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Michael Dunne: In college athletics, there are definitely haves and have-nots. In Eugene, the University of Oregon is definitely a have. But up the road in Corvallis, Oregon State might be largely perceived as a have-not after losing out on conference realignment. The president of OSU is determined not to let that perception or reality linger. Today on the show, you'll hear from President Jayathi Murthy about efforts to increase funding for the athletics program in an attempt, as she says, to win the new PAC-12. A foundation has granted the university millions of dollars, and Murthy hopes for a local match in order to give OSU athletes a huge boost in resources. Then at the end of the show, we'll talk to one of our reporters about how thousands of rural customers of EWEB are being moved to a local cooperative. Jayathi Murthy is the Oregon State University president. President Murthy, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us.
Jayathi Murthy: It's wonderful to be talking to you today.
Dunne: There's a big announcement by the university and the university's foundation to invest in student athletes. Let's start with that. Tell us what's happening at OSU.
Murthy: Today we announced an amazing gift from the Wayne and Gladys Valley Foundation for $24 million to support revenue sharing for OSU athletics. This is a challenge gift. It's called the Valley Challenge, and the idea is that our community would match the $24 million gift with another $24 million. So we're calling on our donors to match the Valley Challenge gift. If we are successful, and we have every intention to be successful, the total money raised for revenue sharing for OSU athletics would be $48 million, which is a very substantial sum. This is to be done over three years, and all OSU sports count, so revenue sharing philanthropy to any OSU sport absolutely counts toward the match. It's really exciting. It puts us in a very good position as we enter the new PAC-12 Conference, which kicks off on July 1 of this year.
Dunne: What is this going to allow OSU athletics to do?
Murthy: As you know, revenue sharing is now a feature of collegiate athletics in our country, and the numbers are pretty substantial. This year, for example, the cap is $20.5 million. So universities are allowed, college athletics is allowed, to provide $20.5 million. Every university is allowed to do that, to share revenue with its athletes. Now that's a cap, but it's a pretty substantial cap, and this particular gift allows us to push toward that cap. What does that mean for our teams? It means that coaches and our athletes can have the resources needed to compete in an increasingly competitive athletic space, so we can aspire to lead the new PAC-12 and to win decisively in the new PAC-12.
Dunne: Maybe you can explain to our listeners the collaboration between OSU and the OSU Foundation and this other foundation, the Wayne and Gladys Valley Foundation. How did this all come together?
Murthy: The way fundraising is done at OSU is that the OSU Foundation, which sits outside the university, leads all fundraising for the university. It's a very tight collaboration. We collaborate with them and with their CEO, Shawn Scoville, to lay out the goals for the university. These goals are arrived at through collaboration, and so the foundation and I, along with our professors, deans, our community, and their fundraisers, work together to reach our philanthropic goals. The Valley Foundation is a long-standing supporter of OSU. Wayne and Gladys Valley were always long-term supporters, and they supported many projects across the university. When their foundation was established, it continued beyond their lifetimes and has been supporting us for many years. Their interests are very broad. They've certainly supported athletics, and you'll see many athletics facilities named for them, but they've also supported research and academics. So their reach across the university is very broad and very effective. We were talking with folks from the Valley Foundation, and they understood that this particular moment was a critical one in the life of OSU athletics. The new conference was coming. We intend to win in the new conference. We will need resources to do that, and they stepped up to provide those resources. They did it in a very creative way, because they challenged our donors and our fan base to match their generosity. I have every confidence that's going to happen. It's a really exciting time.
Dunne: In the announcement, the phrase "rapidly evolving collegiate athletics landscape" is used. In conjunction with this money, how is OSU evolving to compete in this new college athletics environment?
Murthy: Talk about rapidly evolving. The kind of evolution that's happened in the space of two to three years is truly head-spinning, and a lot of it is driven by the House case and all the settlements that resulted from that case. Things like revenue sharing are now part of the landscape. Name, image and likeness is part of the landscape. What that does is place very significant pressure on resources, on money. All of us are retooling and reorienting ourselves to meet those new demands. Let me give you an example. You may know that we are searching for a new athletic director, because our current AD, Scott Barnes, has decided to step down as AD come Sept. 1, and he'll be with us as a senior advisor for another year beyond that. One of the ways we're thinking about the new AD is that they would need all the skills that a traditional AD would have, but another big part of it is they've got to be very savvy about business opportunities, about revenue opportunities, new streams of revenue, new ideas. They're going to have to be very agile in the business space and the revenue generation space. Our administrative structure in athletics is also going to change. We're now thinking about a chief revenue officer whose full-time job is to develop new revenue streams. The structure of athletics is changing. Our coaches are much more focused on philanthropy and NIL. We're all becoming much more focused on resourcing our athletics programs.
Dunne: I'm also wondering, maybe the right terms are both collaboration and balance. How do you balance athletics and academics, resource-wise, but also just mindshare and attention from you and your leadership team?
Murthy: For me, athletics is very much a part of campus life. We are deeply focused on academics. Of course, we're deeply focused on research and we're deeply focused on athletics. They're all important parts of the campus enterprise and the higher education enterprise, really. Our campus understands that athletics, as they say, is the front door to the university. It is what connects us to our alumni. It connects us to our fans. It connects us to our donors. I've never seen anything like it, particularly here in Oregon. People will drive hundreds of miles to come every weekend to watch all kinds of sports: football, men's and women's basketball, for sure. Baseball's got a huge fan base. People come for gymnastics, wrestling, you name it. That devotion is a source of connection with our alumni, fans and students. It's deeply valuable. Our faculty and our students understand that. For me, it's a part of the total. Of course, it means you have to be careful with money and balance all of these competing interests. But we should all understand that philanthropy to athletics, the people who give to athletics are also people who give to all the other parts of our enterprise. The Valley Foundation is a prime example. They have given broadly across the OSU enterprise: academics, research, athletics, you name it.
Dunne: Tell us your vision of what you hope, especially as it relates to OSU, the new PAC-12 will become, and specifically what OSU's position will be in that new conference.
Murthy: Without any hesitation, we intend to win in the new PAC-12. OSU and WSU rebuilt the PAC-12 with a great deal of tenacity and a great deal of fight, and I will tell you that OSU didn't do it for nothing. We did it, and I'm proud of having rebuilt the PAC-12. We go in with every intention to win. That is the central proposition. Our desire to win also sits side by side with our desire to work with our PAC-12 colleagues on any number of things. We are pulling together for the success of the conference. This is a new version of the conference, and we're all working together to make it successful. This is a set of like-minded people. These institutions are so similar to us in so many ways. Many of them are land-grant institutions, and so we share a certain kind of hunger and scrappiness. We call ourselves a challenger brand, and I think that is actually true. We're willing to try new kinds of models, new kinds of enterprises to resource ourselves. In all the PAC-12 presidents' meetings I've been in, there is a real willingness to take risk. Other parts of our PAC-12 universities are also talking. On the academic side, some of our academic leadership is meeting. Student affairs folks are talking. So other kinds of collaboration are shaping up as well. But on the playing field, we compete, and we compete to win.
Dunne: So much history in this state, in Oregon, surrounds the rivalry between OSU and the University of Oregon. Do you feel like that can be replaced somehow, perhaps organically, with another university? Obviously the Civil War was part of the state's identity.
Murthy: It's certainly a part of the state's identity, and there are feelings on both sides of that so-called Civil War. People who wanted the game, people who wanted a friendly game, people who wanted an actual rivalry, sure. I understand all of those things. There is heartbreak in some of that, and families who have both Beavers and Ducks in them. So there's a lot of feeling around that. The world changes and the world moves on, and there will be new rivalries. There will be new sides taken and new, hopefully friendly battles. Things will change, and nothing stands still.
Dunne: Some people cast college athletics in terms of haves and have-nots: power conferences with lots of money. With this grant and your commitment to winning, do you think this helps level the playing field for Oregon State University?
Murthy: I think it absolutely helps. I'm not blind to the fact that there are enormous amounts of money in the college athletics universe, and there are universities with different levels of capacity. But the truth is, at the end of the day, we have to decide what we're committed to. The opportunities we afford our student athletes are incredibly important to their development. As much as I talk about winning and losing, at the end of the day, the focus is on our students and on our student athletes across the board.
Dunne: My last question is this idea, specifically with regard to the grant but also your vision, of a diversity of resources applied to a diversity of athletic endeavors. Just talk a little bit about that.
Murthy: We can't be blind to the fact that football and men's and women's basketball and baseball are our four big, revenue-generating sports that draw audiences. Of course, there's passion behind a lot of our other sports as well. There's no question that some sports are far more expensive than others. Football, for example. We've got to be realistic about what plays out in that arena. At a time of tight resources, we're going to have to play the game carefully. That said, the rest of our athletics is also incredibly important. Look at gymnastics, look at Jade Carey and all the successes she's had. Olympic sports are going to be important in the U.S. All of us, universities, have to be thinking about what the future of those other sports is. They're all important.
Dunne: Jayathi Murthy, the president of Oregon State University, really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for coming on.
Murthy: Thank you.
Dunne: Now, our reporter Zac Ziegler talks about how around 2,500 former customers of EWEB have been moved to a smaller but more localized utility. KLCC's Zac Ziegler, thanks so much for coming in and chatting.
Zac Ziegler: Yeah, sure thing.
Dunne: I saw the story that you filed about a transfer of customers from EWEB. Talk about this story. Why did this happen?
Ziegler: The area is basically up the McKenzie River, from right about where the McKenzie Highway intersects with Thurston Road, all the way up to Vida. You're talking about 2,500 customers getting transferred over to Lane Electric Cooperative. This is something they've actually been talking about doing for about 12 years.
Dunne: Was it that they weren't a viable customer base for EWEB? Is that kind of the situation?
Ziegler: The concern has always been that EWEB is 97% urban and suburban customers, and this is a rural area that's a ways out of their service area, so it can be a little hard for them to get out there when the power goes out. They'd actually been waiting over that decade-plus for Lane Electric Co-op's rates and EWEB's rates to get close enough that it wouldn't be a real hardship for these customers. Things reached that point, so now they're going to make the swap and hopefully get a little better service from Lane Electric.
Dunne: Talk about some of the benefits that customers might see.
Ziegler: A big one will be when the power goes out, there's a likelihood that Lane will be a lot better at getting it back on quicker. If you're a service technician for EWEB, your truck is at the lot over here in Eugene. Getting up to that area, you'd get dispatched, it would take 30-plus minutes to get up there, you diagnose the problem, maybe you don't have the gear on your truck, now you have to go back, or you have to have someone else come out who is trained to do this. It's a big hassle. Whereas the crews for Lane Electric, those folks live in the area. They keep their trucks at their homes. They have a wider variety of tools that might help, especially with rural problems. They're more likely to carry something like a chainsaw, because a branch touching a line can cause it to ground and short out, or issues like that. So there's more local knowledge. Then there's also the hope that Lane Electric has some territory north of this area, and they're hoping to connect that grid into the system. Now you have redundancies, which always helps, because if a power line gets taken out and there's only one going into the area, that area is without power. If you have two, the electricity just reroutes around and comes in, and you don't necessarily see as big of a hiccup in service.
Dunne: Did these customers have to do anything? Or was it pretty seamless, switching from EWEB?
Ziegler: It was pretty seamless. Usually with things like this, they just start sending notices in the mail: Hey, you're going to get a different bill from a different company starting soon, you'll have a new account number. So if you do things like online bill pay, you'll have to set up that new account. But don't worry, this isn't someone trying to defraud you. Your service is actually switching to a new provider.
Dunne: Something we always have to look out for.
Ziegler: It is the day and age.
Dunne: It is, yeah. Zac Ziegler, reporter for us at KLCC. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much for coming in.
Ziegler: No problem.
Dunne: That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon on the Record are available as a podcast at KLCC.org. Tomorrow on the show, we'll get an update about what the governor and other officials are saying and worrying about for our upcoming fire season. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon on the Record. Thanks for listening.
