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With a goal of raising $100 million—Portland State announces it first-ever comprehensive fundraising campaign.

When I was a student at Portland State, you had the feeling something was being born. Now, when you're there, you really get the feeling something big is happening. There's a palpable sense of electricity about the place," says Steve Forrester '71, publisher of the Daily Astorian.

Something big is happening at PSU: the University's first comprehensive fundraising campaign, Building Our Future. It is a multiyear effort, which has already raised an estimated $73.7 million in private investment toward a goal of $100 million, including the biggest gift in the history of PSU: $8 million from alumnus Fariborz Maseeh. It is ushering in an unprecedented surge of growth at Portland State, including new and renovated buildings, new programs, laboratories, scholarships, and professorships—all serving to elevate PSU to a regional powerhouse in education and technology.

This campaign could not have happened at a more crucial time in the history of both the University and the region. For example, the state legislature has mandated that the university system double the number of engineering graduates by 2007. As a result of private donations through the campaign, PSU already has more than doubled its enrollment of engineering students and is on track for supplying Oregon with 40 percent of its new engineers.

This is happening at a time when state funding for the University continues to shrink, when research costs are skyrocketing, and when students and their families are under ever-increasing pressure to cover college costs. Individual donors connected to the University know this, and have responded generously to the campaign.

"The future of the region and the University is linked and intertwined. People are recognizing that and are supporting the University in ways we've never seen before," says President Dan Bernstine, who has seen enrollment rise from 16,000 to 24,000 since he arrived in 1997.

Initiatives funded by the campaign are designed to enhance cultural and planning programs that enrich our urban environment; build a bright economic future for the region by helping PSU become a major research institute; and ensure academic excellence through new scholarships and professorships. The campaign is already responsible for adding new labs throughout the campus, helping build the new Native American Student and Community Center, and endowing chairs and professorships that will attract and retain exceptional faculty.

Forrester, who attended Williams College in Massachusetts before serving in Vietnam, came to PSU in 1968 and says his Portland State education has been invaluable in his career as a journalist. He has maintained close ties to the University ever since graduation.

Now the Forrester family's connection with PSU is coming full circle. His daughter, Susan, is entering PSU this fall as a freshman.

"I have not known anyone so excited to go to college," he says of his daughter, who was an exchange student in New Zealand and a page in the U.S. House of Representatives. "PSU just felt right to her."

The resources brought in through the campaign have already had life-changing impacts on thousands of PSU students. Here are just two examples.

A Passion for Education

Khandice Love had plenty of tough challenges in her life in the late '90s. Her young daughter was enduring surgeries and radiation treatments for brain cancer (she has since improved dramatically). Love was going through a divorce. And she was struggling to make ends meet as a nurse's assistant. She took a hard look at her future and decided to take on another challenge: going back to school to become a teacher.

"I felt I really wanted to do something that I would enjoy and feel proud of—something that my kids would be able to say with pride when asked, 'What does your mom do?'" she says.

Love finished her bachelor's degree in social science, then applied to Portland State's Graduate School of Education and won an Ames Scholarship. Gary and Barbara Ames gave a major gift to PSU through the campaign in 2000 to establish this scholarship and a professorship in business administration.

"Khandice is an outstanding, extremely dedicated woman," says Barbara Ames, a former elementary school teacher. "One of the things I most like is the way she fulfills the Ames Scholarship mission." Part of the scholarship's charge is to provide tuition to students who have experience in multicultural settings.

After graduation, Love, an African American, was hired to teach social studies at the predominantly white Westview High School in Beaverton. The ethnic differences never stood in her way. In fact, she says it's important for white children to see that people of other backgrounds are successful, too.

She made it clear to her students from the first day that all of them had the right to speak their mind in class without fear of being verbally attacked by another student or by Love herself. The approach worked, and she quickly established a reputation as a superior classroom manager and one of the most popular teachers at the school.

"When the students started embracing me, I knew this was my destiny," she says. "By just being who I am and showing that if I can do it you can do it, I feel I can make a difference."

Through the Microscope

Nanoscience, the study of objects thousands of times smaller than the diameter of a hair, is looked upon by academics and business as one of the next great scientific frontiers. The potential applications are enormous, including making computer transistors smaller than a speck of dust.

Physics professor Jun Jiao and researchers from other fields throughout the University formed the Center for Nanoscience at PSU in 2001. With the help of private industry, PSU purchased a state-of-the-art electron microscope. The M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust gave another $475,000 through the campaign, enabling the University to make significant enhancements to the microscope and to purchase a second one. Portland State is now the only educational institution in the Pacific Northwest with this kind of instrumentation.

Lifeng Dong, a talented master's degree graduate from China, saw what was being done at PSU, and decided this is where he wanted to further his education. He demonstrates how Portland State, through the kinds of improvements made possible by the campaign, is attracting top-level students not just from Oregon, but from throughout the world.

"There aren't many labs like this, even at places like Harvard or Stanford, that have the combination of equipment and the cooperation of different departments like PSU," he says. "There are so many opportunities to interact with students and faculty from all different fields."

He earned a second master's in physics in 2002 and is now working on his Ph.D.

Dong's work using PSU's new microscopes investigates the use of carbon nanotubes for electronic devices that will potentially improve the resolution of flat panel displays and electron microscopes. He's also working on a project with Intel to share information about how nanotubes can be used in microscopic computing devices.

Coming to PSU required a leap of faith and personal sacrifice for Dong. He left behind his wife and twin boys to establish a foothold in Portland. His wife, Liwei Ning, followed him to PSU a year later and is a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. She plans to work in the semiconductor industry. Their twin boys, now five years old, rejoined their parents in 2003 after a long battle by the family to obtain visas.

Dong wants to remain in academics when he completes his doctorate, and finds PSU to be the perfect place to build his career. He received eight awards in the last two years, including several for his outreach activities. He has served as a mentor for some of the state's top-ranked high school science students, helping some of them win top prizes at science fairs sponsored by Intel, Siemens, and Westinghouse.

"I know how to train students and work with them, and many times I learn as much from them as they do from me," he says.

The lives of these students and thousands of others are enhanced every day by the gifts the campaign has brought to the University.

"Please join me in Building Our Future," says President Bernstine. "You will find no effort more compelling or rewarding."