The University of Oregon is engaging in a big-stakes transformation that challenges assumptions about what is a public and what is a private institution.From this page, you can download an executive summary, or the entire white paper, "Preserving Our Public Mission Through a New Partnership With the State." Selected paragraphs:

Many states across America, including Oregon, are struggling with the current higher education paradox—a broad consensus, fueled by the lessons of our own history, that postsecondary opportunity is critical to our collective prosperity, but challenged to sustain the investments needed in public higher education to support such prosperity. As a result of this paradox, state policies have been adopted across the United States that have fundamentally restructured public higher education systems as states and their public institutions negotiate a new balance of autonomy and accountability ... .

In Oregon, there is growing consensus that the state must move aggressively to enact real reform that supports our collective goal to help more Oregonians earn college degrees—reform that fundamentally changes the state’s role so that each institution is better able to fulfill its public mission through increased autonomy and greater accountability to meet the state’s needs ... .

At the University of Oregon, discussions about how we can better serve the state, and enhance our capacity to meet our public responsibility are well under way and include faculty members, students, staff members, alumni, and other stakeholders. We hold a collective view, joined by the University of Oregon Foundation and the University of Oregon Alumni Association Board of Directors, that the University of Oregon must continue to meet its responsibilities as a public university despite the funding environment that makes it difficult to do so. However, to accomplish this goal we need fundamental change to the governance and funding structure of our public university system. The university’s future is fundamentally predicated on our ability to enhance our capacity to provide greater educational opportunities through increased flexibility, autonomy, and stable funding support from the state ... .