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Phil Knight gives $400M for more graduate students

at Stanford. The NYT has the story here.

13 Comments

  1. just a thought 02/23/2016

    Knight is clearly dedicated to achieving and maintaining academic excellence.

  2. honest Uncle Bernie 02/23/2016

    Meanwhile, UO continues unsuccessfully to court the big donors. With mediocre faculty who have managed to get the confidence of the mediocre administration. Maybe some day Phil will come through, but it seems ever more remote.

    • Dogmatic Ratios 02/24/2016

      Don’t worry — there’s plenty of mediocrity at Stanford. Just look at Hennessy’s quote: “Nobody understood the real difficulty in making significant change in the public education system” — which is untrue: in fact the majority knew the difficulties. He’s as uninformed as the other technocrats who pushed Zuckerberg to make that contribution in the first place. These are not people capable of creating a program to “make positive change”. Hopefully the students will be able to overcome this mediocre initiative.

  3. Marc Mooney 02/24/2016

    I’ve had a knowledgeable Stanford alum tell it to me straight: Knight’s giving is a division of labor (er, capital). The smart money goes to the smart school, the jock money goes to U of O.

    Sometimes I wonder if Harbaugh tamped his criticism down or even went away whether the spigot would open. (And I don’t mean Jim Harbaugh).

    • uomatters Post author | 02/24/2016

      To Mooney:

      “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?”

      or, from wiki,

      “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?”

      • Dog 02/25/2016

        Now now, let’s practice the right kind of scholarship in this form and do the correct citation. e.g. Thomas Beckett (or Henry II)

        and consider this one from Erasmus (Desiderius) who really did use the printing press well in the early 1500s …

        . . Perhaps it would be wise to pass over the theologians in . silence. That short-tempered and supercilious crew is unpleasant to deal with. . . . They will proclaim me a heretic. With this thunderbolt they terrify the people they don’t like. Their opinion of themselves is so great that they behave as if they were already in heaven; they look down pityingly on other men as so many worms. A wall of imposing definitions, conclusions, corollaries, and explicit and implicit propositions protects them. They are full of big words and newly-invented terms. . . . 

  4. Nod to Knight 02/24/2016

    Clear message from Knight – quit sending me cheerleaders to sing happy birthday, and shape up your academic side.

  5. honest Uncle Bernie 02/24/2016

    Phil to Schill: I am not an academic, a scientist, a scholar, , but i can find out, and my own noggin tells me, you’re sending I the B team to solicit the academic dollars. Send in your A team if you have one. And not the saboteurs, the ones who really care about UO.

    • Oryx 02/24/2016

      Our development office can’t recognize who the A team is.

      • I know this 02/24/2016

        Oryx, you are so correct. I just learned that Kat Walsh, who started out in CAS, then went on to lead Journalism and then AAA, just left for Stanford. We have lost some really good folks the last 5 years. This coincides with LaRivierre’s hire of Andreason and several of his (A’s) subsequent hires. Dev is as screwed up as any other department. There is waste there as well. Direct fundraising is a tough, tough job and despite the enormous raise in salaries we don’t do any better now than we did under DF.

        • uomatters Post author | 02/24/2016

          I’m really bummed to hear the news that Kat has left.

  6. Dog 02/24/2016

    wait, we have an A team? I don’t see any leader of it smoking cigars around campus …

  7. doh 02/24/2016

    [UOM: Comment redacted on the grounds of unnecessary roughness. Revise and resubmit.]

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