New UO President Richard Lariviere By Allie Grasgreen
As a child, Richard Lariviere didn’t plan to have a career in education. He had his sights set on the majors. “Growing up, what I wanted to do was be the starting pitcher in the seventh game of the World Series for the St. Louis Cardinals,” Lariviere recalls.
Then again, that is rather characteristic of the new University of Oregon president. He aims high, and he recognizes the value of working with a good team. Lariviere’s ambition will be a crucial asset this year as he shepherds the institution through a time of intense financial uncertainty. The turbulent economy has not left the UO unscathed; its state funding for 2009-11 is 16 percent, or $1.8 million, lower than the previous biennium, which means higher tuition for students and more pay cuts and furlough days for faculty and staff.
Remembering the past
University President Dave Frohnmayer, the institution’s second-longest-serving man to fill the office, retired in 2009 after 15 years at the helm. Before he left, he launched construction on the Matthew Knight Arena—merely one component of his presidency’s unprecedented building development—and wrapped up Campaign Oregon, which raised $853 million in private donations. Frohnmayer was a high-profile, top-down manager, a former Oregon attorney general who didn’t concede to critics and went to great lengths to get what he wanted for the UO. Lariviere, by contrast, is an unknown here, an intellectual from the Midwest who favors quick decision-making, delegation, and autonomy for his staff.
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While Frohnmayer understood the intricate workings of the state, Lariviere has international ties and perspective—he is a life member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Oriental Society, and a member of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain. Fittingly, these associations have broadened his views on issues in higher education. “I guess I never see any question or issue in a narrow context,” Lariviere says. “I always think of these things in terms of how it will play out in a bigger audience, in a bigger world.”
Lariviere, the man
Lariviere is an engaging character. Calm and collected, he takes his time when speaking, choosing every word with care. A tall stature and a suit and tie, along with a wide smile and hands often in motion, combine to make Lariviere professional yet personable. He was born in Chicago but raised in Iowa, and attended the University of Iowa as an undergraduate, studying Jewish and Hindu traditions en route to obtaining a religious studies degree. Upon graduation, Lariviere was once again faced with the ever-looming question: What am I going to do with my life?
Lariviere knew one thing: he was interested in how law and religion interact to shape societies. The recent graduate decided to continue his education, this time attending the University of Pennsylvania and focusing on Indian studies. “I had some great teachers there who have been lifelong mentors,” Lariviere says.
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After graduate school, the Queen Empress of Iran selected Lariviere to teach Sanskrit and related studies at Shiraz University in Iran. But because of that country’s tumultuous state, Lariviere chose instead to teach at Penn State for a year. His decision turned out to be a wise one. “I got up one morning to discover there had been a small revolution in Iran and the Queen Empress had high-tailed it to New York,” Lariviere recalls. And with her went the job.
But Lariviere caught another break that would take him overseas. A National Endowment for the Humanities grant supported Lariviere to study abroad for four years; he studied in England, Paris, and India before getting a job teaching Sanskrit and religious cultures at the University of Iowa. The University of Texas at Austin then offered him a job, and he worked there for 24 years, serving as dean of its College of Liberal Arts from 1999 to 2006. Since then, Lariviere has been acting as provost at the University of Kansas. He departed from Lawrence, Kansas, on June 10, 2009, and became University of Oregon president July 1.
Lariviere’s wife, Jan, also has a background in education—she taught science at Kansas and Texas—and is now working for the UO development office. The couple’s daughter, Anne, teaches fourth grade in Brooklyn, New York.
Life in Eugene
The characteristics Eugene is known for—environmentalism, political involvement, community activism—drew Lariviere to Oregon. “It’s a wonderfully progressive community,” he says. It won’t be too much of a culture shock: Lariviere says Eugene and Lawrence have similar vibes, although this college town is “a little more cosmopolitan” than the one he left behind.
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Among Lariviere’s highlights so far: the Eugene Celebration parade, the Bach Festival, and local eateries, including Marché, Adam’s Sustainable Table, and Beppe & Gianni’s Trattoria. “We really like to walk to Prince Pückler’s in the evening,” he says. In what seems to be a reflection of his work philosophy, Lariviere won’t acknowledge a favorite ice cream until every cone has made its case. “I’m still working my way through the flavors.”
Lariviere jokingly describes his leadership as “brilliant and wonderfully effective.” But when prodded, he reveals his management style as very much a team effort. “I’m a big believer in getting the right people into the job and being given the freedom and authority to do their job without being constantly second-guessed and supervised,” he says.
On his own, Lariviere is a quick thinker who doesn’t dawdle when problem-solving. “I like to hear all sides of an issue and then make a quick decision; I don’t like long, drawn out processes,” he explains. “Sometimes it’s necessary if there’s a lot of people who have to weigh in on an issue, but there’s a high value placed on being as quickly responsive for the people we’re working with as possible.”
The funding issue
Lariviere’s biggest task as president will be dealing with the institution’s funding situation. Frohnmayer has said the UO should move away from the Oregon University System, the body that oversees Oregon’s public universities and sets tuition and fee rates, to gain more financial independence and address the frustrations with declining state funding. It would be a bold move, giving up a security blanket that provides guaranteed funding every year. Lariviere, who has taken to describing UO’s financial situation as a “bread and water diet,” says he is looking into the separation. “It is certainly an attractive enough option that I would want to look at with some care,” he says.
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Lariviere also says he is already in the early planning stages of an “ambitious” private fundraising endeavor to follow up Campaign Oregon. Lariviere’s got his work cut out for him in that arena, according to Frohnmayer. “That process takes a couple of years, and it’s a very systematic process, and many people don’t realize how complicated it is,” Frohnmayer said before leaving office. “But I’ll bet anything that he’ll start that off within his first year.”
Lariviere agrees that fundraising is a difficult issue that needs attention. “It’s pretty clear that the biggest issue facing the UO is the same issue facing all public universities,” Lariviere says. “We are having a sudden rather than gradual shift in the funding patterns.”
One widely publicized source of funding on this campus is Nike co-founder Phil Knight, with whom Frohnmayer was close. Critics call the UO “Nike University,” and some faculty say Frohnmayer emphasized athletics over academics.
Lariviere says he recognizes the value of intercollegiate athletics—both in monetary and social terms—and believes that as long as athletics do not impinge upon the institution’s academic mission, the two can coexist peacefully. Lariviere plans to handle those individual conflicts as they arise. “There’s seldom a situation in which you can use a cookie-cutter solution with these things,” he says.
Damage control
But as president, Lariviere has already had a bitter taste of the controversies surrounding sports and, consequentially, the institution fielding them. After UO running back LeGarrette Blount punched a Boise State player in the Duck football season opener in September, Lariviere issued a statement calling Blount’s “reprehensible” conduct intolerable. Head coach Chip Kelly suspended Blount for the remainder of his senior season, but allowed him to remain on scholarship and reap the other benefits offered to student athletes, such as targeted academic support and access to training facilities.
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In an interview later that month, the president called Kelly’s decision “appropriate and humane.” “For the university to pull the rug on him . . . would be to close doors on him that would be so long-lasting in their impact that they would be hard to justify,” Lariviere says. “But because of what [Blount] did, he can no longer represent the University of Oregon on the football field.”
However, following Kelly's announcement October 2 that Blount is eligible for reinstatement, Lariviere said he favors giving the player a second chance. “I am supportive of the athletic department’s continued attention on this issue and this student athlete," Lariviere says. "Coach Kelly has established a plan for how the student may be able to earn reinstatement. The UO does not tolerate behavior that was displayed after the Boise State game, but we also value growth of personal character and hard work.”
Looking to the future
Before his tenure here began, Lariviere spoke excitedly about the challenges that lay ahead, both for him personally and the institution. “The first order of business (for me) is to learn, listen, and learn,” he said. Since taking over the president’s office, Lariviere has indeed done much learning, and perhaps even more listening. It may not be worldly travel, but he has enjoyed exploring the back roads of Oregon en route to cities all over the state, where he spoke with mayors, daily newspaper editorial boards, heads of community colleges, alumni, and legislators—his goal is to meet them all in their home districts.
Not only does this process familiarize him with the state and its great outdoors—“Oregon is far more beautiful than I had any right to expect,” he says—it also helps him gauge the UO’s impact on regions outside Eugene. These communities are interwoven with ours, he explains, though people forget that.
But it hasn’t quite been all work and no play. When Lariviere’s extended family visited from Chicago and Texas, he managed to travel for pleasure. They saw sand dunes in Florence and the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, and picked blueberries outside Veneta. The Larivieres have remained in close touch with Richard’s first Ph.D. student, considering him to be like family. When the student’s 8-year-old twin boys visited from Austin, Texas, they were most impressed simply by the trees on campus, particularly a large giant sequoia right outside the president’s Johnson Hall office window. “They were enchanted by the fact that the limbs are so large and so close to the ground,” Lariviere says.
The president and his wife have also embarked on their own outdoor adventures, chief among them trout fishing. The McKenzie and Deschutes Rivers are their favorite haunts. “The fishing has been kind of uneven, but just being on the trout stream is what the name of the game is,” Lariviere says. “The fish are a bonus.”
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But in the coming months and years, the real name of the game for Lariviere will be business. And while Frohnmayer and Lariviere certainly have their differences, they can probably agree on at least one thing.
“It’s a very tough time for higher education,” Lariviere says, “but there are enormous opportunities and great obligations that these institutions have to fill.”
