My latest OB blog discusses the impact of Brady’s mayoral campaign on New Seasons. I use Mitt Romney and Bain Capital as a kind of narrative frame to talk about what happens to a company when a former co founder runs for political office.
Comparing New Seasons to Bain Capital was, for the most part, an ironic rhetorical flourish. But some people didn’t see it that way.
A repost from my OB blog:
Tigard-based Typhoon’s decision to shutter all four of its Oregon restaurants last week capped years of troubles for the once acclaimed Thai restaurant chain, which has faced a series of allegations of worker discrimination, pay violation and tax evasion.
On a less litigious note, the fall of the house of Typhoon offers a glimpse into the changing, inner workings of the ethnic restaurant industry in Portland, a city recognized nationwide for its culinary prowess.
Read more here:
Our 1996 Volvo Sedan isn’t pretty. Fossilized imprints of peanut butter and other assorted sandwiches dot the floor, while the seat cushions are so worn down, passengers risk inhaling bits of foam on every trip.
Things have languished thus for a while. But after talking to John Atcheson, vice president of Getaround, the San Francisco-based “peer-to-peer” carsharing startup, I’m thinking it might be time to spruce up ye olde family auto.
That’s an excerpt from my new blog at Oregon Business, where I’ll be posting once a week. I will cross post here when appropriate, but also aim to do a better job posting original urbanista content.
Read the rest of the OB car sharing story here.
It’s not often I agree with Phil Knight on the subject of higher education funding. But his indictment of University of Oregon president Richard Larivier’s firing today is almost spot on:
“It deeply saddens me that some people in power in our state continue to drive Oregon into a death spiral with their embrace of mediocrity,” said Knight, who was quoted in the Oregonian.
The O article also quoted Knight as saying the state board and Chancellor George Pernsteiner made an “astonishingly bad decision” against renewing Lariviere’s contract after it expires July 1.
I’ve been reporting on higher ed’s death spiral for a number of years, including here and here, as Oregon’s universities try to stay afloat in a state that no longer supports public universities.
And while I don’t necessarily agree with all of Larivier’s proposals to make the state’s flagship university more independent, the UO president was an unabashed academic and a bona fide leader, willing to buck a system that has turned the state into a post-secondary backwater. As I noted last week, Larivier’s decision to hand out millions of dollars in faculty raises, an effort to bring professor salaries in line with national norms, was unbelievably risky–and admirable.
It was also the final nail in the coffin for the UO’s erstwhile head of state.
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