University of Oregon:
Theater of the Absurd
The University of Oregon has the lowest faculty salaries in the Association of American Universities, along with pathetic academic budgets across the board. As a group of faculty point out in a recent opinion piece, the school is well on its way toward outright squalor:
Ancillary support services for teaching and research are fast disappearing. New and current faculty members are being lured away by other institutions. Many faculty now pay for classroom photocopying, business phone calls, and even students' books.
Yet the university plans to spend $213.5 million on what it calls a "theater of basketball."
...The price tag ... could be well above $200 million, again making the project one of the most expensive of its size ever.
According to documents obtained under the state public records laws, the UO estimated last year it would take $213.5 million to pay for the project once land costs are figured in. That's substantially more than the $160 million estimate used recently by university officials.
Allan Price, the UO's vice president for advancement, said the lower price was an estimate based only on costs directly related to construction. He said the university does not consider the cost of the former Williams' Bakery, where an arena would be built, or the former Romania car lot, which could be used for parking, as part of the arena's costs.
Price acknowledged that direct construction costs at the time the estimate was written early last year were put at about $175.5 million. He said that would have built an arena that would have been among the best in college sports and met the university's goals.
...Two of the released documents, labeled "Sources & Uses," indicate a direct construction cost of $128 million with an additional $34.5 million for architects fees, permits and other "soft costs." Bond interest during construction and underwriting fees add another $7 million.
Other costs include $5.6 million for reserves and $5 million for a post-construction building fund.
In addition, the UO already paid $25 million for the former Williams' Bakery property where the arena will be built and $5.6 million for the former Romania car lot. The university also could spend $2.5 million to buy several smaller properties adjacent to the bakery site.
...Much, but not all, of the money for the arena is expected to come from private donors, a total contribution one document placed at $123 million. Another $55 million would come from bonds repaid from arena revenues, either by the university or National Championship Properties, the private nonprofit group formed by the UO Foundation that is expected to build, own and manage the arena.
...As with the earlier arena effort, most of the private money again is expected to come from a small number of donors. Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike and the UO's most generous donor, is widely expected to provide the bulk of the private funding.
How much is something the university never has been willing to discuss. Details also are scarce in the documents, and the UO blanked out some donor information before
releasing some documents to The Register-Guard.
On one, a line that should indicate the source of $100 million is blank. The line below that lists "UofO and other Donors" at $18 million.
Price said in the original document the blanked-out line read "Title Donor." He said that was meant as a placeholder to indicate an amount the university hoped to receive from a small number of key supporters, not an amount that donors had said they would give.
Even considering just construction-related costs and reserves alone - an estimated $175.5 million a year ago - the UO arena still would be among the elite college arenas in terms of cost. The next most expensive arena recently built is the 15,000-seat John Paul Jones Arena at the University of Virginia, with a construction cost of about $150 million, including a parking garage and new road.
While the university becomes an intellectual slum, "the athletic department," note some of its professors, "furnishes its offices with leather sofas, pays its coaches multimillion dollar salaries, charters private jets, etc."
The University of Oregon is a sort of American Turkmenistan, where autocrats build palaces for their amusement, and the rest of the place can go to hell.
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