The UO Loves Construction Companies More than Students

Ok its been a while but the student body presidents pointed out in a recent article that Oregon gives more money to university construction projects than to financial aid.

Which reminded me that the University of Oregon Employees Union- SEIU Local 503- released a report in 2019 saying in the past two decades, the percentage of overall state funding to Oregon Universities that got sucked up by construction debt went from under 3% to a whopping 16%.

So here’s some quick, not-so-fun stories about UO construction projects.

First off, the UO brags on its own website that the UO’s “construction spending generated an economic impact of $196 million in 2017–18.”

$196 million is a lot of money! The same year a UO Grad Student published their thesis on food insecurity among UO students and found that 52% of students at the UO that year were food insecure, with BIPOC students and LGBTQ students experiencing the worst of the food insecurity. How much could that $196 Million have done to help hungry students? We may never know.

This has all been going on a while. Back in 2012, the UO tried to renovate the EMU (in a bid to suppress student activism and get more control over student groups), but all the student groups and the student government opposed it, so the state said the UO had to hold a referendum where students could vote to approve or deny, because the UO was gonna make students pay a new fee for it. And of course, being the UO, they tried to rig the election. They spent big money on a PR firm to persuade students to vote yes to more construction fees.

Now here’s the thing: the company which got the contract to complete this EMU renovation which admin forced students to pay for was Colas Construction, and the president of Colas Construction is Andrew Colas, a member of the UO’s BOT.

Then we have the case of the building of the Matt Knight Arena in 2010. The local blog UO Matters reported that there was some strange corruption with top UO Athletics Officials pushing the project through. Namely, Athletics Director Pat Kilkenny made money off the project. Is that somehow NOT a conflict of interest?

Is this why the UO loves construction projects more than it loves students? I personally want to know who the owners of these construction companies that the UO does business with are and whether our Board of Trustees has invested in them. Is Andrew Colas the only trustee who financially benefits from these construction deals?

That brings us to now. That big Hayward Field Project? Is any of your tuition money going to it? I dunno. Here’s an article on it. Some real gems from it are:

“University of Oregon officials declined to confirm the Hayward price tag.”

“Knight was the lead funder, though the university also declined to specify just how much of the money came from him.”

Wait so we don’t know how much a major expensive project at a supposedly public university costs? Why might that be? If Phil Knight didn’t foot the entire bill with all that money he made from forced labor, then who paid for the rest of it? Students maybe? Why can’t we know?

Also, a lot of UO community members didn’t even want this project to happen at all! But since always Phil Knight gets what he wants, it went through.

This of course is not a full history, and there’s probably a lot more shady construction deals I couldn’t find info on. But as always, maybe it’s a starting point for a conversation that needs to happen.

That’s all for now. As always, fire Michael Schill, go organize, and share these stories so folks know what’s happening.