The Operative Euphemism
Bridget Burns, the OUS dismantling, and the Discourse of Higher Education Reform
“What you fund shows what you value.” Those were the words of Bridget Burns to a symposium on the future of Oregon’s higher education system on November 1, 2011.1 At the time, Burns was chief of staff and senior policy advisor to the Oregon University System, the state agency that coordinated the state’s seven public universities. Within two years, she had left Salem. Within four, the agency she staffed no longer existed. Within 15 years, she was testifying before Congress as chief executive of a national consortium funded by the same foundations whose degree-attainment agenda had reorganized Oregon’s schools. Her career follows the same sequence of decisions that left Oregon’s universities to manage their own decline.
Burns’ rise through Oregon higher education system was rapid and, by her own account, unlikely. She grew up in a low-income family in rural Montana, began college with the support of a Pell Grant, and transferred to Oregon State University, where she served as student body president.2 At 22, she was appointed to the Oregon State Board of Higher Education, the citizen board that then governed all seven public universities. She earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Oregon State in 2005 and a master’s in public policy in 2011, rising through the chancellor’s office to its senior staff position.3
The 2011 Rupture
Burns’ own success in higher education was not enough to dissuade her from leading its corporatization and subsequent dismantling, however. She led the government relations campaign behind the 2011 legislation, SB 242, that removed the Oregon University System from state agency status. In its place was a reconstituted system, led by corporate boards of trustees, who had expanded their authority over purchasing, personnel, and finances.
Her colleagues in higher-education government relations gave Burns a national award for the effort; the citations describe the campaign as having freed the universities from state-agency status.4 Freedom is the operative euphemism, one that makes sense only against two decades of disinvestment.
Oregon’s 2011 rupture with direct university governance followed two decades of disinvestment. Ballot Measure 5 capped property taxes in 1990, and a governor’s task force urged the state in 1997 to treat its universities as contractors selling services rather than as public institutions.5 Defenders of SB 242 point to that history, and they are right to: the state cut funding first, then offered autonomy as the remedy, and the universities took it. A state that has released its universities to manage their own decline, however, no longer has to answer for it.
Three statutes consolidated the shift: Senate Bill 909 created the Oregon Education Investment Board; Senate Bill 1581 established the achievement compacts of 2012; and Senate Bill 270 in 2013 granted the University of Oregon and Portland State independent governing boards, defined each university as “an independent public body,” and set the remaining campuses on the same path.6 By 2015, the Oregon University System was dissolved.7 The chancellor’s office, in which Burns had served as chief of staff, was abolished along with it.
Burns left Salem in 2013, the year SB 270 passed and two years before the dissolution was complete. She departed for an American Council on Education fellowship at Arizona State University, where she worked directly with President Michael Crow. During that fellowship year, she and Crow developed the University Innovation Alliance, launched in 2014 to raise graduation rates at large public research universities by sharing and adapting student-success practices across campuses. Its 11 founding members included Oregon State University. Portland State never joined.8
Who Was in the Room
The public record does not show what role, if any, Burns played in the interim committee that drafted SB 270 in 2012. It does show who was in the room as Oregon’s new governance structure took shape.
In August 2011, Governor Kitzhaber convened LearnWorks, a design lab sponsored by the Oregon Business Council, charged with developing implementation strategies for the newly created Chief Education Office, the Oregon Education Investment Board, and the Higher Education Coordinating Commission. The member directory lists Bridget Burns, chief of staff to the Oregon University System, alongside the president of the Oregon Business Council, an Intel education relations manager, the Portland Business Alliance’s government relations manager, and John Tapogna (then of ECONorthwest), whose firm would help assemble Governor Kotek’s Prosperity Council report 15 years later.9
LearnWorks was a workshop rather than a hearing or a task force. Throughout August 2011, its members met daily to develop Oregon’s new education system. The universities’ coordinating agency sent its chief of staff. Over the following four years, much of the framework discussed in those meetings was enacted into law.
Coordination, Privatized
For decades, the Oregon University System governed the campuses, coordinated statewide funding and policy, and managed shared administrative services: a central bank, payroll, and auditing.10 When the system was dissolved, those functions did not disappear. Responsibility for some moved to the new institutional boards, some to the Higher Education Coordinating Commission, and the rest ceased altogether. Until 2015, OUS audited each university’s finances; afterward, each board oversaw its own finances, working from materials prepared by the campus administration itself.
Pre-reform, the Oregon University System (OUS) deliberated under the state’s public meetings law, which required it to open its sessions and release its records upon request. Now, Burns’ group, The Alliance, convenes its member presidents under the confidential and non-transparent “Chatham House Rules”, which abandons the public as a partner in public higher education.11
The University Innovation Alliance receives funding from Gates, Ford, Lumina, Kresge, and their peers. This is the same corporate philanthropic sector that created the unrealistic mandate for student achievement in Oregon’s statutes. This “40-40-20” law resembled President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, demanding that by 2025, 40 percent of Oregon adults should hold at least a bachelor’s degree, 40 percent should have associate’s degrees or certificates, and the remaining 20 percent should attain a high school diploma.12 Educators knew from the beginning that this aspirational expectation would never – could never – be realized, and of course, it was not.
This is the body that also failed in its mission for higher education. And, it has done so by migrating public entities from public scrutiny to private operations in which the Alliance selects its own members, sets its own metrics, and audits its own results. Nothing was privatized in the formal, statutory sense. Everything was privatized in the operative one.
Accounting for the Alliance
Back when SB 242 was being debated in the Oregon Legislature, Burns argued that state agency status did not serve students. She called the state’s central management of university quality and practice “bureaucratic.” Her argument was that universities released from the system, and connected to one another voluntarily, could move faster than any chancellor’s office would permit. She made the same argument about voluntary networks to Congress in June.
The Alliance’s member campuses expanded proactive advising, predictive analytics, completion grants, and chatbot-based student support, and shared lessons across institutions. The consortium now claims 19 public research universities enrolling more than 570,000 students. It reports that its members have produced more than 180,000 additional graduates above baseline projections since 2014.13 Its flagship completion-grant program distributed just over $3 million across 11 universities in three years, at an average award of $741.14 The completion-grant program, which awards emergency assistance to low-income students nearing graduation, is especially touted as a key to degree attainment.
Oregon has one campus within the Alliance, making the state a test case. Oregon State University, a founding member, graduated 5,670 students in 2019–20, up from 3,911 in 2012–13. OSU reports that graduates from racially marginalized groups increased 117 percent across those years.15 The Alliance claims that its approach works. Yet two facts qualify that success. Oregon State’s in-state tuition rose by more than half between 2014 and 2024, because a consortium has no power over how much a Legislature appropriates.16 Portland State, 90 miles north, is not a member; the state’s other large public university receives none of those resources.
By 2016, two years after its 2014 launch, the Alliance had raised $18.45 million in philanthropic funding. It announced another $2.9 million in 2024 to expand from 10 campuses to 17.17 A decade of national philanthropy for coordination reaches 17 campuses out of roughly 4,000. Foundations can fund a laboratory; they cannot sustain a system.
The Alliance also chooses its own baselines, and its claim of “additional” graduates rests on those choices. A forecast is a set of judgments about which inputs to include, which assumptions to lock, and how far to project. I have documented the same pattern at Portland State, where a $35 million deficit target is the output of a model whose fixed assumptions guarantee the conclusion.18 In the Alliance’s case, the underlying numbers are not in dispute: federal completion data record the graduates, and the counts withstand scrutiny. What belongs to the Alliance is not the graduates but the forecast they are measured against, the baseline that turns ordinary growth into “additional” completions. That forecast has never been reconciled independently.
The Witness
On June 3, 2026, Burns testified before the House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development, using a hearing on “Building an AI-Ready America” to present the Alliance as “a national laboratory for innovation.”19
She told the subcommittee that responsible adoption of artificial intelligence requires infrastructure for trusted collaboration, peer learning, and cross-campus coordination — infrastructure that her 19-member campuses enjoy and the nearly 4,000 remaining degree-granting institutions largely lack.
The concern is well founded, and the testimony doubles as a record of how states dismantled the very coordination she now says is missing. Oregon dismantled its version early and decisively, and the government relations campaign that cleared the way won her a national award. She is now paid to warn the country about the consequences of the autonomy she helped to render in Oregon. Her foundation now argues to fill the void that she, in her prior role, helped to create.
Oregon set out to raise its graduation rates and, for a decade, told itself the way to do so was to loosen the state’s hold on its universities. It did. What it has now is the work of coordinating its universities not by the state, but by a private consortium that answers to its funders, admits the campuses it chooses, and reports its own results. The public university system that once did this work for every campus in the state is gone. What replaced it serves 19 campuses in the country, one of them in Oregon, and calls itself a laboratory.
Notes
1. Bridget Burns, remarks at the “From Goal to Reality: Achieving 40-40-20 in Oregon” symposium, Corvallis, November 1, 2011, quoted in Oregon University System, From Goal to Reality: A Report on Strategies to Meet Oregon’s 40-40-20 Education Goals (May 2012), 9 (Burns, identified as “LearnWorks participant and Chief of Staff for OUS”: “What you fund shows what you value. It is the testament to your character. It indicates what you care about … We care about excellence and productivity and we’re not putting our value on that right now.”). ERIC ED539338.
2. Bridget Burns, interview transcript, “An Educated Guest” podcast, November 15, 2022, University Innovation Alliance, https://theuia.org/blog/innovating-together-11-15-22-episode-bridget-burns-educated-guest-podcast-transcript; witness biography, Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development, June 3, 2026, https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/119338/witnesses/HHRG-119-ED13-Bio-BurnsB-20260603.pdf.
3. Arizona State University faculty profile, Bridget Burns, https://search.asu.edu/profile/2224046.
4. 1776 advisor profile, Bridget Burns, https://www.1776.vc/profile/bridget-burns/ (award for “leading the successful legislative effort that freed Oregon’s seven universities from state agency status”); University Innovation Alliance, “Bridget Burns,” https://theuia.org/team/bridget-burns (Edward Crawford Award).
5. Oregon Ballot Measure 5 (1990), property-tax limitation, Oregon Constitution, art. XI, sec. 11b; Governor’s Task Force on Higher Education and the Economy, Higher Education and the Oregon Economy (Portland, OR: Oregon Business Council, 1997). Both are discussed in Ramin Farahmandpur, “From Kitzhaber to Kotek: The Managed Demise of Oregon Public Higher Education,” Academic Gadfly, June 11, 2026, and “Prosperity by Subtraction,” Academic Gadfly, June 29, 2026.
6. Oregon Senate Bill 242 (2011); Senate Bill 909 (2011); Senate Bill 1581 (2012); Senate Bill 270 (2013), Enrolled, §§ 1–3, https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2013R1/Downloads/MeasureDocument/SB270/Enrolled.
7. Higher Education Coordinating Commission, 2024 University Evaluation: University of Oregon (ORS 352.061), https://www.oregon.gov/highered/strategy-research/Documents/Legislative-Budget-Resources/Leg-2025/2024-University-Evaluation-University-of-Oregon-ORS%20352.061.pdf.
8. Michael T. Nietzel, “Scaling Higher Ed Collaboration: An Interview with University Innovation Alliance Executive Director Bridget Burns,” Forbes, June 1, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/06/01/an-interview-with-university-innovation-alliance-executive-director-bridget-burns/; the eleven founding members are listed in “University Innovation Alliance receives $3.85M in new grant funding to improve student success,” University of Kansas, March 4, 2016, https://news.ku.edu/news/article/2016/03/04/university-innovation-alliance-receives-385-million-new-grant-funding-improve-student.
9. On LearnWorks: Oregon University System, From Goal to Reality (May 2012), 9 (ERIC ED539338), describing LearnWorks as “a group of about 30 individuals with professional expertise and passion for Oregon public education,” “convened by the Governor and sponsored by the Oregon Business Council,” which “met every day throughout the month of August 2011” to shift Oregon from a model that “incentivizes enrollment growth and ‘seat time’” to one “focused on successful outcomes.” LearnWorks Member Directory, State of Oregon (listing “Bridget Burns, Chief of Staff, Oregon University System” alongside Duncan Wyse, Oregon Business Council; John Tapogna, ECONorthwest; Public Strategies Group; Intel; and the Portland Business Alliance); Oregon Business Council, “Putting Students at the Center: An Overview of Oregon Learns” (six-year retrospective), https://cdn.orbusinesscouncil.org/docs/policy/Oregon_Learns_Six-Year_Retrospective--v2.pdf. The OUS report gives roughly 30 participants; the OBC retrospective gives roughly 40. On ECONorthwest’s staffing of the Prosperity Council report, see Farahmandpur, “Prosperity by Subtraction,” note 2.
10. State Board of Higher Education, “Evolving Roles and Responsibilities,” 2013, https://www.eou.edu/governance/files/2013/09/Evolving-Roles-and-Responsibilities-State-Board-of-Higher-Education.pdf (direct governance, statewide funding and policy coordination, shared administrative services including a central bank, payroll, and auditing).
11. Bridget Burns, written testimony, Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development, Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives, June 3, 2026, https://edworkforce.house.gov/uploadedfiles/bridget_burns_written_testimony.pdf.
12. University Innovation Alliance, Completion Grants Playbook, https://cg.theuia.org/ (eleven participating institutions provided over $3 million in completion grants to nearly 5,000 students across three academic years; average award $741, campus averages ranging from $423 to $1,000; funded by Ascendium Education Group and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).
13. “Oregon State part of national consortium of universities that has outpaced its graduation goals,” Oregon State University, June 2021, https://today.oregonstate.edu/news/oregon-state-part-national-consortium-universities-has-outpaced-its-graduation-goals (graduates rose from 3,911 in 2012–13 to 5,670 in 2019–20; graduates of color up 117 percent; low-income graduates up 17 percent). The percentage claims rest on the Alliance’s baseline projections; the graduate counts do not.
14. National Center for Education Statistics. n.d. “Oregon State University Institutional Profile.” Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). U.S. Department of Education. Accessed July 26, 2026. https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/.
15. “University Innovation Alliance receives $3.85M in new grant funding,” University of Kansas, March 4, 2016 (total funds awarded of $18.45 million, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the Lumina Foundation, the Markle Foundation, USA Funds, and the U.S. Department of Education); “University Innovation Alliance grows to 17 schools, lands important philanthropic investment,” PR Newswire, October 2024, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/university-innovation-alliance-grows-to-17-schools-lands-important-philanthropic-investment-302277335.html ($2.9 million; expansion from ten to seventeen campuses).
16. Ramin Farahmandpur, Factual Review Memorandum, Findings 1–7, prepared for the PSU-AAUP review team, 2026.
17. “Q&A with University Innovation Alliance CEO Bridget Burns,” ASU University Design Institute, https://udi.asu.edu/co-lab/article/University-Innovation-Alliance-CEO-Bridget-Burns-Q-and-A.
18. Funders per note 17. On Oregon’s 40-40-20 goal and its philanthropic genealogy, Oregon Senate Bill 253 (2011); Lumina Foundation attainment goal, 2008.
19. Burns, written testimony, June 3, 2026 (see note 11); hearing record, “Building an AI-Ready America: Higher Education in the Age of AI,” June 3, 2026, 2175 Rayburn House Office Building.