One of the most familiar sites in Portland is under siege from special interests from outside the Portland area.

The Made in Oregon sign, which resides on a building owned by the University of Oregon on 3rd Avenue, had been targeted by UO as a possible source of advertising for that university. If UO had gotten its way, the sign would have read “University of Oregon,” and would’ve served as an advertisement for a university that has no significant presence in the city of Portland. This has been a controversial issue, one that concerns the rights of property owners and the image the city of Portland wants to put forth. There is another issue here that should be of interest to PSU students: Portland already has a first-class public university that is always overlooked in state discussions of higher education.

Portland State is the redheaded step child of the Oregon University System. All over the state, and especially in the Portland metro area, when issues related to higher education are being discussed, OSU and UO are the focal points. There is no clearer example of this than in the issue of collegiate athletics, where the majority of college sports fans in the area get excited about a university that most of them have never attended and have no connection to. PSU has a perfectly reasonable athletics program subsidized by the students that could use those dollars—and it’s just as entertaining.

But the crux of the issue is not sports but the image that PSU wants to put forth publicly. Multnomah County Chair Ted Wheeler has stated that Portland needs a world-class high-tech university; State Senator Mitch Greenlick echoed the sentiment in past years by proposing a merger between OHSU and PSU, which, while a bad idea in and of itself, was at least addressing the identity crisis that PSU is undergoing currently. The issue is, simply, this: Why would the city of Portland allow a historic landmark like the Made in Oregon sign be used to advertise a university that is far from the city when Portland has invested so much into PSU? Administrators at PSU have been trying to change its image from a commuter university to a more traditional one—there is no clearer evidence of this than the increased focus on sports on campus through the hiring of Jerry Glanville and the statewide advertising campaign.

The proper thing to have done with the sign would have been to leave it as it was. Instead, the city has elected to change it to read “Oregon” in UO green. In a way, UO got what it wanted, since everyone associates green with the University of Oregon. Which is a bit of a problem, because green represents PSU as well—not that most residents of Portland would know that, since most of them associate the identity of a university with its sports programs, rather than the contributions it makes in the community.