The campaign to add a one cent sales tax statewide, led by OU President David Boren, met a resounding defeat Nov. 8, leaving the future of education funding in Oklahoma uncertain and dealing one of the state’s most towering public servants a rare defeat.
State Question 779, which would have raised sales taxes to fund K-12 and higher education in the state, fell by a margin of 59-41. Boren, a former state governor and U.S. Senator, is in his 22nd year as OU’s president and has long been an advocate for increased education funding from the state government. Boren traveled to towns around the state urging people to vote for the measure.
The campaign was ignited amid declining education funding from the state, which reached a tipping point when Gov. Mary Fallin declared a revenue failure in December, leading to mid-year budget cuts across state agencies. Oklahoma, the state with the lowest annual mean secondary teacher salary, has seen some school districts cut back to four day school weeks in a desperate attempt to save money.
Boren, one of Oklahoma’s most decorated politicians, suffered a rare political defeat.
“It's been a lot of years since our president has been governor and senator, and so many of the legislators that we have now refer to him as President Boren and not Senator Boren and not Governor Boren,” said George Henderson, a professor emeritus who first taught at OU in 1967. “And that somewhat diminishes his clout. He certainly has the relationships and the contacts, but he has done well in terms of extracting value from those relationships, but sometimes you can go to the well once too often.”
Dan Snell, president of the Norman School Board, said the failure of the question at the ballot box may encourage more teachers to leave for larger paychecks across state lines.
“This is a good reason to get out of Oklahoma education in general,” Snell said.
Following the defeat, Boren promised to continue fighting for more education funding.
“While the results did not come back in our favor, we’ve succeeded in starting a conversation across Oklahoma about education and the need for adequate funding," Boren said in a statement Tuesday night. "We won’t stop fighting to keep great teachers in the classroom. We won’t stop fighting to improve funding for our schools. We won't stop fighting for our children.”
Snell said he thought the campaign, even in defeat, might have made enough noise that lawmakers would have to listen, and is thankful to Boren for leading the charge.
“He didn’t have to do this,” Snell said. “It would benefit the university a bit, but mostly it would benefit K-12 education, and he could’ve just kicked back and complained like the rest of us did, but he didn’t, so I think it’s a noble effort.”
The defeat was a first for Boren, who won the 1974 gubernatorial race at just 33 years old and has been a public servant ever since.
After one term in the Governor’s Mansion, Boren jumped to the Senate, where he served for 16 years. Boren may have left Washington, D.C., but he did not leave his connections, maintaining strong relationships with lawmakers and serving as chair of Barack Obama’s President’s Intelligence Advisory Board for more than three years.
“He’s well-liked by myself and by a lot of us that have been in and around the Hill for a long time … he’s well respected on both sides of the aisle, and I think President Obama had a good relationship with him,” said former Senator Don Nickles, who was the other half of Oklahoma’s Senate delegation with Boren from 1981-1994.
Taking over at OU in 1994, Boren set out to build a university his home state could be proud of, raising the school’s national reputation and exceeding internal expectations.
“What he has done has been absolutely miraculous, in my opinion,” Henderson said. “He came to a university where we aspired to be average. We did. And the very first thing he told us faculty when he became president is that we're going to strive for excellence. And many of the faculty members chuckle, 'You've got to be kidding. Excellence? We haven't even achieved the average yet.' President Boren was looking beyond that, and he's taken us there.”
Under Boren, OU has built a study abroad campus in Arezzo, Italy, added new colleges and increased the size of the student body while raising admissions standards.
“He took us to heights that very few faculty members ever believed that we could achieve,” Henderson said. “He let us ride in the plane when we were just walking, and now we take the plane away and blame him because we're no longer flying.”
But Boren said the state’s education funding is threatening the status of the university that he has worked so hard and so long to achieve, both by making it pinch pennies and by failing to properly educate the university’s main student base.
“I am very hopeful that we can avoid forced layoffs and excessive tuition increases. We will take our urgent need to the legislature when they go back into session,” Boren said in a statement Wednesday. “The university simply cannot absorb another cut or the magnitude which we received this year, 16 percent, without facing some painful decisions.”
In the event of cuts and layoffs, at least Boren can point to the state question and say he fought for the university.
“He didn't lose that ballot initiative,” Henderson said. “At least we had it. At least he can say he tried to do something. But the man does not like to lose. And that's why the university has won so much.”
Boren showed the legislature there is a desire in the state for more education funding, but he could not fix Oklahoma’s education problem alone.
“Do all of the hard work that needs to be done to try to change the status quo, and one man can't do it for us,” Henderson said.
Dana Branham contributed to this report.
This story was corrected at 10:45 p.m. Nov. 9 to show Oklahoma had the lowest annual mean salary for teachers, not starting salary.
