Good morning. I want to open my comments by pointing out not what will go wrong if we don't get the money we need, but what OUS accomplished with the money we were given in the last biennium.

• It meant we had more dollars to expand existing programs to serve more and more Oregonians;
• it meant we were able to create new programs to meet the changing needs of Oregon business, society, and culture;
• it meant we widened access by keeping tuition at a more or less reasonable level so more students could attend school, more could finish in a timely fashion and also not be burdened by a crushing debt when they entered the job market;
• it meant we could keep great faculty who had been offered good salaries at other institutions and in business;
• and it meant that we could recruit new young faculty with vast potential.

I note that we always talk in terms of educating students for global competition, but these are often used as mere cant words that we mouth to sound up to date. But I taught in Japan last Spring and summer and it was clear to me that Japanese, Korean, and other foreign students studying at Waseda University and Hokkaido University where I was working take this notion very seriously. They believe they had better be well prepared to compete with us. We would do well to be serious about this challenge.  In any case, what we do in the future depends on how important the Governor and the Legislature think it is to have strong institutions that can educate all of this state's talented people to compete in the global economy.

Faculty hope that it's as much as those on the front lines of higher education think it is. Thank you.

Craig Wollner (PSU) President IFS email: wollnercr@pdx.edu Professor of Social Science Fellow, IMS, Portland State University, P.O.Box 751, Portland OR 97207-0751; 503-725-5484 fax: 503-725-5162