Over the years this observation passed from a joke to quasi- university policy.

In the intervening years as we have further struggled with declining budgets or holding-the-line budgets, the notion of our "publicness" and what that means has been, in many respects, set aside or redefined.

As our development office funding strategy moved to targeting major donor gifts and our hopes for being refunded by the state legislature waned, the question of who we were as a university in the eyes of average Oregonians, while still being seen as important also diminished in importance.

Talking with faculty around campus, seldom have I heard anyone ask the question, "What has the university done for the average citizen of the state?"

We do have statistics showing the economic value to families and potential students of a college degree compared to a high school degree and we have other statistics for state legislators showing the added tax revenues for the state generated by the work the university does in adding value and increasing the earning power of Oregon residents.

This is all important and valuable information, but again the idea of our "publicness", what this means, and how we live and work the idea of a public institution in the service of a democratic public has continued to recede.

Clearly we have notable examples of projects and centers across the university engaged in direct service to those most needy in terms of access and participation as fully functioning citizens in our democracy: The Center for the Study of Women in Society's excellent reports on the economic and social health of working families in the state; the work of the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics; the work of the Carlton and Wilberta Savage Chair in Peace and International Relations Committee; the Community Literacy Project; the Democracy Project; President Frohnmayer's eloquent address to the city at the recent Eugene Vigil following September 11 and many others.

Yet as a university, we tolerate and fail to act on growing inequalities in our midst, from the reimbursement for our classified employees; to growing inequities between programs and departments that are divided by the degree to which their work has direct economic outcomes, whether or not they contribute to building a democratic culture.

At the same time we have, perhaps unintentionally, perhaps feeling there was no choice, but nevertheless, we have strip-mined the social capital of the university, undermining the opportunity for community building and simply pleasure in having the time and space for informal exchanges between faculty, between students and between faculty and students.

After the wars over the canons of the eighties and nineties, one of the great understandings every program and discipline seems to have faced, as the borders between our programs and research blurred was our great scholarly and human interdependence. And it seems there are fewer and fewer among us who would argue that there is such a thing as an institution of learning where all values can be left at the door or outside of the lab.

The questions then become, as we consider our institutional future, what values are we practicing intentionally and unintentionally, and which values do we want to practice.

I would suggest that the one value that must define us is a commitment to the continuing practice, understanding, and deepening of our state and nation as a living democracies. This is to say, borrowing the words of Benjamin Barber, the University of Oregon doesn't just "have a civic mission, as a public university it is a civic mission."

I believe we need to carefully re-examine the meaning of our "publicness" and our commitment to the public. It is not enough that we enlist the growing support of the high-tech industry in Oregon for higher education. We must convince the working people of Oregon that we are their public think tank, working in their interest. Not just to provide a way for their children to get higher paying jobs, but to deepen and enrich the everyday quality of their civic lives as democratic citizens. To get really concrete, we could look at a very specific recent example: The challenge posed by questions raised over the university's acceptance of the funds for the naming of Grayson Hall. Once it became clear that the funds contributed to the university for the naming of the building may have come from the misuse of pension funds of the working men and women from our state, we could have a sent a clear to a wider public, that we were returning this money because we were their university, too.

Not to get too dramatic, but I believe we must be public minded in the same way the firefighters and police and construction workers of New York walked into midst of the neediest of their community on Sept. 11 to help in the interest of their fellow citizens and in their own interest to define themselves as part of the communities in which they live and work.

Democratic life is not a taken for granted achievement, it is a living process which has been sustained, in part, through the action of public institutions acting in the interest of the public as a whole. "Public" education is at the center of that process. We must rebuild our image of "publicness" in order to gain the confidence of Oregonians that a publicly funded university will enrich the everyday lives of all citizens of this state