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(Below is an excerpt from an essay by University of Oregon President Dave Frohnmayer, who will retire from his post on June 30 after fifteen years. The piece appears in its entirety in the summer issue of Oregon Quarterly.)

Some years ago, on one of those wonderful, colorful, but very foggy autumn days on campus, I walked back from lunch at Rennie’s along Thirteenth Avenue, headed toward Johnson Hall. The fog was just clearing and the emerging light shone beautifully on the maple trees, glowing with bright crimson, orange, and yellow. A young woman on a bicycle and a walking friend approached me, about ten yards away. The student seemed to recognize me, jumped off her bike, and ran up asking, “Excuse me, are you the president of the University of Oregon?”

“Why, yes, I am,” I said.

“I just want to shake your hand,” she said.

“Why do you want to do that?”

“Because I love the University of Oregon,” she said, with a big long emphasis on the word love. She was filled with youthful exuberance and genuine joy on that beautiful, pastoral Oregon day. I felt a powerful sense of unbridled engagement from that young woman, who obviously was thrilled with her experience here.

The University of Oregon matters because of what we did, what we were, for that young woman. We changed her life, and because of that she will change the life of her community, and on it goes. Over the years, the University of Oregon itself has been transformed.

In the past, we had grand men and (relatively few) grand women on our faculty. If you had looked thoughtfully, greater numbers of grand women also held this place together in webs of support offices and through ways we recognize in retrospect as heroic. But now, we have grand men and women in the classrooms and labs, who are gaining far more scholarly recognition, making far more powerful discoveries, and are much more likely to be regarded as leaders in their fields than even the great faculty of the late sixties and early seventies.

We have added or remodeled eighteen or nineteen buildings in my tenure, buildings that my successor won’t have to fund or build. The structures are symbolic because they are so dramatically visible, but what really is important is what happens when creative people are in facilities that are equal to the quality of their talent, their inquisitiveness, and their energy.

Our promises to donors have come true already. To visit a Beverly Lewis and say, “If you make that gift, then we can keep great people and they will make discoveries that relate to how we recover from injuries or strokes”—and then to introduce her five years later to someone who is doing exactly that work and who has obtained a highly competitive federal grant that will bring millions of dollars and more life-saving new discoveries… that is the power of energy, faith, and belief.

To be able to tell Lorry Lokey that our greatest need was the music school addition and then to show him musical performances occurring in the new space that he and 200 other people helped to make possible… that is thrilling.

To see the strongest freshman class we have had in years and years and to see the University of Oregon increasingly become a destination of choice… that is profoundly gratifying.

We are more poised now to become a creator of human opportunity than we ever have been. I leave this present calling supremely proud of what we have accomplished, but even more excited about the opportunities that will be created for generations who will succeed us.

The challenges will not go away, but the university will endure and advance, because, like the other lasting institutions, the values at our core reach beyond the individual and the transitory to the universal and timeless. We are the keepers of an extraordinary legacy. I thank you for the privilege of helping to advance it for the uncommon good.

Dave Frohnmayer will continue to teach at the university. Read this essay in its entirety in the summer Oregon Quarterly.