An editorial in today's Oregonian:
A huge opportunity on the South Waterfront
We're pleased to see the collaboration among Oregon universities on a major new development in Portland's South Waterfront. But the universities must go beyond a group hug to keep alive the dream of a waterfront campus.
Here's our full editorial on the subject for Wednesday's newspaper:
Signs of life (sciences) on the South Waterfront
Last year, an anonymous donor gave $40 million to Oregon Health & Science University to jump-start development on the downtown side of its South Waterfront campus.
Nothing happened.
No bulldozer growled. No steel soared. No interior design firm celebrated the chance to put kids through college.
The stall served as a stark reminder that in so many of our city's vaunted public-private partnerships, the public side of the equation inks the deal.
That's why it's so important that the Oregon State Board of Higher Education embrace the opportunity facing it Friday. It must decide to invest $250 million in exactly the sort of venture Portland has been waiting for.
In a striking demonstration of what can be achieved when longtime competitors opt to cohabit, OHSU is offering to partner with the University of Oregon, Oregon State University, Portland State University and the Oregon Institute of Technology on a project it calls the Life Sciences Collaborative.
Make no mistake, at stake here is a much larger agenda than just getting these folks to play nicely together. In addition to unleashing the next wave of OHSU expansionism, this proposal advances two key civic agendas:
*It strengthens Portland State's drive to emerge as a major urban university.
*It leverages South Waterfront in a way that the city's investment, especially in the neighborhood's transportation infrastructure, warrants.
Portland said from the start that although condos were nice along the Willamette's bank south of the Marquam Bridge, the riverfront neighborhood really needed jobs. Lots of them.
The initial idea for the emerging health and science campus was that public-private research partnerships would generate lots of employment -- in biotech.
We turned out to be a little late to that party.
More encouraging this time around is the amount of horsepower involved. In the proposed new center would be classroom and lab space for OHSU's medical school, for Portland State's science departments, for Oregon State's College of Pharmacy and for OIT's health-related programs. That combo platter should serve as a better lure for what we need next: hundreds of jobs at a biomedical device firm or drug discovery company.
We're not banking on a silver bullet. We're simply calling for one more step in the state's long-overdue care and feeding of higher education in the Portland area.
Up next, we need to see less talk and more walk on the sustainability front. And greatly enhanced access to higher education for Portland-area students, leading to much better graduation rates. (We wouldn't mind a bit if, in the process, tuition at PSU was free to any graduate of a Portland high school.)
We have no interest here in promoting collaboration for the sake of collaboration. We're looking for progress, not a group hug. The key to success in concord is to be selective. With the Life Sciences Collaborative, we believe higher ed is doing just that.
