Tag Archives: Steve Clark

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Local News: The Times They Are a-Changin’

It used to be that if you didn’t read your local newspaper you simply didn’t know what was going on.

When I was growing up in the small town of Wallingford, Connecticut in the 1950s, my family read the Meriden Record, established in 1867, at the breakfast table and the New Haven Register, around since 1812, in the afternoon.

When I moved to Lake Oswego, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, in 1987, one of the first things I did was subscribe to the local paper, the Lake Oswego Review.

In 2006, Lake Oswego spent $20 million to acquire some property featuring an 89,000 sq. ft. office complex, intending to transform the site into a community center.  But all hell broke loose when local opposition to the plan surfaced.  Over coming years, the issue generated persistent news coverage in the Lake Oswego Review.

A couple years in, I asked a local friend, an educated professional, “So, what do you think about the controversy over the proposed community center?”

“Huh,” he replied. “Don’t know much about it.” I was shocked. He didn’t subscribe to the Lake Oswego Review, the principal news source for local residents.

That was back when as many as 8,500 local newspapers still played a critical role in the civic health of communities across America.

But since 2000, more than 3,200 newspapers in the country have simply vanished. In 2025, only about 36% of U.S. adults said they got news from their local daily paper at least sometimes, down from around 55% in 2000, and I suspect that percentage has continued to slip, particularly among young people. Overall news trust is also continuing to decline, although the most trusted news brands continue to be local television outlets and regional or local newspapers.

The loss of local media coverage in Oregon has been painful for the producers and consumers.

The Chronicle, which had served the southern Willamette Valley region in Lane County since 1909, focusing on Springfield, Creswell, Cottage Grove and Pleasant Hill, died a painful death earlier this month.

The staff of the Chronicle on their last day.

“We never put our heads down or ran on muscle memory,” Executive Editor Erin Tierney-Heggenstaller wrote in the last edition. “We were strategic, offering communities with virtually no other credible journalistic outlet what people say they want: award-winning hyper-local news about family, friends, and neighbors; practical reporting to make daily life easier; and curated content edited with standards that social media, AI slop, and corporatized commodity news no longer offer. “Build it, and they will come.” But they didn’t.”

The Lake Oswego Review hasn’t been spared from the same tumult.

Founded in 1921 as the Western Clackamas Review, renamed the Oswego Review in 1928, and then the Lake Oswego Review in 1961, the paper underwent several transformations, gradually expanding its readership and impact. By 1976, the paper was being published twice a week, totaling 90 pages and with a circulation of 8,200.  In 1978, Eagle Newspapers, an Oregon regional newspaper group rooted in John Day, purchased the paper.

In 1996, former Review editor Steve Clark and his wife, Randalyn, bought the Review and its parent company, Community Newspapers Inc. Over the next few years, the company grew to include nine community newspapers. In August 2000, Lake Oswego residents Robert and Marilyn Pamplin bought Community Newspapers and transitioned it to Pamplin Media Group. Over the next 24 years, Pamplin grew to include two dozen newspapers in Oregon and their corresponding websites, including the Lake Oswego Review and the group’s flagship, the Portland Tribune, which had launched in February 2000.

“The Tribune and its family of newspapers provides the ‘right stuff’ that citizens need to engage effectively — with government, with each other, with the bigger world,” former Metro councilor Rex Burkholder said in 2016. “News, especially news that is about what is happening here and now, in one’s own community, is essential nourishment for anyone wanting to make a difference.”

On June 1, 2024, Mississippi-based Carpenter Media Group bought the entire Pamplin Media Group for an undisclosed sum. Carpenter, founded in 2023, says on its website, “The newspapers, websites and magazines we lead are the cornerstones of their communities, allies to businesses, incubators for innovation, and cultivators of journalistic talent. We aim to forge a well-informed, interconnected, and prosperous society – one community at a time.”

So much for that. In Oregon, a massacre followed.

Among the victims was the Lake Oswego Review, which had built a strong track record of publishing award-winning investigative and enterprise journalism, and two other Pamplin papers in adjacent cities, the West Linn Tidings and the Wilsonville Spokesman.

On February 11, 2026, the three papers were merged into one,The Review, a pale imitation of its three predecessors. The entire August 12, 2026 issue of The Review ran just 24 pages, including one self-congratulatory page promoting local stories in The Review, three pages of public notices and one page urging readers to let Oregon legislators know they value access to public notices in their local paper. The August 19 issue had just 15 pages of news.

With that kind of shrinkage in news coverage, it hardly matters whether my Lake Oswego friend subscribes to the local paper today.

Meanwhile, other local news outlets have shriveled as well.

In October 2024, Carpenter Media Group bought the EO Media Group, which owned Oregon’s Bend Bulletin, the East Oregonian and other rural Oregon newspapers, and proceeded to slash and burn the papers’ staffs. John Carr, Senior VP of Oregon and Washington at Carpenter Media, said the cuts were “necessary financial changes and cost-cutting measures that will stabilize these publications for the future.”

The Portland Tribune had 40-50 newsroom staffers when it launched in February 2001. It ceased printing in June 2025 following major newsroom cutbacks and layoffs and now operates strictly as a digital, online-only news service that requires a paid subscription to access. Although Multnomah County still describes the Tribune on its website as a ” Portland city newspaper, offering comprehensive coverage of news, sports, business, people and entertainment”, it now has just one reporter, Hannah Seibold , who describes herself as “the sole survivor of the Portland Tribune at this point”.

The Oregonian newspaper, once the Portland area’s dominant local news source, has suffered as well. Founded in 1850 as a four page weekly, its first issue printed in a log shack on Portland’s SW First and Morrison,

I joined The Oregonian as a business reporter in 1987. It was a robust, well-respected paper then, with a proud past and a much-anticipated future. Daily Monday-Friday circulation was 319,624; Sunday circulation 375,914. When I left the paper 10 years later in 1997 to take a corporate communications job, daily Monday-Friday circulation was 360,000, Sunday circulation 450,000. We were on a roll.

Much of that success was attributed to Sandra Mims Rowe, who came on as editor in 1993 and tried to energize the newsroom with a hiring spree, bringing on reporters and editors from around the country. Under her leadership, the newsroom distinguished itself by winning five Pulitzers.

But the paper wasn’t able to escape the tumult of the newspaper business during her tenure. By the time she left the paper in Dec. 2009, she had to cut staff, salaries and benefits as circulation and revenue declined.

In 2009, The Oregonian’s daily circulation sat at 268,572 and Sunday circulation at 344,950, causing the paper to lose its position as one of the top 25 Sunday circulation papers in the country. That same year, the paper announced a long-term policy that protected full-time employees from layoffs for economic or technological reasons would end.

By 2012, daily circulation sank to 228,599, only slightly higher than circulation in 1950, and the declines continued. Talented reporters began departing in droves, some pushed out, others motivated by buy-outs. At the same time the once powerful paper saw its clout diminish as it abandoned rural Oregon and 7-day-a-week print distribution. 

When I left The Oregonian in 1997 to take a corporate communications job, the paper employed a newsroom staff of about 400 journalists (reporters, editors, and photographers). The newsroom staff now consists of about 66 employees.

The paper publishes print editions just four days a week, while continuously updating its digital content. Average daily print circulation is 29,325 copies and Sunday print circulation is 44,294 copies. The days are long gone when what was in The Oregonian, particularly its opinion section and columnists, dominated local conversations all day.

So here we are. A once mighty paper hollowed out and humbled. A growing population served by a smaller paper. A weakened paper that no longer drives the daily discussion at the proverbial water cooler (or over a latte). A diminished, editorially impotent presence with a dwindling ability to hold powerful interests accountable.

But is the local news environment as depleted as often presumed? Is the gloomy view unwarranted?

As the size and impact of the traditional major dailies and weeklies in the Portland metro area have shrunk, other news outlets are working to fill the gap. Some of their audiences are limited and their coverage is not very deep, but together they are beginning to fill a continued need and judicious selectivity can provide unexpectedly broad local news coverage.

There is still, however, too much online coverage of national news and not enough of local. As Public Media Company CEO Tim Isgitt recently said to Poynter, “…public media is facing a perfect storm. We’re part of a rapidly changing media and technology landscape that is providing unlimited content — but perhaps not the content we need. We can get any national journalism we need, but we can get very little local journalism from this landscape…We’re part of a media and technology landscape that is largely failing our society — with detrimental societal impacts, whether it’s misinformation, lack of trust or the effects it’s having on polarization, teen mental health or the loneliness epidemic.”

Some local media in Oregon are trying to do better.

Willamette Week, an alternative paper and digital media outlet, continues to offers cultural, civic and political coverage and reaches hundreds of thousands of print and online viewers, even if it tends to focus on only a few topics each week and its daily local online news coverage is limited. 

The Portland Mercury, an alternative bi-weekly, offers coverage of local arts, music, and city culture. 

There are also a number of hyper-local outlets such as the Northwest Examiner, the Southeast Examiner, Montavilla News, The Bee, Star News, The St. Johns Review, The Mid-County Memo and The Skanner, 

Other options include the solid news site OPB, City Cast Portland, a website and a daily podcast for local news, Oregon Capitol Chronicle, part of the States Newsroom, and a relative newcomer, Axios Portland, with two reporters, Meira Gebel and Kale Williams.

And there’s still Oregon Business, around since 1981, that reports on a wide range of topics such as leadership, innovation, technology, culture, politics and environment, and the Portland Business Journal, published since 1984, which delivers local commercial news, data, and networking opportunities for the Portland, Oregon metro area.

Another innovative outlet focusing on local business news is Portland Inno, a digital media outlet powered by the Portland Business Journal, focused on Portland’s local startup, technology and innovation economies. A recent story, for example, broke the news that Mark Ronay, who founded materials company Liquid Wire in 2016, had launched a company is called Spectralsurf, aimed at  bringing down the costs of semiconductor manufacturing, with funding from Portland Seed Fund and ONAMI .

Then there are Portland’s television stations, KGW 8, KOIN 6, KATU 2 and KPTV Fox 12, offering varying levels of useful local news.

Portland’s local news outlets sometimes provide mindless drivel and poorly-researched gossip, comparable to the blitzing of the podium done by the Trump administration on a regular basis, and there’s a lot of slop out there, but they can also produce substantial deeply-researched impactful stories and the fact is the public is hungry for reliable local news.

Increasingly, however, that hunger for local news is being met not by the news outlets noted above, but by social media. Young people, in particular, move between podcasts, X accounts and YouTube livestreams where there’s no editorial control, no reviews and no accountability, where skepticism is required, but not often employed. Of course, young people will eventually grow older, but there is little likelihood that they will grow into accessing media as their parents did.

For the first time globally, more people are getting their news from social media platforms featuring independent online news personalities and commentators on platforms like Substack, TikTok and YouTube than television or news websites, according to a new report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. This is particularly the case with younger audiences who often stumble upon information passively, consuming news that is automatically served to them through algorithm feeds, comment sections, and trending topics.

Substack is one beneficiary off this trend. One of the more prolific, and controversial, Substack commenters in the Portland area is Keven Dahlgren, who writes on homeless issues in  Truth on the Streets. Another widely read site is Oregon Roundup by Jeff Eager, which says it covers “Oregon’s uniquely dysfunctional state government and the politics that create it.”

One problem, though, is that of the strong, reliable news, even local news, is only available if you are willing to shell out for a subscription, and many people are not. As one commenter on a substack post, Second Rough Draft, recently noted, “…the press sells what the public wants to buy. If there was a greater market for light, the media would cut back on the heat…elite audiences willing to pay are getting ample good information and others choose to pay less and get less.”

The Reuters Institute notes in a report, another troubling sign, that it is seeing stagnation or decline in overall online news engagement. People are turning away from the news. “The trends are worse among younger people and those without a university degree,” Reuters says. 

Some of that decline may be simply due to the way social media works. “Social media algorithms are optimised for engagement, with the goal of keeping people on the platform as long as possible, ” according to Reuters. “This has seen social media companies prioritising things like entertaining short-form video and de-prioritising news…Political news caused headaches for them, so they turned away.”

The problem is locally-focused social media can be a swamp and it can be hard to separate truth from the muck.

“… in different, darker corners of the internet, it has become a source of endless misinformation and disinformation dispensed by a panoply of influencers, conspiracy theorists, edgelords, grifters and con men, DIY gurus, hostile foreign actors, and partisan echo chambers full of dittoheads and doxers,” observes John Ramage, a former and Arizona State University professor of English, on Substack. “It is a world without gatekeepers, regulators or arbiters, an epistemic wild, wild west where anyone who relies on evidence-based reasoning is dismissed as an establishment tool.”

Then there’s the problem of what’s happening when news-searchers engage with social media, such as items on X. 404 Media recently noted that X’s algorithm learns what you hate and shows you more of it, according to a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper, titled Value misalignment of X’s feed algorithm is a reflection of value tensions in engagement, found that the site’s algorithm prioritized engagement above all else when it generated a user’s For You Page. 

“When a user on X sees a post that makes them mad — like a press release from a politician from a political party they don’t like — sometimes they’ll fight about the post in the replies,” 404 Media noted. “It doesn’t matter who you follow or what your stated values are, X reads replying as engagement and will send more of the infuriating posts the user’s way.”

Reviewing The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything, New York Times book critic Alexandra Jacobs noted that with social media,”All was sweet, innocent fun for awhile, then the algorithm came along and ruined everything, like a drifter in a Cormac McCarthy novel”, with all sorts of deleterious effects.

Or as historian Anton Jäger said recently on the Ezra Klein Show, “…our attention is fundamentally shaped now by algorithms that care about controversy, that care about newness, that are hunting amorally and constantly for whatever will get a rise out of people.”

It’s also important to realize that slop is proliferating on the web — some studies say 50 percent of online articles are now artificially generated. Then there are so-called “pink slime” sites, publications that mimic the appearance and output of traditional news organizations. Snopes, an online fact-checking and myth-busting website, can help sniff out such sites. 

it’s incumbent on citizens to proactively be selective in their news habits. In “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: How to Reclaim Your Power, Fight for Freedom and Reimagine Democracy”, Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of the national nonprofit Democracy Forward, urges Americans to do an inventory of the sources of their news and information and “to become an active, purposeful seeker of information rather than passively absorb whatever comes our way.” 

However you consume local news, “Studies have shown that the supply of local news is correlated with higher rates of civic engagement,” says the Agora Journalism Center at -the University of Oregon. “Robust local journalism matters to how informed citizens are, and according to another recent Knight Foundation report, a healthy news and information ecosystem creates “a virtuous circle whereby improved information contributes to improved community outcomes.”

If you want an educated, informed public in a position to make wise judgments, quality local journalism is key. As Thomas Jefferson wrote  in 1787, “The way to prevent irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs through the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people.”

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Fiscal Follies: Oregon’s Public Universities Embrace In-State Tuition for Nation’s Indian Tribes

Trying to correct for injustice can be well-intentioned, but an effort by Oregon’s public universities shows how an altruistic effort can go terribly wrong and undermine confidence in formerly trusted institutions.

It’s frustrating to see Oregons well-regarded universities go blindly down this counterproductive path. There will be a cost to this need to feel enlightened. After all, there is no free lunch.

With no public debate in advance of their decision, the presidents of all but one of Oregon’s public universities, convinced of their moral superiority and apparently blind to the financial implications of their decisions, have decided to institute in-state tuition for enrolled members of Indian tribes.

Not just members of tribes with strong ties to Oregon, but millions of enrolled members of all 574 federally recognized American Indian and Alaska Native tribes spread across the entire United States. 

Hall of Tribal Nations, Bureau of Indian Affairs

Some other states offer tuition benefits to members of tribes with specific connections to the state, but Oregon’s public universities are the only ones to go national with an in-state tuition policy that does not require any tribal connection to the state to qualify. 

Portland State University (PSU) started the ball rolling. On July 21, 2022, it announced that, beginning with the fall 2022 academic term, PSU enrolled, degree-seeking undergraduate students who are registered members of any one of the federally recognized tribes in the United States would qualify to pay in-state tuition rates.

Undergraduate in-state tuition and fees at PSU for the 2022-23 academic year total $10,806. Non-resident tuition and fees total $29,706, a $18,900 difference in revenue to the school per student. Differences between resident and non-resident tuition and fees at other public Oregon universities are similarly wide.

“This offer of in-state tuition is a small way to honor the legacy of Indigenous nations from across the country,” Chuck Knepfle, PSU’s vice president of enrollment management, said in a statement.

It is not, however, a costless gesture.

PSU is struggling to maintain affordability with rising costs and limited revenue and said it made the decision without knowing how many current or potential students might take advantage of the policy or what its potential financial impact might be. “We do not currently collect tribal information for our students so we don’t know how many will qualify,” said Christina Dyrness Williams, PSU’s Director, Strategic Communications. 

PSU rationalized the nationwide expansion of the in-state tuition policy by tying it to the university’s commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”  

In a spasm of guilt run amok and willful blindness on the costs, the resident tuition policy spread to Oregon’s other public universities like a contagion. 

On August 3, Oregon State University (OSU) said it, too, would initiate in-state tuition for enrolled members of all federally recognized Indian tribes in the United States, including currently enrolled students, no matter where they live. 

“Tribal citizens from throughout Oregon and the country represent multiple sovereign nations and are valued, contributing members of the OSU community,” said Becky Johnson, OSU’s interim president. “This new tuition policy advances our commitment – in the spirit of self-reflection, learning, reconciliation and partnership – that the university will be of enduring benefit to Tribal nations and their citizens throughout Oregon and the country.”

Steve Clark, OSU’s Vice President for University Relations and Marketing, said the school had 174 students enrolled last fall who indicated they were of Native American/Alaska Native heritage. Most were Oregon residents, but the school didn’t know who among them were enrolled members of federally recognized tribal nations. Approximately 10 currently enrolled non-resident students may qualify for the benefits of the new policy, should they apply for it, Clark said. 

Clark said OSU doesn’t believe the number of new out-of-state tribal students that will enroll in future years because of the new tuition policy will be large.

Like lemmings leaping over a cliff, other public universities dutifully followed, with little evidence of doubt or serious debate.

Next up on the resident tuition bandwagon was Southern Oregon University (SOU) in Ashland. Tuition and fee revenue at SOU per full-time student in FY2021 was about $26,000 for non-residents versus about $9,000 for resident students. 

SOU took the tribal tuition step even though it is dealing with growing deficits. University president Rick Bailey told faculty and staff in September that the school is facing a nearly $5 million deficit in the 2022-23 school year, a $13 million deficit in three years and a $14 million gap in four years. 

Then in November 2022, Bailey announced significant proposed staffing cuts and program reductions in the face of a structural deficit. At that point he said SOU faced a $1.3 million deficit in 2022 that was forecast to grow to $14.6 million in the 2026/27 academic year.

The Oregon Institute of Technology (OIT) signed on to the new policy because “Oregon Tech has been furthered by tribal culture and heritage and from the tribal lands on which our campuses reside,” said OIT’s President Nagi Naganathan. 

The herd mentality of in-state tuition reparations continued with Western Oregon University (WOU) following suit. “Boarding schools and then colleges and universities were built on Native American homelands,” WOU’s president Jesse Peters said. “The educational system itself was often implemented as a tool used to destroy indigenous languages, communities, and cultures.”

Eastern Oregon University (EOU) also joined in, even while admitting ongoing financial struggles with rising expenses and inflation. “This is another demonstration of EOU’s commitment to ensuring a welcoming environment for all students, while prioritizing a commitment to inclusion, diversity, equity and belonging,” said Genesis Meaderds, EOU’s Director of Admissions.

The only one of Oregon’s public universities not to fully embrace the groupthink is the University of Oregon (UO). 

Documents obtained through a public records request show that UO resisted early on offering resident tuition for non-residents of all 574 federally recognized tribes.

Instead, UO announced on Oct. 16 the launch of a Home Flight Scholars Program. Once state and federal options have been exhausted, the university will waive remaining tuition and fees for Oregon residents who are enrolled citizens of the 574 federally recognized Indian tribes.

“Our philosophy is that every college campus, public or private, in the US is on Indian land. We absolutely hope every university will take our lead,” said the school’s Native American and Indigenous Studies director Kirby Brown. “We feel every university has a responsibility to Indigenous students, being built on land that was forcibly taken from their tribes and used to benefit universities, counties and states who founded themselves on Indigenous resources.”

All this chest-beating beneficence is occurring against a backdrop of financial stress at Oregon’s public universities  

At a September meeting of PSU’s board of trustees, university leaders said early indications showed the school has still not bounced back from the pandemic’s hit to its enrollment. “The university is not going to meet its overall enrollment goal for the year,” PSU Finance and Administration Committee Chair Sheryl Manning told the board. Manning said student credit hours this fall are down 8 to 9% compared to the same period last year.

According to board documents, the university has lost roughly $18 million in gross tuition and fee revenue since the 2019-20 fiscal year.

“This trend in enrollment is certainly a call to action and requires a plan from management to address the future,” Manning said.

And this comes as Oregon’s public universities have been raising tuition on Oregon residents to keep up with inflation and rising expenses.

For example, PSU announced on April 21, 2022 that resident undergraduate tuition for the 2022-23 academic year would be $9,000 for students enrolled in 15 credits a quarter for three quarters, up from $8,685 for 2021-22. 

“Tuition is a necessity,” said PSU President Stephen Percy, bemoaning limited state support being behind tuition increases. “The state covers less than 35% of our education costs. We strive to be affordable, but we also must meet our obligation to deliver an outstanding experience to our students — in the classroom and outside it. That requires resources and the resource need increases each year.”

EOU’s Board of Trustees approved a 4.9% tuition increase for in-state undergraduate students for the current academic year. Even with the tuition increase, the school is anticipating a budget deficit of at least $2 million.

UO tuition rates for the 2022-23 academic year include a 4.5% increase over 2021-22 for incoming in-state freshmen.

It’s clear that while Oregon’s public universities plead with the legislature and alumni for more money, concern about revenue goes out the window when they want to do some virtue signaling.

Expanding resident tuition benefits to out-of-state tribal members means foregone revenue for increased services. Oregonians will have to cover the cost of this new non-resident benefit for tribal members across the country. And the amount of money resident students are expected to pay to cover full-time cost of attendance after all grant aid is accounted for is already high relative to other states.

The new tribal tuition policy also runs contrary to a recommendation in a scathing September 22, 2022 report commissioned by Oregon’s higher education leaders that Oregon’s public universities increase revenue from out-of-state students who can pay a premium to attend. 

The revenue from these students is “crucial… to Oregon’s universities’ bottom lines to counter rising educational costs,” the report says.

“It is critical to recognize that the additional dollars collected from nonresidents can be put to many uses,” the report, written by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS), said, “including by paying for the recruitment of those out-of-state students so that in-state resources are not used, helping support Oregon residents through targeted institutional aid or by relieving upward pressure on resident tuition prices, funding the development of new or expanded programmatic capacity in areas of state need, as well as other institutional priorities.”

The NCHEMS report noted that all of Oregon’s four-year institutions collect substantially more revenue from non-resident students than residents. 

Additional Tuition Revenue Collected from Non-Resident Students, FY 2021  

University of Oregon$169,804,003 
Oregon State University$106,873,533 
Portland State University$43,902,179 
Southern Oregon University$18,619,681 
Western Oregon University$12,862,228 
Oregon Institute of Technology$10,089,269 
Eastern Oregon University$7,500,363 

Notes: Data are annual for full-time first-time students enrolled in Fall 2020. Some data are suppressed to avoid violated state- mandated cell-size limitations. These data provide the amount of additional revenue nonresidents contribute than they would have had they been resident students. The “nonresident premium” is the additional revenue generated from each nonresident student. Source: HECC

The University of Oregon, for example, collects about three times as much revenue from non-residents as residents on average. 

“Overall, that additional funding (from non-residents) plays a crucial role in supporting the institutional mission,” the report said.

Tuition revenue from out-of-state students is particularly valuable, the report said, because Oregon has consistently expected its in-state students to bear more of the cost burden of public higher education than the nation as a whole, and a substantially larger share than its fellow Western states.

Then there’s the critical point that in adopting the new tribal tuition policy, a small group of like-minded academicians, acting with virtually no oversight, can push extreme policies. Believing themselves to be the defenders of the downtrodden, they have elevated one minority group above all others, magnifying differences in the misplaced pursuit of ethical purity.

It is all part of the rising trend of true believers viewing the world through an “identitarian lens,” Joanna Williams observed in City Journal earlier this year. “People are not seen as individuals, but as group members, with each group allotted a place in a hierarchy of privilege and oppression,” she wrote.

The problem with going down this route is that native Americans are hardly the only group that has felt the sting of oppression.The fact is other minorities in Oregon and across the country have suffered as well during morally toxic times, but Oregon’s universities have not extended resident tuition to them.

Oregon and the nation have a particularly sordid history of racism against Blacks.  The Oregon region’s provisional government forbid slavery in the 1840s, but it also banned Blacks from settling in the area. And when Oregon became a state in 1859, it was the only state admitted to the Union with an Exclusion Law in its constitution.

In the early 1900s, a resuscitated Ku Klux Klan had a strong presence in the state, claiming 35,000 active members in 1923.  As late as the 1940s some Portland businesses displayed signs saying they catered “to the white trade only”.

The Oregonian newspaper aided and abetted Oregon’s racism for many years. In October 2022, the paper published a lengthy apology for its “Racist Legacy” ever since its publication as a daily paper in 1861. 

“The now 161-year-old daily newspaper spent decades reinforcing the racial divide in a state founded as whites-only, fomenting the racism that people of color faced,” the paper said. 

“It excused lynching. It promoted segregation. It opposed equal rights for women and people of color. It celebrated laws to exclude Asian immigrants. It described Native Americans as uncivilized, saying their extermination might be needed…The seeds of such inequalities and many more were planted before statehood and in the years that followed by the white men who dominated Oregon’s positions of power, including its longest continuously published newspaper.”

A 2014 report by Portland State University and the Coalition of Communities of Color, a Portland non-profit, concluded Oregon has been slow to dismantle overtly racist policies. As a result, the report said, “African Americans in Multnomah County (which includes Portland) continue to live with the effects of racialized policies, practices, and decision-making.”

“I think that Portland has, in many ways, perfected neoliberal racism,” Walidah Imarisha, an African American educator and expert on black history in Oregon, told an Atlantic magazine writer in 2016.  “Yes, the city is politically progressive, she told the writer, but its government has facilitated the dominance of whites in business, housing, and culture. And white-supremacist sentiment is not uncommon in the state.” 

Oregon has an ugly history in its treatment of Jews as well. 

If The Oregonian’s researchers had gone back further to the 1850s when the paper was founded, they would have discovered another shameful record, the persistent anti-Semitism of its first editor, T.J. Dryer. 

“The Jews in Oregon, but more particularly in this city, have assumed an importance that no other sect has ever dared to assume in this country,” Dryer wrote in an Oct. 16, 1858 anti-Semitic screed posing as an editorial headlined “The Jews”.

“They have leagued together by uniting their entire numerical strength to control the ballot boxes at our elections,” Dryer wrote. “They have assumed to control the commercial interest of the whole country, by a secret combination, and the adoption of a system of mercantile pursuits which none but a Jew would ever pursue…They, as a nation or tribe, produce nothing, nor do nothing, unless they are the exclusive gainers thereby…What have the Jews done for the benefit of the American nation, for religion or morals , that they should with swaggering arrogance claim exclusive rights and privileges denied to all other sects and creeds”?

When Jews initially emigrated to Oregon’s frontier, racial stereotypes also prevented many of them from obtaining credit for their businesses, according to The Jews of Oregon, 1850-1950. The principal U.S. credit rating agency, R.G. Dun & Co, a forerunner of Dun & Bradstreet, specifically identified them as Jews in vitriolic reports and included offensive stereotypes such as referring to them as “untrustworthy.” 

One Jew, Aaron Meier, who migrated to Oregon in 1855 and was later a founder of Meier & Frank, a prominent retail business, was described as “shrewd, close, calculating and considered tricky.”

Anti-Semitism in Oregon stretched into the 20th century. The Tualatin County Club, which still exists in a suburb of Portland, was established in 1912 by a group of Jewish men because Jews weren’t allowed to play golf on other links. 

In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan opposed and disparaged Oregon Jews, painting them as predatory capitalists and dangerous radicals. Anti-Semitism was also evident in the professions. 

Despite the vile history of mistreating Jews and Blacks in Oregon, the state’s universities apparently feel no need to extend the tribal in-state tuition offer to them wherever they live in the United States.

And they shouldn’t. 

Not to them or to the members of all 574 federally recognized American Indian and Alaska Native tribes.

A relentless academic focus on guilt-based compensation to various wronged groups in our increasingly diverse society is corrosive, divisive and nonsensical. It positions entire categories of people as victims.

Extending resident tuition to all the enrolled members of all 574 federally recognized Indian tribes in the entire United States is, quite simply, a mistake. 

It is nothing more than wrong-headed feel-good performative activism, all at the expense of Oregon resident students and Oregon taxpayers, and it needs to stop.

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In responsione: OSU and state support for higher education

After I wrote about Oregon’s abandonment of higher education, focusing on the situation at the University of Oregon, Steve Clark, Vice President for University Relations at OSU, responded to me with some informative comments.

Steve Clark, Oregon State University

Steve Clark, Oregon State University

Mr. Clark agreed to let me share them:

Like you, at Oregon State, we worry about the cost of higher education for Oregonians. I would like to share with you a number of steps we have taken to minimize the impacts of this change in state funding, but we do realize that there is more work to do in this regard. And while our efforts are many and have had a positive impact, we continue to urge Oregon legislators to restore higher education funding at least to levels provided in 2007.

Weatherford Hall at Oregon State University

Here is some information that I hope aids you and shows how Oregon State remains a public university for Oregonians.

I realize that while your column largely shared statistics about the University of Oregon, your point was that all of Oregon’s public universities are public in name only.

While OSU’s out-of-state and international enrollment has grown over the past decade, OSU’s undergraduate enrollment is still 74% made up of Oregonians. That percentage has declined over the past decade, but we have pledged to not let it fall below 66%. That’s our land grant mission.

Meanwhile, we have launched OSU Open Campus to bring educational programs directly to Oregon communities in partnership with local school districts, ESDs and community colleges. And we have dual degree partnerships with all of our Oregon’s 17 community colleges … so students can simultaneously enroll at OSU and the community college near their home and then transfer after a year or two of community college to attend Oregon State without losing credits. In some cases – such as in an agricultural sciences program with Klamath Community College – a student can graduate in four years without ever having to come to Corvallis, but instead take community college courses for two years or so and then complete their degree taking OSU on-line distance learning classes.

We do recognize tuition and fees are expensive. OSU’s in-state tuition and fees are $9,123 per year compared to the $9,918 you pointed out about UO. Still that is a lot more than students paid 7 to 10 years ago. Out-of-state tuition at OSU is $26,295 per year compared with $30,888 at UO.

With such a heavy tuition load in mind, we launched many years ago our Bridge to Success program. It enables 2,600 to 3,000 Oregonians per year to attend OSU without paying any tuition and fees. The program combines Oregon Opportunity Grants, federal Pell funds and university funds. And then there is our OSU Foundation philanthropy – The Campaign for OSU has raised more than $183 million for student scholarships.

Yes, there is a significant issue with how the state funds higher education in Oregon and we are working with the legislature to change that. Time will tell about such efforts. Meanwhile, as Oregon’s statewide university, we will not abandon Oregonians. And we will work hard to moderate costs, bring higher education to many Oregon communities, and grow funding for financial aid for students.

Steve Clark