The University of Nike was born, in spirit, the moment Dave Frohnmayer withdrew the University of Oregon’s membership in the WRC; in a more practical sense, the transformation was complete once Knight showed he could have university employees hired or fired; in an absolute sense, the takeover will not reach its apotheosis until the coming decade, with the opening of the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact.
The Knight Campus was announced ninety minutes before the sun rose over Eugene on the morning of October 18, 2016, with a series of Web sites, promotional videos, and press releases that made it seem more like a product launch than an academic undertaking: Knight pledged $500 million to fund the $1 billion Knight Campus, which will consist of three new 70,000-square-foot buildings, adjacent to the school’s existing science complex, outfitted with cutting-edge laboratories, research facilities, prototyping tools, imaging facilities, and an innovation hub—an academic incubator, of sorts, that is sure to make every head in Silicon Valley bow. PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel turned heads, after all, with his fellowship program that pays a select few students to drop out of school and pursue research or business ventures. Knight, ostensibly a relic of old-school American capitalism, managed to transform what he found unprofitable about the public university.
It might not have happened if not for Richard Lariviere’s vision for a more independent university, which unexpectedly came true in the middle of 2015: each of Oregon’s seven public universities, long under the governance and oversight of a state board of higher education, were granted the right to have individual governing boards. Knight was approaching eighty and spending his $24-billion fortune more liberally than ever before, with gifts of $500 million to the Oregon Health & Science University and $400 million to Stanford. The time had come for Knight—with the help of Michael Schill, the fourth University of Oregon president since Frohnmayer’s departure—to elevate the concept of the quasi-private public university to new heights.
The impressive speed with which they embraced such a major logistical undertaking was not what most surprised Thomas Hager, who had been in charge of the university’s media relations during Frohnmayer’s early years as president. As with the dramatic rebranding initiative that had been kept quiet years earlier, it was the fact that they had managed to keep it secret.
“I was struck by how the whole thing sprang full-blown, in a moment, from nothing to everything, with this packaged approach that gave no hint ahead of time that anything was coming,” Hager said. “It was quite an example of PR-age.”
The language of marketing and public relations seemed an appropriate vehicle for delivering news of the Knight Campus, which had been conceived, in secret, as a bridge between industry and the university. It would be “dedicated to fast-track science discoveries into innovations, products or cures,” according to a press release, which said it would “reshape the higher-education landscape in Oregon by training new generations of scientists” while “forging tighter ties with industry and entrepreneurs.”
Hager, along with many others on campus, struggled to understand what any of this actually meant.
“Very little was said about what kinds of things we are going to be researching, aside from bio-science and health stuff, which for me is very problematic because that means the pharmaceutical industry,” he said. “There are serious ethical issues and questions over the role of the university in commercialization and product development when you’re a public institution, and I haven’t seen any evidence that those issues have been thought of or addressed.”
Seven months later, when hundreds of Eugene residents gathered at a community center to learn more about the Knight Campus, President Schill gave no indication that he’d considered any of the ethical issues raised by members of his faculty. Instead, he offered up a buzzword-laden description of a project that seemed to border on neoliberal utopianism.
The Knight Campus, Schill said, would give researchers a way to move their laboratory discoveries more quickly into testing, so they could more quickly become “cures and solutions” for the problems facing society.
“That market signal,” he said, “would turn around and benefit and inform their basic science—we call this the ‘impact cycle.’
“One of the overarching goals of the Knight Campus,” he added, “is to create a research-rich environment, gather together smart and innovative people, remove barriers, then that in turn would rapidly speed this impact cycle.”
This raises an important question: Who will decide which barriers need to be removed from the path of the “impact cycle” at the University of Oregon’s Knight Campus?
The architects and agents of the CIA’s MK-Ultra program, for example, viewed basic constitutional and human rights as barriers to be eliminated. The Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis, in its partnership with UC Berkeley, tossed aside important ethical research practices, like the obligation to publish clinical-trial data, which it viewed as a barrier to innovation. When the Knight Campus announces its corporate partners—if it announces its corporate partners—where will the “impact cycle” lead the researchers working there? And what will they do if it leads them somewhere they had not prepared for or even imagined?
Recent history suggests that the University of Oregon will side with its corporate partners, which could be disastrous if the contracts they sign with Nike and other corporations are anything like those signed by UC Berkeley and Novartis. Under such terms, “cures and solutions,” if they are unprofitable to the university’s corporate partners, might be shelved; studies linking a corporation’s food products to some disease or another might be buried; and clinical trials might be repeated but not published, ad nauseam, until a sponsor has the opportunity to tailor the variables in such a way that the product is shown only in the best possible light. University research, in these conditions, becomes a form of marketing rather than inquiry.
President Schill did not address precisely what barriers may be standing in the way of the University of Oregon’s “impact cycle,” nor how these obstacles might be removed through corporate partnerships. One of the less ominous answers is lack of funding. A state-of-the art facility might help Oregon recruit better scientists, just as its athletics facilities helped it recruit better athletes. And with the corporate backing and industry partnerships the Knight Campus promises, new tenure-track faculty might produce the kind of research needed to help the school win greater prestige and more federal grant money, both of which it could use.
Over the years, Knight’s increasingly generous gifts brought athletic acclaim, brand recognition, and lucrative television and licensing deals to the University of Oregon. But they failed to bring a sense of stability to the school, and in some ways obscured the fraught reality of an institution constantly on the brink of peril. Frohnmayer and his successors relied on a crude but effective model for shoring up funds to replace declining state support for higher education: they used Knight’s money to build Oregon athletics into a regional and national powerhouse, then leveraged the power of that brand to attract more out-of-state students, who pay higher tuition than Oregon residents. This worked so well that between 2004 and 2014 the percentage of Oregonians entering the school’s freshman class declined from 68 percent to just under 50 percent. (It also worked well enough that, before it earned the nickname University of Nike, the school was often derisively called the University of California, Eugene.)
There was no commensurate hiring of new faculty, however, and throughout this same period, Oregon’s staff remained poorly compensated relative to colleagues at peer universities. Some of these faculty were faced with ballooning class sizes, which pushed the faculty-to-student ratio beyond the point where Oregon could punch its weight, academically, against peer institutions where students had more one-on-one time with professors. To keep class size under control, administrators tended to hire adjunct professors, rather than tenure-track faculty. This saved the school money on salary and benefits, but it also won it fewer federal grants for the kind of research produced by tenured professors, and produced fewer PhD and graduate students emerging from under the tutelage of tenured faculty, whose research they often assist. In 2013, when the school at last dared to research which of its peer institutions produced fewer doctoral degrees per tenure-track faculty member, it found that the answer was none.
This strategy exacerbated the financial burden on a generation of students whose lives will be defined, in part, by the historic amount of debt they take on in order to attend college. When Measure 5 passed in 1990, students at Oregon’s public universities paid for about 26 percent of the cost of their degrees, compared with 61 percent in 2015. The costs keep rising—between 2011 and 2016, out-of-state tuition at the University of Oregon jumped from $26,415 to $33,441, and that increase was preceded by a 10.2-percent increase, which itself followed just two years after a previous jump in the cost of studying at Oregon’s flagship state university. These tuition increases, according to the school’s vice provost for budget and planning, were aimed at shoring up the university’s general fund, which subsidizes a number of programs and services that don’t benefit students who are not athletes. One glaring example is the maintenance and staffing for the Jaqua Center for Student Athletes—millions of tuition dollars annually, which benefit only a select group of student-athletes. When students protested the latest tuition hikes ahead of the 2016 academic year, university administrators blamed the recent unionization of Oregon’s faculty, which could be found at the bottom of its peer group of nine universities in terms of salary. And yet, annual tuition increases had been around for years before the faculty unionized, including the 10.2-percent increase that came in the academic year before Oregon professors joined the United Academics union.
These trends are set to continue for years to come, not by accident, but by design. In 2017, after five consecutive years of decreased enrollment of in-state students, the University of Oregon unveiled a $1.3 million plan to bring even more out-of-state students to Eugene. Five full-time recruiters, all based outside Oregon, were hired to bring in as many as 3,000 more out-of-state students over the course of several years.
Schill, meanwhile, has lobbied Oregon’s legislature for more money to help pay for the Knight Campus. Knight’s gift was the largest ever to a public university and, according to Schill, “the single most transformative event in the history of the University of Oregon since its founding.” But it was also a $500-million bill that Schill is asking Oregon taxpayers to subsidize, not unlike the debt-accruing state bonds that were sold to pay for the construction of the Matthew Knight Arena. Students, meanwhile, continue to pay higher tuition with each passing year: in 2018, Oregon residents would pay double the tuition and fees they would have a decade earlier, while out-of-state students saw an increase of 60 percent.
Lack of funding aside, there are more ominous barriers University of Oregon administrators may seek to remove in the name of closing the “impact cycle” at the Knight Campus. One of them is transparency.
When it appeared that the University of Oregon had attempted to cover up rape accusations against three of the school’s basketball players, lawyers for The New York Times filed legal motions arguing for the release of emails between certain administrators and public-relations staff. One of those lawyers was Victoria Baranetsky, who noted in legal motions that the school had demonstrated a willingness to “use privacy as both a sword and a shield” in order to prevent public scrutiny of its handling of sexual assault on campus. This argument would seem to be consistent with the methods Lisa Thornton passed down to her employees as head of the university’s office of public records—methods that included allowing the school’s public-relations department and its general counsel to review documents it did not want released, so that they could find reasons to claim exemptions, sometimes illegitimately. The general counsel, in particular, was happy to redact entire documents even when the law called only for certain names to be blacked out, according to Thornton’s former assistant.
This pattern of behavior, combined with an important exemption from state and federal open-records laws that allows for the redaction of public records that might reveal trade secrets, suggests that much of what goes on at the future Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact may be shielded from public oversight. This is especially concerning given the potential for ethical violations at an institution hoping to raise $500 million through corporate partnerships. What kinds of promises or compromises might a school be willing to make under such circumstances? Frohnmayer’s various concessions to Knight set a worrying precedent that may pale in comparison to the potential for corruption that surrounds the Knight Campus.
If there are backroom deals to be cut or promises to be made in the search for new corporate partners, they may be coming sooner rather than later: in 2017, the University of Oregon asked lawmakers to approve $100 million in state bonds to help fund the Knight Campus, and were given $50 million; a year later, they asked for another $40 million and again walked away with half of what they requested. Representative Nancy Nathanson, a key architect of the state’s budget, said she was surprised the university had come back for more money so soon.
In early March 2018, when the university broke ground on the construction of the Knight Campus, just $70 million of its half-billion-dollar shortfall was covered. President Schill told the crowd that had assembled that his school would need every dollar it could get its hands on.
“We are hoping the state will provide us with more money,” he said.
At the tail end of March, in 2017, head men’s basketball coach Dana Altman brought the Oregon Ducks to the Final Four after a 78-year absence from college basketball’s biggest stage. As with Oregon football, much of the credit went to Phil Knight, who had helped build the opulent basketball arena that then helped the school’s basketball program recruit the kind of talent it needed to win. And while the school’s programs have performed well, they have never managed to stay out of trouble: recruiting scandals, sexual-assault accusations, and legal troubles among student-athletes have been persistent side effects of Nike’s experiment at the University of Oregon. The school’s approach to these problems, much like Nike’s approach to the issue of sweatshop labor, has been to strive for eliminating the appearance of trouble, rather than rooting out the trouble itself. This suggests that such problems may be a feature, rather than a bug, at the University of Nike, which would explain why the university learned no lessons from the campus rape scandal of 2014. Two years later, the school allowed Kavell Bigby-Williams to play in thirty-seven basketball games with rape allegations hanging over his head.
Bigby-Williams was a promising prospect from London, England, who transferred to Oregon from Gillette College in Wyoming, where he was named National Junior College Player of the Year before his transfer was finalized during the summer of 2016, when he joined a Ducks roster already stacked with talent. Altman’s new recruit seemed like the perfect addition to help the Ducks make the jump from the NCAA’s Elite Eight tournament to its first Final Four since 1939.
Bigby-Williams arrived on campus in late August and joined his new teammates on a four-game tour of Spain, then returned to Gillette to say his goodbyes to friends and former teammates before the beginning of fall term. In late September, three days after classes began, a detective at the University of Oregon’s campus police department received a phone call about Bigby-Williams. Brooke Tibbetts, who worked as a campus police officer at Gillette College, was investigating a sexual assault. She told Kathy Flynn, the detective in Oregon, that Gillette’s campus police received the sexual-assault complaint on the evening of September 19, when a friend of the alleged victim contacted their department. The girl was upset and acting strangely, her friend told Tibbetts, and she had a large bruise on her neck. She suspected that the girl had been drugged and raped at a party she’d attended on the evening of September 17.
When Tibbetts arrived at the girls residence, the girl told the officer that she didn’t remember anything, so she couldn’t say for sure that she’d been raped. But she recalled drinking whiskey and vodka, then blacking out at some point after ten o’clock on the evening of the party, and when she woke at 3:30 in the morning on September 18, she was naked and bleeding from her sore vagina. When she went to the hospital for a pregnancy test and screening for sexually transmitted diseases, she couldn’t account for the painful bruises on her neck or recall the name of the man who had given them to her. But her three roommates, who were there on the night of the party, did have a name for Tibbetts: Kavell Bigby-Williams.
The girl had thrown up in a trash can around midnight, then passed out on her bed, according to her roommates. Once they noticed how strangely she was acting the next day, two of the roommates confronted Bigby-Williams, who told them he’d had consensual sex with the girl on the evening of the party. After taking photographs of the alleged victim’s bruises, and collecting her sheets and clothing as evidence, Tibbetts felt confident she had enough evidence and witness testimony to move forward with an interview of Bigby-Williams. She suspected he had committed sexual assault in the first degree by having intercourse with someone who was unable to consciously consent. But by then her suspect had left for Oregon. Tibbetts repeatedly called her suspect, and sent him text messages, but he didn’t respond, so she reached out to Oregon’s campus police and asked Detective Flynn to conduct an interview for them. Flynn reviewed the campus police report Tibbetts sent her, as well as the photos and text messages, then tried contacting Bigby-Williams herself. The basketball player brushed the investigator off, repeatedly, until one day she heard from Gillette College’s assistant basketball coach, Nick Carter, who is also an attorney in Wyoming. He called to ask her not to contact Bigby-Williams again. So, with little else to do, Detective Flynn notified the appropriate officials within the University of Oregon’s administrative structure. One of the people Flynn told about the case was Darci Heroy, who had recently been hired as the Oregon’s Title IX coordinator, charged with ensuring that the school acted in compliance with federal law when it came to investigating sexual harassment, sexual assault, and gender-based harassment or discrimination. The other person was Lisa Peterson, a deputy athletic director who served as Heroy’s deputy Title IX coordinator.
Heroy’s work on Title IX issues at the school began in April 2015, in the aftermath of the campus rape scandal that cost Michael Gottfredson his job as university president. The school’s new president, Michael Schill, publicized her appointment at a time when colleges around the nation were doing all they could to signal that they had heard President Obama’s stern missive urging America’s universities to do more to prevent campus sexual assault and investigate its aftermath.
One of Heroy’s responsibilities as Title IX coordinator was to notify the school’s director of the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards, Sandy Weintraub, whenever she learned of sexual-assault allegations against a student. Weintraub would then decide whether it would be necessary to take emergency actions, like suspending the accused student or limiting their ability to participate in activities outside of class—activities like athletics, for example. And yet, when Weintraub tallied the number of sexual-assault cases the risk-assessment team handled during the academic year beginning in 2016, the one allegedly involving Bigby-Williams was not among the twenty-one they arrived at. The Title IX investigation into the basketball player was stopped, quite literally, before it even got started. It had stopped with Heroy and Peterson.
In these early stages of an investigation into sexual misconduct on campus, establishing guilt or innocence is not the goal; instead, Weintraub and Heroy are supposed to lead an initial “risk assessment” to determine what level of protection other students on campus might require, if any, while an investigation into the allegations runs its course. It is not, therefore, up to Heroy to determine that there is no risk and that Weintraub does not need to be involved in the matter; it is, in fact, explicitly Heroy’s responsibility to inform Weintraub and then, in concert, decide whether a suspension of any kind is warranted while campus police or university administrators carry out an investigation. And yet Heroy kept Weintraub out of the loop and decided, with help from a deputy Title IX director who works in the athletic department, that Bigby-Williams posed no risk to the campus community.
When news of the case leaked to the media in June 2017, the University of Oregon’s massive public relations staff once again mobilized, as they had during the Artis, Dotson, and Austin scandal. Director of communications Tobin Klinger played a key role in containing both rape scandals, which the school managed by compartmentalizing information and ensuring that only public-relations professionals, like Klinger himself, spoke to the media. When circumstances demand it, an administrator or member of the athletic department might give a press conference, but under no circumstances would they answer questions from the media or the public. One reason for this was to keep university and athletic department officials from telling a lie that might end their careers if the truth came out later. Any lies Klinger might tell on behalf of someone in the school’s administration or its athletic department, if revealed, could be chalked up to his own misunderstanding. And because he’s a communications professional, with experience and training, Klinger excels at phrasing comments to the press for maximum deniability if they prove to be untrue or problematic later on. In the case of the Bigby-Williams incident, for example, Klinger was asked by journalists whether Coach Altman knew that his player had a sexual-assault allegation hanging over his head throughout the season. Instead of answering the question directly, Klinger merely suggested an answer by saying that it’s the school’s practice not to notify coaches when their student-athletes stand accused of sexual assault. It may have been a lapse in public-relations judgment that compelled Klinger to suggest Oregon’s athletes are so frequently accused of sexual assault that the school needs such a policy, but it’s also possible he didn’t answer the question straightforwardly because a direct denial would have been a lie.
In the two days after University of Oregon officials first learned of the criminal sexual-assault investigation into Bigby-Williams, Altman’s phone records show he talked five times with the school’s deputy Title IX director, Lisa Peterson, who works in the school’s athletic department. His phone records, which were first obtained by student reporter Kenny Jacoby, also showed that during those same two days, Altman spoke on four occasions with the player’s former basketball coach at Gillette College. These calls, which began on the day that Officer Flynn informed Heroy and Peterson of the investigation, illuminated one possible reason for hiring Peterson as the school’s deputy Title IX director: it was not unusual, as Klinger would later claim, for her to be speaking on the phone with Altman, who she worked with in the athletic department—even if phone records showed that the two of them ordinarily did not talk by phone.
In the end, Klinger would again claim the university’s failure to investigate a basketball player accused of sexual assault was in deference to a criminal investigation, which was ironic in the Bigby-Williams case, since the referral had come to school administrators directly from sworn police officers in two different states. But it also demonstrated a certain ignorance about Title IX laws, which, Obama’s task force on campus sexual assault reiterated, don’t relieve a school of its obligation to investigative sexual-assault complaints in cases where a criminal investigation is also taking place.
Heroy, meanwhile, went so far as to say that it was not unusual that Weintraub was not informed about the Bigby-Williams investigation since she didn’t need to hear about “absolutely every disclosure that comes in.” This, too, is in violation of the school’s own written procedures for a Title IX investigation. The case file, Heroy said, had been vague, without enough evidence to determine whether an assault had occurred, and so there was no formal investigation. Putting aside this bit of circular logic—he seemed innocent, so we didn’t investigate, because there was no crime—and the fact that it was not Heroy’s place to make these determinations unilaterally, there is a great deal of evidence suggesting the case file was not as thin as Heroy has claimed.
A student reporter from the University of Oregon learned that police in Wyoming provided University of Oregon officials with a substantive police report on September 28, 2016. Inside were multiple witness statements indicating that the girl had vomited and passed out in her bed before Bigby-Williams had sex with her—sex that the basketball player claims was consensual, but which could not have been under Wyoming law unless the girl woke up clear-eyed and conscious between the hours of midnight and 3:00 a.m., then had consensual sex with Bigby-Williams and promptly forgot about it when she woke up at 3:30 that morning. The police report Oregon officials received also included text messages and more than forty photographs. Klinger nevertheless claimed there had been “insufficient” evidence to warrant an investigation—not a determination of guilt, but an investigation, under the rules of Title IX, which call for only a preponderance of evidence, not proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. When the same student reporter asked President Schill whether he was aware Bigby-Williams had played an entire season for the Oregon Ducks while under investigation by law enforcement for sexual assault, Schill replied, glibly, that he could not comment on an individual student.
“What if I was asked by another reporter about you being obnoxious?” Schill said. “Would you want me to tell them that?”
Dana Altman’s basketball team was not alone on campus with its Title IX woes in 2016. Throughout the course of the year, seven of Oregon’s football players were accused of some kind of sexual misconduct or gender-based violence. One of these cases involved Tristan Wallace and Darrian Franklin, who were accused of sexually assaulting two different women at a house party that took place in late September at Eugene’s Courtside Apartments. A third student-athlete was accused of a separate assault at the same house party, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation, but that individual remains anonymous because the victim chose not to move forward with her complaint.
University officials learned in early October that Wallace and Franklin were accused of vaginally penetrating two women who said they didn’t want to have sex, but who were too intoxicated to resist the men’s advances physically. Head coach Mark Helfrich suspended both players, but the school made no announcements, and both men remained on the Oregon Ducks roster throughout November. Finally, in December, the Oregonian reported on the criminal investigation that had been quietly proceeding for months, leading Craig Pintens, Oregon’s senior associate athletic director for marketing and public relations, to announce that they had both been suspended indefinitely. In early January, Willie Taggart took over as head coach for Oregon’s football team, and all seven players accused of Title IX violations in 2016 quietly vanished from the team’s official roster.
Behind the scenes, university employees with knowledge of these cases grew increasingly frustrated with how the school handled things.
“We need to be more forthcoming when these things happen instead of waiting for the public to ask questions,” one insider said. “Looking like you covered something up is worse than acknowledging there is a problem and handling it.”
University employees also had serious concerns about the motives of the school’s public-relations department and its general counsel.
“Decisions are being made based on how bad things might look from a public relations standpoint and how likely we are to get sued,” another administrator said. “Sometimes that leads us to make the wrong decision.”
At a glance, the University of Oregon’s fear of litigation seems to have an outsized influence over how the school chooses to handle reports of sexual assault. The reality is even more cynical. It’s all in the odds: an athlete accused of sexual assault will invariably defend themselves against the allegations at all costs, while a victim of sexual assault will often decide not to pursue justice; of the small number of rape victims who do report the crime, and who follow up on the investigation, a certain number will give up when the pressure and their trauma becomes too intense; and those few who follow a case to its conclusion will be likely to accept an out-of-court settlement, relieved to be able to move on from their ordeal. When universities bet against a victim, they rarely lose; betting against the accused, on the other hand, would cost them more financially, the math suggests, especially when one considers the great number of additional rape accusations that would be associated with the university brand and the brand of its corporate benefactor.
Only this kind of cynical calculation could explain why Klinger defended Oregon’s handling of the Bigby-Williams case by claiming the Wyoming police report proved “insufficient” in determining whether a crime had been committed, when in fact there was a detailed thirty-eight-page report that Officer Tibbetts felt was evidence of sexual assault in the first degree. Wyoming police, Klinger said, had made it clear in their report that the complaint came from a third party, rather than the victim herself.
“The voice of a survivor is the key to an investigation,” Klinger said. Without it, there was no point in proceeding, he said, apparently unaware that Title IX does, in fact, demand just the opposite. But with a victim who was not pushing hard for justice, the school chose to place its usual bet. Late in the summer of 2016, Bigby-Williams transferred to LSU, where recruiters were eager to have him.
Inside the university, people involved with various aspects of dealing with the school’s Title IX complaints began feeling fatigued and let down. Depressed, they began to worry about whether the same kind of reflexive, protect-the-brand mentality might infect the Knight Campus as well.
“It isn’t really an athletics thing,” one such person said. “It’s an obsession with protecting the brand and keeping people from giving testimony in open court.”
The brand, apart from its value to Nike and IMG Communications, is also an important tool for increasing enrollment at the University of Oregon, where attracting out-of-state undergraduates remains central to the school’s strategy for replacing the money it has lost due to declining state funds for higher education. And this, more than anything else, may explain why American universities seem to be getting worse, not better, at dealing with campus sexual assault.
American universities that receive federal funding—all of them, basically—are required to release an annual security report that details, among other things, the number of sexual assaults reported in the campus community that year. These statistics are a source of dread for university administrators, who know that parents will be more hesitant to send their children to schools where a high number of sexual assaults have been reported. And since universities have yet to find meaningful ways of preventing campus sexual assault, some desperate administrators have decided instead to fudge the statistics by doing whatever they can to prevent formal reports of sexual harassment and assault. At the University of Oregon, one such instance occurred in 2013, when a PhD student named Erica Midttveit tried to report a professor who had clearly violated the school’s policies surrounding sexual harassment and conflicts of interest. At the school’s Office of Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity, an equal-opportunity specialist named Anne Bonner advised her not to file a formal complaint against the professor.
“She told me that if I filed a formal complaint, [the professor] would know it was me and they couldn’t do anything to protect me,” Midttveit said. “They said I should just let them handle it informally, and that they’d handle it exactly the same way as if I had filed a complaint.”
A year later, Midttveit was called into the office of Robin Holmes, the vice president for student life. The professor, Holmes told her, would quietly resign and move to a different institution. Midttveit, however, had no recourse for the abuse she’d suffered or the damage that had been done to her academic career. After all, she hadn’t filed a formal complaint.
It was a shock for Midttveit, who saw, for the first time, how far her school would go to protect the brand it had built. Once it had been a university with an out-of-control athletic department, then it became, for a time, more like an athletic department besieged by unruly educators. Now there was harmony: it was a university united by a common mission.
Amy Frohnmayer became acquainted with death early. She spoke about it plainly; when her sisters died, she refused to use euphemisms like “passed away.” Her father’s death was different. It was the first time she’d had to process the death of a family member as an adult, and it was hard on her. She coped by adding extra miles to her daily run. A year after the Frohnmayer’s last family vacation in Hawaii, Amy and Alex returned, and he proposed to her on the beach. She said yes.
Several months later, Amy was running along the Deschutes River Trail, in Bend, Oregon, when a sharp, sudden pain coursed through her spine. She ran through the pain, and it passed, but a few weeks later it suddenly returned. After a trip to the emergency room revealed dangerously low blood counts, she was admitted to the Knight Cancer Institute at Portland’s Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), which was made possible by a $500-million gift from the Nike billionaire. The marrow of her bones was ridden with leukemia cells. A few days after her diagnosis, she was flown to the University of Minnesota Medical Center for a cord-blood expansion, which would be followed by chemotherapy. When she wasn’t too weak or too sick, Amy walked the halls of the hospital, where eleven laps added up to a mile, and on her good days she logged four miles. In June 2016, she and Alex were married in a ceremony at the hospital, dressed in scrubs. Later that month, Amy graduated from her master’s program at OSU, and took part in the ceremonies using Skype. Six weeks after her procedure, it was clear that it had been a failure. She returned to the Knight Cancer Institute at OHSU.
In late September of 2016, Amy began saying goodbye to family and friends from her hospital bed. One day, while talking with her brother, she tearfully recounted the joy of completing the marathon she ran while she was an undergraduate at Stanford University. One minute she was crying and the next she was laughing, but she did both with a smile as her brother asked her to tell more stories. When Amy arrived at a difficult moment, her brother pulled her out of it by asking her to recite the final lines from a Mary Oliver poem she’d once read to him.
“In this life, you must be able to do three things,” she said, paraphrasing the poem from memory. “To love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones as though your life depends on it; and three, in the end, to let it go. To let it go.”
Just before dawn on October 2, she did.
What began as an attempt to save one public university has become an effective blueprint for corporatizing any number of public colleges, with proponents like David Carter, executive director of the Sports Business Institute at Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.
“Phil Knight and Nike have essentially created a lab at the University of Oregon,” Carter said. “The students welcome that. As long as the programs perform well and stay out of trouble, it’s rinse and repeat.”
The University of Maryland, for one, has studied the Oregon blueprint exactly: in 2014, the school signed a $33-million equipment deal with Under Armour, an athletic apparel company founded by Maryland alumnus Kevin Plank. The university, which has lost 20 percent of its state funding since 2000, will also be getting renovated athletics facilities courtesy of Plank. Its football team, which joined the Big Ten conference in 2014, will help test the next generation of Under Armour products as the company sets its sights on Nike, having already overtaken Adidas as the second-largest retailer of sporting apparel in America. Maryland’s athletic director, Kevin Anderson, has been happy to credit the University of Nike as his inspiration.
“I saw the beginnings of what Nike did with Oregon and that’s been our conversation from day one, that we can have that kind of relationship,” Anderson said. “Before Nike got involved with the University of Oregon, nobody knew where Eugene was.”
And it’s true: for someone in Maryland or New York, Eugene is almost certainly easier to find on a map than it was twenty years ago. But for people living there, the question of where Eugene has ended up is difficult to agree on—a land of dreams for Joey Heisman, and nightmares for Jane Doe. What they can agree on is how it got there.