia University Looks to Cut Nearly 3 Dozen Academic Programs, Including All World Languages,” Higher Ed Dive, August 11, 2023, https://www.highereddive.com/news/west-virginia-university-looks-to-cut-nearly-3-dozen-academic-programs-inc/690709/

25. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007)

26. On Cannon as Kitzhaber’s chief education advisor: From Goal to Reality (Oregon University System, 2012), 19. On Cannon as current HECC executive director: Oregon Capital Chronicle, April 28, 2025 (see note 26).

27. Alex Baumhardt, "Undergrad Tuition to Rise Again at All Oregon's Public Universities, Up Nearly 30% from a Decade Ago," Oregon Capital Chronicle, April 28, 2025, https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2025/04/28/undergrad-tuition-to-rise-again-at-all-oregons-public-universities-up-nearly-30-from-a-decade-ago/.

28. Oregon House Bill 4124 (2026); Higher Education Coordinating Commission, “Oregon Postsecondary Education System Study — Implementation of House Bill 4124,” https://www.oregon.gov/highered/strategy-research/pages/hb-4124.aspx. See also “Higher Ed in Oregon Gets Legislative Wins,” OPB, March 10, 2026, https://www.opb.org/article/2026/03/10/higher-education-oregon-legislature-budget/

29. No Hiding from the Money Issue,” editorial, The Oregonian, June 9, 2005, C04.