UO STRIVES TO SPREAD WINGS WITH ASIA INITIATIVE.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

When University of Oregon President Dave Frohnmayer visited Thailand recently, he found that not even a deluge packing a winter month's worth of Oregon rain into a few hours can keep die-hard Asian Ducks from an alumni reunion.

"On a very monsoon-like evening we had 65 Thailand Ducks come to an alumni event," Frohnmayer said. "One man fought traffic for three hours to make the meeting. People who have had the University of Oregon educational experience - and this is true throughout Asia - are very, very loyal Ducks."

That kind of loyalty is turning into a growing asset for the UO as Asian economies come to dominate a bigger and bigger piece of the global marketplace. Over the past several decades, the university has nurtured a presence in East Asia that has grown large enough to make the UO a player on this red-hot economic stage, an advantage the university is hoping to press.

A new China-East Asia initiative is under way at the UO, aimed at taking inventory of all the connections the university has forged over the years, deciding how best to coordinate those efforts and ultimately look for ways to expand them, both on campus and to the rest of the state. Ultimately, the university would like to leverage its connections into new opportunities for students and scholars as well as advantages for Oregon businesses.

"We're cultivating our knowledge capital, trying to establish Oregon as a place where Oregon business, education and public service sectors interested in China and East Asia would look to the UO as a prime source of students and faculty with competence in culture, language, business, architecture, law, public policy and other areas," said Russ Tomlin, the UO's vice provost for academic affairs. "We'd like to be a place where if there was, say, an export opportunity that some set of Oregon businesses wanted to explore and they thought China was a good market, we could support them in some way."

The initiative still is in its early stage and no decisions have been made on how the university will offer its services to businesses or other organizations, although some kind of center or outreach program are among the possibilities. Right now, a committee is finishing up a list of objectives to forward on to Frohnmayer with hopes that an action plan will begin to take shape this fall.

Although the initiative is focused on East Asia - primarily China, Japan and South Korea - Frohnmayer said the UO has established programs throughout the region. On his two-week tour in late June he visited Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore and signed agreements with all three solidifying student exchange programs, and met with government and university officials to discuss opportunities for the UO to develop other partnerships.

The UO already is a major supplier of English language instruction and coursework in parts of Asia. Frohnmayer, on his sixth Asia visit in 11 years as UO president, visited a distance learning center in Thailand that provides educational programs nationwide and where the UO provides content and support for English language classes.

Frohnmayer said the university is held in high regard by the country's revered royal family and that the Thai crown princess plans to visit the UO later this year to formally present a gift of more than 1,000 rare and important books from the royal library to the UO library.

The UO's Asia programs run the gamut, from a major landscape architecture project in downtown Kyoto, Japan, to a joint sports marketing program at China's Fudon University that's helping to market the upcoming Beijing Olympics. A joint program that teaches English as a second language at one of South Korea's largest private universities this month was named the best of its kind by the Korea Times newspaper, and the school, Hanyang University, has given $500,000 to the UO for scholarships, student and faculty exchanges and other programs.

Also, political science professor Richard Suttmeier has received a $500,000 National Science Foundation grant to continue his research on China's scientific community and the role of technology in U.S.-China relations. And the UO's Lundquist College of Business and the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies are developing a series of classes to prepare students to do business in East Asia that will culminate with a tour in China.

The UO also is preparing grant applications that could bring almost $2 million in federal funding to the school to establish a national resource center for East Asian studies and fund graduate student fellowships.

James Bean, dean of the business school, said the state's business leaders have been clamoring for more workers knowledgeable in Asian business practices. He said one goal of the initiative is to ensure those slots can be filled by Oregon graduates rather than seeing companies import workers from other states.

"Much of the new economy of Oregon is high-tech and is heavily partnered in East Asia already," Bean said. "Industries come to us frequently and say they need business graduates that understand East Asian culture and that are comfortable working with our partners there. So for our students to be competitive against students from other universities, we need an increasing number who have that competence."

Another important but less easily measured goal is expanding the network of people throughout China and East Asia who have some connection with the university, through education, cultural, business or other contacts. Personal connections carry great weight in the Asian business culture, and Tomlin and Frohnmayer said cultivating those connections could give the entire state a critical advantage in a competitive marketplace.

"This is just an incredibly valuable set of relationships," Frohnmayer said. "These relationships over the long term are enormously rich in terms of the human connection and usually lead to very important educational and economic relationships."

When Frohnmayer talks about the initiative, he deliberately stresses the academic advantages that flow both ways through improved connections in East Asia, the benefits the program has for students and the contribution the university can make to Oregon business. But even though he prefers not to emphasize it, the effort also has economic advantages for the university.

It already has brought several sizable gifts, and programs that the university offers through its sister schools in the region bring in modest but useful revenue to the university. The UO also will benefit if it can boost the number of foreign students from the region who come to Eugene to study.

"The recruitment of 100 international students is worth $1 million to our bottom line. I find that a very crass and unhappy comparison to have to make but it's absolutely true in terms of the mathematics," he said. "So a trip like this has clearly paid for itself already."

Tomlin noted that efforts such as the English as a second language program in South Korea receive no state dollars and actually earn a small profit for the school. He said such programs are one way the university is able to maintain the quality of its programs in spite of the sharp state disinvestment in higher education.

"We have an entrepreneurial spirit on this campus," he said. "We're not simply looking for ways to spend state dollars; we're looking for ways to create resources in support of the research and academic and instructional mission of the University of Oregon."

UO officials rarely fail to point out that, despite its budget woes, the university holds its own against some of the country's largest and most prestigious public institutions and that the scope of its programs reach not only beyond campus but beyond state and national boundaries. In the China-East Asia initiative, UO leaders see a natural fit and a chance to further expand a kind of academic manifest destiny.

"The University of Oregon plays on an international playing field," said Tomlin. "We're part of the pros; we're not a regional university. We have a responsibility to take our excellence and apply it wherever it's needed to support the state and to pursue our academic ideals abroad."

CAPTION(S):

"This is just an incredibly valuable set of relationships." - DAVE FROHNMAYER, UO PRESIDENT