In 2005, Nike Chairman and co-founder Phil Knight issued a shocking mandate to his alma mater, the University of Oregon.
He told the university’s athletic director, Bill Moos, to fire his track and field coach Martin Smith.
At the time, Moos was the most successful athletic director in the school’s history, and he and Knight enjoyed a strong, decade-long relationship. But on this point, Moos disagreed — he refused to fire Smith.
For Knight, who is currently Forbes’ 16th richest person in the US, this was unacceptable.
He told university president Dave Frohnmayer that he wanted both Smith and Moos gone, and that he would withhold much-needed funding for the construction of the school’s new basketball arena until it was done.
Smith was forced out in late 2005; Moos left, after much pressure, in 2007. Knight then insisted that Pat Kilkenny, a university donor with no experience in college athletics, replace Moos. Again, Knight got his way.
The new book “University of Nike: How Corporate Cash Bought American Higher Education” (Melville House), out Tuesday, exposes how Knight’s massive corporate donations to the University of Oregon’s athletic departments made him and his corporation the de facto leaders of the college.
After Oregon voters passed a measure in 1990 cutting funding for state universities by 20 percent, the publicly funded University of Oregon sought out corporate money.
Since 1994, Knight has donated almost $1 billion to the school, much of it going toward the construction or renovation of various athletic facilities.
But even as Knight’s generosity turned Oregon’s sports teams into national powerhouses, it also gave him increasing control over the school.
“He acts like these are not gifts, but investments from which he expects a certain type of loyalty,” the book’s author, Joshua Hunt, told The Post.
According to Hunt, Knight bought influence any way he could, even by personally contributing $40,000 toward Frohnmayer’s annual salary in the mid-’90s.
Knight also made an annual Christmas donation of $1 million to the Fanconi Anemia Research Fund, founded by Frohnmayer and his wife in 1989 — a charity unaffiliated with the university. Fanconi anemia (FA) is a rare and fatal disease that ran in Frohnmayer’s family and eventually killed all three of the couple’s daughters.
While the contributions were unquestionably generous, they made Frohnmayer beholden to Knight both professionally and personally, especially since the donations were funding real advances toward curing the disease.
When protests against Nike’s sweatshop and child-labor practices swept college campuses in 2000, Frohnmayer faced enormous pressure to sign an agreement to censure those practices. In the end, he felt he had no choice but to sign.
In retaliation, Knight not only withdrew a $30 million donation slated for stadium renovations, but also cancelled his annual donation to the FA charity. Two of Frohnmayer’s daughters had already died of FA, and Frohnmayer was terrified for the third. At that point, “Phil Knight’s money was the only thing that seemed like it might save her,” Hunt writes.
Nathan Tublitz, a biology professor at the school who knew about Knight’s contributions, called it “outright extortion,” adding that, for Frohnmayer, it was like “a loaded gun pointed at his child’s head.”
From then on, catering to Knight wasn’t just the main aspect of Frohnmayer’s job, it was also his family’s lifeline. In time, he repaired the relationship and Knight re-instated his donations the following year.
Although Frohnmayer retired from the university in 2009 and died of prostate cancer in 2015, Knight continues to fund the university. In 2016, he donated $500 million toward the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact — a “mysterious project” that amounts to “quasi-privatization with little or no public oversight,” Hunt says.
Hunt notes that the deal itself was conceived in secret, with the public and even university officials only learning about it upon its announcement, and that it was disclosed in vague terms, never revealing what sort of research will be done and on whose behalf. Given Knight’s history of commandeering the endeavors he funds, significant questions remain about whether the work at the campus will provide greater benefit to students and the public, or to corporate interests.
Nike’s relationship with the school has also had a negative impact on faculty and students, Hunt argues.
While Knight’s corporate contributions boosted the University of Oregon’s athletic department, this led to greater expenses, with the outside money only flowing toward sports. When a stadium renovation cost the school $89 million, Knight kicked in $60 million and much of the rest came from other donors. But there was still a $2 million shortfall, and to cover this, the school raised its tuition, leaving the bill for students who received no benefit from Nike.
The University of Oregon’s winning reputation also allowed it to attract more out-of-state students, who pay much higher tuition than in-state students. At a certain point, this made it harder for the college to meet its true purpose: providing affordable education for Oregon residents, who saw tuition and fees double from 2008 to 2018.
“Between 2004 and 2014,” Hunt writes, “the percentage of Oregonians entering the school’s freshman class declined from 68 percent to just under 50 percent.”
Over that same time period, the school’s class sizes “ballooned” and its faculty “remained poorly compensated relative to colleagues at peer universities.” The school produced fewer Ph.D. and graduate students, and when it researched “which of its peer institutions produced fewer doctoral degrees per tenure-track faculty member [in 2013], it found that the answer was none.”
In addition, Hunt argues that Nike’s attachment to the school meant student athletes accused of rape or sexual assault were likely given greater protection — at the expense of their alleged victims.
In March 2014, a freshman accused three University of Oregon basketball players of rape just as the team advanced to the second round of the Division 1 national championship.
Rather than launch an investigation, the school suppressed the information while it came up with a PR strategy to “contain the crisis” — with the assistance of Nike communications staff, Hunt writes.
The University of Oregon, he writes, “employed some eighty communications, public relations, and marketing staff, on top of the various Nike employees who quietly contributed these services to the school in an unofficial capacity — that’s one communications professional for every 295 students enrolled at the school, which is more than the combined faculty in Oregon’s departments of history, economics and philosophy.”
Not only were no charges filed against the players, but when the alleged victim took advantage of school counseling services in the aftermath of the attack, the university’s general counsel secured a copy of her therapist’s notes.
When this was later uncovered, the school reached a settlement with the student for $800,000 while also paying for her four years of tuition, housing and student fees. At the same time, the student athletes were allowed to continue along in the playoffs, finish that semester’s classes and then quietly transfer to other schools with no mention of the scandal to follow them. The local DA declined to prosecute, citing insufficient evidence, meaning the school could handle the issue as an administrative matter.
In the end, the entire cover-up was driven by a desire to guard the school’s brand — and that brand was Nike, Hunt argues.
“University administrators want to protect their brand, whether it’s Columbia protecting its sterling reputation, or the University of Oregon protecting its valuable relationship with Nike,” Hunt says.
“That relationship was deemed to be sensitive and worth shielding from public scrutiny, whether dealing with public records, or with athletes wearing the Nike swoosh who are accused of sexual assault.”
Funded by taxpayer dollars and intended to serve state residents, the school instead prizes its corporate master before all others, leaving Oregon students with larger tuition bills — if they can even get into the university in the first place.
“When a school has that close of a collaboration with a corporation, to the extent that Nike branding, marketing and public relations people are giving advice to university employees on how to do their job,” says Hunt, “that’s very dangerous.”