Pick the right fight.

Byline: The Register-Guard

The Oregon University System is battling with both hands tied behind its back to keep elite researchers and teachers, who bring in big grants and boost local economies, from being lured away by the promise of bigger paychecks elsewhere.

Look at what OUS is up against: Faculty pay at the state's seven four-year universities lags well behind scales at equivalent institutions across the country.

Even worse, the state's budget crisis prompted the Legislature to order a statewide pay freeze for the 2003-05 biennium.

To its credit, OUS refused to accept that nothing could be done to save its best and brightest faculty. It developed a plan to break the state's pay freeze and grant raises to selected professors by creating a $500,000 "fighting fund" from the savings it achieved through downsizing the chancellor's office.

But the symbolic good the plan might do for a handful of deserving faculty will certainly be undone by the palpable ill will it will earn OUS in the Legislature and among thousands of equally deserving faculty and classified employees who'll get nothing.

There are better ways to spend half a million dollars than by buying a bomb to blow up staff morale.

The Legislative Fiscal Office is pointedly unconvinced that the OUS initiative is justified, and Gov. Ted Kulongoski had serious second thoughts about OUS bringing the matter to the Legislative Emergency Board this week.

If unabashed higher education booster Kulongoski smells trouble on this idea, there is no shame in OUS backing away and biding its time.

Right now, the Emergency Board is digesting legislative budget analyst Steve Bender's report that says OUS has overstated the problem. There's no emergency.

In fact, Bender's report can't even document an increase in faculty losses following the Legislature's salary freeze.

Out of 1,841 tenured and tenure-track faculty, only 21 have recently left the state, according to a survey conducted in February. Nineteen others were believed to be in negotiation with another institution, and 26 others were identified as likely to be approached by other universities.

The pay raise plan flies in the face of specific guidance from the Legislature to OUS not to award salary increases in the 2003-05 budget. The education subcommittee denied a request to exempt higher education faculty from the pay freeze.

If OUS decides to proceed with its plan absent Emergency Board approval, it will risk torching its bridges in Salem and driving a stake through the heart of Kulongoski's goal of improving relations between higher education and the Legislature.

Without more compelling evidence than has been offered to date, the university system would be foolish to invite such antagonism for a one-time fiscal Band-Aid on an issue that has plagued Oregon higher education for decades.

Add to that the plan's repugnant favoritism and systemwide morale corrosion and OUS has more than enough reason to shelve its fighting fund for now.