The University of Oregon’s campaign ended December 31 as the largest fundraiser in state history, bringing more than $853 million to the University and raising its profile among the nation’s outstanding educational and research institutions.
Certainly that needed to be said. Anyway, there’s this nun who gets a call from a student fundraiser seeking alumni donations in the early days of Campaign Oregon, but she must politely decline. Her vow of poverty made a contribution impossible, we can only assume.
That’s obviously not the whole story, but we can’t go too far along without telling you how the campaign actually will transform lives. How, for example, there is enough money to offer scholarships and fellowships to hundreds of additional talented students every year, and even more support for recruiting and retaining the best faculty. Or how, once opportunity brings all those bright folks here, they will find so many new hubs of discovery, including amazing, top-of-the-line facilities for the sciences, business, music, education, theater, art, and other disciplines, with more new buildings and major renovations on the way. Or how a new baseball park, a future basketball arena, and other athletic upgrades will keep the Ducks soaring and fans flocking to Eugene, giving a booster shot to a swooning economy.
All right, you can read quite a bit more about that success elsewhere in this issue and online (campaign.uoregon.edu). Back to the nun, who after that chat with the student returns to Mexico, where her sacred calling is helping at-risk children.
Let’s be real, here. This anonymous nun really isn’t the reason Campaign Oregon exceeded its fundraising goal by well over $200 million. We believe in giving credit where it’s due. The University is fortunate to have a few donors capable of making a big difference, including the UO’s all-time leading booster. Let’s extend the favor of anonymity and just say he’s an entrepreneur who has built up a bit of an apparel business since the days he sold track shoes out of the back of a Plymouth Valiant. And added a swoosh. And became one of the UO’s most famous graduates and Oregon’s richest resident. And over the years, with his wife, gave millions of dollars to University athletics and academics. And, quite literally, changed the campus landscape.
There’s been a story or two about him, but none about the nun, who didn’t forget her conversation with the student fundraiser. Sometime later, she calls the folks in the UO’s annual giving program and says something like, “I can’t stop thinking about the students at the University of Oregon,” recalls director Carlyn Schreck ’95. Remember, the nun has some important work of her own. “She felt like what we were doing here at the University was the same as that and wanted to be part of it.”
We’re reminded here of those legions of other alumni and other friends of the University who also made sacrifices great and small to be a part of Campaign Oregon. We can’t overstate this: Their donations will change our world. They will increase our collective knowledge, boost employment and our economy, enrich our culture, and enhance our lives. It’s even possible those dollars, put in the right hands, one day will help cure cancer, end global warming, or get the Ducks into the BCS title game.
Whoa, there. Let’s come back to Earth a moment to the day an envelope arrives from Mexico. Inside are a collection of U.S. coins— nickels, dimes, quarters—adding up to five dollars. Most of us have that much in a dish somewhere, but it’s everything the nun can spare. Schreck couldn’t be happier if it were a million dollars and deposits it in the general scholarship fund.
“We talk to so many people,” she says. “Every now and then, somebody reminds you of the great work you do.”
UO President Dave Frohnmayer, whose passion helped drive this campaign to unprecedented heights, appreciates everyone who contributed: “The number and range of people who cared enough about the University to contribute to Campaign Oregon is simply stunning. They range from a woman who has taken religious vows of poverty to an Oregon native who gave to an institution in the state of his origin even though he never attended the University and lives elsewhere. All are united by a common mission to help our students, reward our distinguished faculty, and build an enduring institution of excellence in one of the world’s most beautiful places.
“My response to this generosity is both professional and personal. Everyone who gave to the University made a sacrifice. I cannot tell you how moved I am by each of those sacrifices and the evident affection for the University each reveals.”
Megan Ward ’08
prospective medical student
Megan Ward is no stranger to the long haul.
A long-distance runner who qualified for this year’s Boston Marathon, the 2008 graduate in human physiology took time off from studying for her Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) to sit for an interview.
Ward’s in an enviable position now, especially considering she narrowly survived being born two-and-a-half months premature.
“I was pretty sick the first couple of years of my life,” she says. “My parents always joked that they think that’s where I got my determination. They say I was a fighter from the moment I was born.”
When she was five, her mother showed her the hospital neonatal unit where she spent her first days clinging to life. “I tapped my Mom and said, ‘I’m going to be a doctor someday, and I’m not going to make the babies cry.’”
Ward went on to compete in track, volleyball, and basketball at Henley High School near Klamath Falls, and her excellent academic and extracurricular record earned her one of the first Giustina Foundation Presidential Scholarships endowed during Campaign Oregon.
She already had attractive offers to attend other colleges, but her parents’ alma mater was her first choice.
“The atmosphere on campus and Eugene as a whole—it’s a pretty great place,” she says. “With that [scholarship], how could you not come here?”
W. Andrew Marcus
professor
Professor Patricia McDowell, then head of the UO geography department, summoned colleague W. Andrew Marcus to her office one day two years ago and handed him a letter announcing his selection for one of the University’s first twenty Fund for Faculty Excellence awards.
The prizes, funded with a $10.4 million gift from super-donor Lorry I. Lokey, include salary supplements and research support in an effort to retain and recruit world-class faculty members.
“Having a really formal acknowledgment that the University values you and wants you there goes a long way in making you happier in your home setting,” says Marcus, who is among the pioneer geographers using exciting advances in aerial photography and satellite imagery technologies to document even minuscule changes in river systems. Tracking those changes, in turn, teaches us how human activities influence water quality and habitats necessary to sustain fish, wildlife, and people.
His spirits soaring, Marcus stopped by his mailbox on the way back to his office. There among the envelopes was an invitation to apply for a position with a research group that a large public university was forming in Marcus’ specialty.
The offer was flattering. “I’m pretty sure I would’ve applied for that position about fifteen minutes earlier,” he says. “Literally, I just looked at it and said, ‘Not today,’ and put it in the recycling.”
George Weyrens
UO staff donor
His attorney thinks George Weyrens must be up in heaven “busting his buttons” over the idea that his life savings one day will help young people get a college degree.
Weyrens, who was developmentally disabled, went to the UO not as a student but for his job as a janitor. He was gentle and kind—but so reclusive he had no social life and so frugal he wore his uniform at home and ate all meals with his one plate, fork, spoon, and knife.
“Nobody knew George Weyrens,” says Marc Perrin ’78, J.D. ’81, of Eugene. “They might’ve seen him in the back of Emerald Hall, pushing dust bunnies.”
Weyrens retired in 1987 and died in 2001, not long after Perrin convinced him to make a will so his money wouldn’t simply go to the state, because Weyrens had no close living relatives. He didn’t designate a beneficiary for the bulk of his estate, but he entrusted Perrin with that responsibility.
Perrin donated $22,000 from Weyrens and added $3,000 of his own money to meet the minimum requirement to endow the George Weyrens Scholarship Fund in 2004, during Campaign Oregon.
Whenever possible, the scholarship will be awarded to children of UO Facilities Services employees or to special-needs students. “I know George, in his own way, would have been very proud.”
John Manotti
fundraiser
When you walk around the Lorry I. Lokey Science Complex, you won’t see “John Manotti” on any of the buildings. But if you dusted for figurative fingerprints, the UO fundraiser’s mark is all over the place.
Lokey’s the headline story. He’s the Stanford graduate who has given $132 million during Campaign Oregon, the guy who relishes the transformation that sharing his wealth has made possible at the University, the guy whose contributions President Dave Frohnmayer says have “the potential to change the world as we know it.”
Manotti’s the charismatic guy who first sat down with Lorry in the Bay Area to tell him about the potential for great things in Eugene, even though Lokey never attended the University.
The fact is, Manotti initially resisted being the subject of this story because he likes it behind the scenes and doesn’t feel like he should be singled out for the spotlight. Or, in his words: “It’s such a team effort. It is by no means that ‘Mr. Fundraiser’ goes out and does this all by himself.”
But his work undeniably illustrates how fundraising is changing the face of the campus.
“People don’t have to give to charity. It’s our job to inspire them, in a way. The reality is, a dollar goes further here than at Stanford or Berkeley,” Manotti says.
“If I don’t ask these people for money, nobody’s going to,” he adds. “There’s nothing more honorable than raising money for a cause you believe in.”
MICHAEL MCDERMOTT / JOHN BAUGUESS
Lallie McKenzie ’02, M.S. ’03 and Cara Bohon
Big Pie Science
Lallie McKenzie ’02, M.S. ’03, studies the chemical properties of nanoparticles to unlock their potential for human progress without unleashing perils upon the planet. Over in the psychology department, Cara Bohon interprets the human brain’s unique responses to stimuli to help discover the devastating mysteries of eating disorders.
These 2009 doctoral candidates are two among the many faces who make up the future of science—a future that seems to have arrived early at the University of Oregon, thanks in large part to the fundraising success of Campaign Oregon.
“We’re building on a tradition of excellence and innovation and creative discovery,” says Rich Linton, vice president for research and graduate studies. He says the UO, long a leader in interdisciplinary research, is at the forefront of what’s now called “supradisciplinary science,” where different areas of scientific research cross-fertilize and strengthen one another. “We’re in the process of a major culture shift that way in the sciences.”
Nowhere is this shift more evident than at the new Lorry I. Lokey Laboratories, named after the University’s record-setting academic donor.
Stepping into the complex, burrowed below the lawn next to Huestis Hall, is a little like walking onto the set of a fantastical futuristic science fiction movie. The lab contains one of the world’s best collections of high-powered electron microscopes and other advanced instruments, allowing scientists to “see farther, deeper, and with more clarity” than just about anywhere else, says John Donovan, director of the Microanalytical Facility. Just as critically, the building is carved into the top ten feet of rock that extends deep into the Earth, giving it the fewest disruptive vibrations among similar labs.
“There’s no facility that we know of in the world that is like that one,” says Jim Hutchison ’86, the UO’s associate vice president for research and strategic initiatives and among the world’s leading researchers in nanoscience and green chemistry. Financed by one of Lokey’s donations, state bonds and lottery funding, and other private gifts and industry support, the lab opened last year.
Even Donovan, who left the University of California at Berkeley for the opportunity to help design and operate the facility, can’t imagine all of its possible uses. The instruments help archaeologists track nanodiamonds as clues of the possible impact of a comet that wiped out early inhabitants of North America, assist geologists evaluating the eruption hazards of volcanoes, allow geneticists to study zebrafish in ways that could lead to cures for human diseases, and enable chemists to advance solar-cell technology to help some day to reverse global warming. “The sky’s the limit,” Donovan says.
The lab brings together the University’s student and faculty researchers with industrial scientists who can lease access to the equipment and even rent lab space on site. Sharing the instruments not only makes the lab more cost-effective but also lends to productive collaborations between public and private researchers across the scientific spectrum, Donovan explains.
“The idea here is,” he says, “let’s make a really big pie and everybody gets a slice.”
Lallie McKenzie’s slice of the pie, for example, is working with Hutchison to find ways to make chemical processes involved in the creation of nanomaterials less wasteful or toxic. “If you look at chemistry as a solution to the world’s problems,” says McKenzie, winner of the prestigious 2008 Kenneth G. Hancock Memorial Award for green chemistry, “it gives you a more hopeful view of your ability to change the world.”
Bohon’s research, working with lead scientist Eric Stice ’89 of the Oregon Research Institute in Eugene, similarly benefits from access to the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine at the Lewis Center for Neuroimaging, made possible with a donation from Beverly Lewis ’48 and her late husband, Robert ’46, who met while UO students.
“We are a very unique site, in that we don’t have to share with anyone else and that we were designed from the get-go for research,” says MRI technologist Scott Watrous ’82, M.S. ’85.
“It’s a humdinger of a magnet,” says Helen Neville, director of the Brain Development Lab, whose research using the fMRI already is demonstrating exactly how fostering language development with young Head Start children is promoting beneficial physical changes in the brain. “Everybody likes the idea that you’re taking the results of basic science and looking at the implications of those results for real practices in the world,” she says. “The Lewis gift just made it all possible.”
Lokey, the Lewises, and the many other donors to UO science will continue to transform the University as their contributions attract matching funding from public and private sources to support students, faculty members, and other researchers and improve the places where they do their work.
Next, work will begin in 2010 on the $65 million, 100,000-square-foot Robert and Beverly Lewis Integrative Science Building, which not only will house an improved neuroimaging center and connect to the Lokey Laboratories, but it will also open doors of discovery to even more students and scientists across campus.
“I think there’s a lot of excitement about the future,” says Karen Guillemin, an associate professor of biology who hopes to expand her research using zebrafish as models to learn more about human diseases such as cancer.
Even with a building boom in the sciences, the UO’s overall program won’t be as massive as those at the nation’s largest research institutions. The point is not to be the biggest but—with talent, focus, and funding—to be among the best.
Or, as Linton likes to put it, “We’re large enough to be great and small enough to be greater.”
—E.A.
Jennifer Pfeifer
neuroscientist
Jennifer Pfeifer arrived on campus in the fall prepared to unlock one of the greatest and most frightening mysteries of humankind—the inner workings of the adolescent brain.
With degrees from Stanford and UCLA and a reputation as an up-and-coming psychology researcher, Pfeifer could have landed just about anywhere. She fondly recalls band concerts at the University while attending high school in Clackamas, but she wouldn’t have returned to Oregon just for that.
“The psychology department here in general is fantastic. They’re really strong in the cognitive neurosciences and in developmental psychology,” says Pfeifer, an assistant professor. “There’s a nice, broad level of support for what I do.”
Campaign Oregon helped boost funding for research and established the Lewis Center for Neuroimaging, which houses the Pacific Northwest’s only functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine devoted entirely to scientific discovery.
With the fMRI, Pfeifer and her research team can detect differences in brain processing as children transition into puberty and seek to answer for themselves such questions as, Who am I? Where do I fit in? What am I good at?
Now Pfeifer is focusing some of her research efforts on children with developmental disorders such as autism, exploring “a new angle in understanding what difficulties they face.”
Steve Sandstrom ’78
graphic designer and donor
Steve Sandstrom says he transferred to the University to watch one campus icon (Steve Prefontaine) run, but he left nearly having run another (Donald Duck) out of town.
“That was always a thrill to go watch your hero trounce everybody,” Sandstrom says about Prefontaine.
It was another person’s idea to have the outspoken Mallard Drake replace Donald as the UO mascot, but as the cartoon character’s creator, Sandstrom became the face of the campaign. This time, it was Mallard who got trounced.
Sandstrom drew “Duck Soup” for the Oregon Daily Emerald as a special studies project under art professor David Foster, who gave his student both the guidance and the freedom to develop his own talent.
If Sandstrom’s edgy cartoons helped shape the UO culture of the late 1970s, his success today as a graphic designer is doing much the same on a wider canvas. Since graduating in fine arts in 1978, he has branded products at small agencies, for Nike, and now as founder and creative director of Sandstrom Partners. The Portland graphic design firm has had megaclients such as Levi’s and Miller Brewing, but it is best known for creating a brand image from scratch, like they did for Tazo Tea Company, or refreshing the images for existing companies such as Full Sail Brewing.
His UO mentor’s death inspired Sandstrom to again stoke change on the UO campus, where he contributed to the David Foster Endowment to support innovative education. He now is on the School of Architecture and Allied Arts’ advisory board of visitors. He also annually donates both cash and creativity to the University in part because Foster and other outstanding educators made “the generous choice” to go into teaching, even though the pay would be better in business or entertainment or sports.
“We as a society don’t support that enough,” Sandstrom says. “A guy could have a decent four days of golf and make more money than a Nobel Prize winner.”
Rhea Cramer ’08
graduate student
When Rhea Cramer was growing up in Oakridge, her mother worked as many as three jobs. Yet Cramer didn’t realize she was poor until she applied for college financial aid. Nor did she recognize until starting course work in family and human services at the University how much her mother, Gienia Baines, overcame to provide a stable environment for six children, including an autistic youngest son and three drug-affected nephews she adopted.
Baines’ four siblings have struggled with drug addiction, mental health problems, homelessness, or incarceration. “My mom’s the only one who’s come from the same background and been able to turn that around and break that cycle,” even though she left home young and was a teen mother. Her marriage to Cramer’s father didn’t last.
“I don’t want my life to sound like some kind of tragedy,” Cramer says. “Having a single mom and seeing the sacrifices that she made makes me appreciate everything.”
One thing she appreciates is the Oregon Community Credit Union tuition scholarship that enabled her last year to become the first in her family to earn a college degree. During Campaign Oregon, the credit union expanded its long-standing scholarship program to reach more students like Cramer, who is now a role model in her own family. Brother Jacob attends Oregon, and Baines is now following her daughter’s footsteps into the family and human services program.
Cramer, who is married, is working on a master’s degree in special education, with an emphasis in early intervention. Her career plan? Throwing lifelines to pull children and families from tumultuous lives.
“I know what kind of life people lead when they don’t have the chances that I’ve had.”
Campaign Oregon: Transforming Lives didn’t just raise $853 million for the University of Oregon. It raised expectations.
“It’s an interesting exercise to walk around the campus and try to find a spot not affected by the campaign. It’s nearly impossible to do,” says Allan Price, former UO vice president for university advancement. “This campaign will go on transforming lives for generations.”
When Price, who now leads fundraising efforts at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, arrived in Eugene earlier this decade to become chief architect of the campaign, the UO’s state funding had been cut to the bone. “There was a great deal of pride in being a place that did more with less. That’s a good thing in that a dollar invested here goes a long way. What’s more important is becoming a university that wants to do more with more. Then we can take control of our own destiny.”
“The impact of the current campaign will still be felt for many years,” says Jim Bean, UO senior vice president and provost. “It really raises the capabilities of both our students and our faculty here.”
Bean says the campaign’s success “certainly keeps us in the arms race among elite institutions.” For example, Oregon is among the smallest public schools of sixty-two research institutions in the influential Association of American Universities, where it must keep up with larger public and wealthier private campuses to maintain that status.
“It basically is our ticket to being at the table in defining how higher education develops,” Bean says of AAU membership. “You want to be among the people who are writing the book, not the people who are reading the book.”
Bean believes the broader base of supporters built during Campaign Oregon leaves the UO prepared to attract a steadier $90–$100 million a year in donations to continue to raise expectations for students, faculty members, and alumni.
These days private fundraising helps fill the gap left by shrinking support from state coffers, which at one time contributed about 40 percent of the UO budget but now accounts for just 13 percent, Bean says. “There are those who probably still pine for the days when the state funded the University, so that fundraising wasn’t necessary,” he says. “That’s not an argument worth having. The reality is, this is how the University will be successful in the future.”
Bean already is plotting that future success by shepherding a group polishing the UO’s new Academic Plan, a broadly ambitious blueprint for the future. Priorities established in that plan will suggest many of the goals of University fundraising for the coming decade.
Expectations are starting high. The University could use a conference center and at least one more science building. Prince Lucien Campbell Hall needs an upgrade. The School of Architecture and Allied Arts, now scattered around campus, would benefit from a central building. Undergraduate and graduate students, and their professors, will need more support. And so on.
So while everyone celebrates the transformational successes of Campaign Oregon, “There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done,” Bean says. “We’re better than we would be [without the campaign] and not as good as we could be. That means that we don’t have a party and shut down.”
Eric Apalategui ’89 is a Beaverton writer who suspects his very modest donation to Campaign Oregon, rather than that “high cost of bronze vowels” excuse, is the real reason his name has not been attached to any new UO buildings. His last piece for Oregon Quarterly was “The $7 Billion Call” (Winter 2008).
