Remembering Roy Lieuallen

Russell Sadler

Roy Lieuallen was arguably the best Chancellor of the State System of Higher Education since the office was created by the Legislature in the 1920s.

He certainly served the longest -- 1961-82 -- and during the most trying times. Lieuallen presided over the greatest enrollment boom in the history of the state’s four-year colleges and universities. Enrollment doubled during his 20-year tenure as the Baby Boom generation -- born between 1946 and 1964 -- replaced its parents who had flocked to the state colleges and universities after World War II financed by the GI Bill.

Roy Lieuallen was also my mentor. In 1967 -- a naive 25-year-old graduate student -- I was appointed to represent the student body presidents of Oregon’s four-year colleges and universities.

Lieuallen took me aside and asked if I was going to be a rhetorical bomb thrower or whether I was interested in helping obtain the resources to maintain low tuition and hire enough professors to keep up with the growth in enrollments. Although wary of being co-opted, I told him the latter was my charge from the student body presidents. I needn’t have worried about being co-opted. Lieuallen took me at my word and began to teach me the finer points of lobbying, which I codified as “Lew’s Laws.” There were two.

Lew’s Law the First: You never have enemies. Today’s enemies are tomorrow’s allies.

Lew’s Law the Second: Never stand in front of a steamroller.

Oregon’s college campuses saw much agitation over the Vietnam War. A bomb had gone off in the University of Oregon’s ROTC building and then-Gov. Tom McCall seriously considered declaring martial law on college campuses. A bill giving the governor the authority to do just that died in the pocket of the late Senate President Debs Potts, D-Grants Pass. Lieuallen quietly persuaded this very patriotic conservative Democrat from Southern Oregon that such authority was excessive. I sat in Potts’ office while Lieuallen did it. Masterful.

The qualities that made some academics wonder whether Lieuallen was up to the chancellor’s job were also the qualities that won so many legislators’ respect. Lieuallen had no national reputation. He was a homegrown educator. He attended public schools in Eastern Oregon wheat country. He first taught in Pilot Rock near Pendleton. Like many lawmakers of that era, Lieuallen’s military service financed his education: a master’s degree from the University of Oregon and a doctorate from Stanford. He taught a decade at Oregon College of Education in Monmouth -- now Western Oregon University -- before becoming its president. After six years in that job he was chosen Chancellor. The Eastern Oregon and Southern Oregon lawmakers who controlled the state’s purse strings then -- the late hog rancher, Rep. Stafford Hansell, R-Athena, and pear farmer Sen. Lynn Newbry, R-Talent, liked Lieuallen because he understood them and they, in turn, listened to him.

Together they built a modern university system whose graduates became the educated workforce that underpinned the Oregon economy’s transition from agrarian to urban and from resource-based manufacturing to high technology.

Built by taxpayers over generations, the state’s colleges and universities are a priceless economic and educational asset. Since the 1980s, the Oregon Legislature has been a poor steward of this educational patrimony.

When I attended the University of Oregon in 1965, tuition represented about 25 percent of the operating cost of undergraduate education. The taxpayers put up the remaining 75 percent with the implicit understanding that they would be paid back through taxes on the higher income that often comes with a college diploma.

The low-tuition philosophy was replaced by a philosophy of “high tuition, high aid,”promoted by the state’s private colleges and universities, who had trouble competing with state universities. But during the recession, “high tuition - high aid” was embraced by conservative lawmakers who wanted to find a way to shift the burden supporting state colleges and universities away from taxpayers and stick it to students and their families.

In practice, the “high aid” never materialized or else took the form of loans. During the 1990s, the average student at Oregon’s public universities graduated between $18,000 - $23,000 in debt.

Today, public university undergraduates pay about 75 percent of the cost of their education. The taxpayers supply only 25 percent. A growing number of high school graduates are priced out of higher education, unless they are willing to go tens of thousands of dollars in debt before their adult lives have even begun.

Lieuallen took his inability to reverse this trend as a personal failure.

True to the principles he lived daily -- Lew’s Law the Second: Never stand in front of a steamroller -- Lieuallen resigned in 1982 in quiet protest of the Legislature’s deliberate, systematic neglect of its educational patrimony.

Lieuallen died last month at 88. He reportedly died of age-related causes. I suspect he died of a broken heart.

By Russell Sadler May 08, 2005