Hey University of Oregon, can we Talk about How Slave Labor Profiteer Phil Knight Privatized Our School in order to Suppress Student Activism?
A while back I wrote a piece about the history of campus police in Oregon colleges. It mentioned a bit about the connection between privatization of higher education in Oregon and campus police (read as: it was the same plan all along). I touched on Phil Knight, founder of Nike, being a slave labor profiteer and pushing the U of O to privatize, but I realized that that story deserves it’s own full-length post, so here we go.
In the 1990s and 2000s, as the state of Oregon saw far-right and mega wealthy activists dismantling tax laws so they could hoard more money while leaving the state broke, Oregon started slashing funding to higher education. UO and other colleges in Oregon became more dependent on corporate donors to keep afloat because the state wasn’t giving them money.
Enter UO alum and Nike founder Phil Knight. This guy made a fortune off of forced labor in Asia. Nike’s horrible labor abuses caught national attention in the U.S. and college students were at the forefront of the anti-sweatshop movement. At some campuses, students pressured their universities to publicly condemn this practice alongside the Worker’s Rights Consortium and United Students Against Sweatshops.
At UO, students tried to get UO to join in calling out Nike and had a sit in at the administrative building, Johnson Hall. But Phil Knight had A LOT of sway at UO. Not only was he a huge donor for both the Athletics Department and academic endeavors, he also gave money to the personal charity of UO President at the time Dave Fronhnmayer, which was seeking a cure for a rare and life threatening disease which threatened the lives of his children.
This was a very sad situation for Frohnmayer, and Phil Knight, ever the disgusting comic book villain, was ruthless in threatening to withhold donations from both this personal charity AND the UO if Frohnmayer gave in to students’ demands. So the UO sided with Nike. (A note: a lot of this history was only known through whispers on campus at the UO until journalist Joshua Hunt published his groundbreaking book University of Nike in 2018.)
*UPDATE* Nike is still using forced labor.
The central organizing hub of this student movement at UO at the time was called the Survival Center. It had a large office in the student union building with floor space, couches, and ample computers and phones that students in that day and age depended on for such effective organizing. This soon would be taken away, as The Survival Center was about to pay dearly for angering Uncle Phil.
It started with half of their floor space being taken away. They lost some desks, some phones, some computers. Then when the UO remodeled their student union building in the following years, a move which was highly controversial and students fought against tooth and nail, The Survival Center had even more floor space taken away and most of their phones and computers taken away, was renamed to be the Radical Organizing Resource Center, and the UO partnered with Columbia Sportswear to create the alternative “Outdoor Center” to attract students instead.
Why an outdoor center to replace them? Because the Survival Center used to be the hub of environmental organizing at the UO as well, and student activists would participate in tree sits and other confrontational tactics to protect the local environment. These activists were then targeted by the Feds in “The Green Scare” right around the same time — the early 2000s and 2010s- where the Federal Government essentially declared environmental activists to be domestic terrorists.
Check out these past issues of the student publication Student Insurgent from the time when all this was taking place to see what students were saying about the EMU remodeling, the formation of campus police, and the privatization of the UO, which all happened within the same few year span.
This brings us to 2010. Frohnmayer was no longer UO President, but had some cushy honorary professorship at UO. He and Phil Knight hatched a scheme called the New Partnership which basically dismantled public oversight of UO and PSU, creating private “Boards of Trustees” to govern the schools instead of the State of Oregon, and also freed them up financially to depend even less on public funds and even more on private donors like Phil Knight.
This proposal didn’t go over too well with the state of Oregon, students, labor unions, or basically anyone that wasn’t a far-right ultrarich corporate donor. So Phil Knight got together with some rich friends, including Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle (remember Columbia Sportswear from like four paragraphs ago?) and they all pitched in about $65,000 to form a Political Action Committee to force the legislation through the Oregon legislature.
Guess what? They won. And after the UO and PSU formed their own private boards, so did all the other universities in Oregon. If you want to read a great dissertation on this, UO Alum Andrew Lubash wrote one and it’s here. These boards are usually made up of rich donors and alumni, and at UO most of them don’t even live in Oregon. They are “appointed” by the Governor of Oregon, which in practice means hand-picked by each university’s president and then the Governor signs off.
BTW, this wasn’t just happening in Oregon. It was happening in the early 2000s and 2010s all across the country as the corporate elite eroded tax laws, lined their own pockets, and dismantled public services like education. Fun fact! In Oregon, the plan to privatize college was called “The New Partnership,” in Wisconsin, the plan to privatize college was called “The New Badger Partnership.”
Listen: The fight for students rights on college campuses is part of a bigger fight nationwide for social and economic justice, and there are very large and nefarious forces at play, even here in Oregon. Phil Knight is terrible. The University of Oregon Administration is and has always been terrible too.
That’s all for now. Stay well out there and as always, know your history, share these stories, and know who your opponents are.
