There's been a big push, led by Knight against the Oregon University System (the governing board for all Oregon state-run universities and colleges) and for the creation of a separate University of Oregon board of regents. This push actually got the last president of the University fired by the OUS, over the objection of just about everyone on the UO campus itself.
Strangely enough, we lost the president but got the board of regents, which is getting established this year.
Allegedly, Knight's estate is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of 11BN, of which substantial portions are (again, allegedly) earmarked for both the University and the athletic department endowments.
What I'm hearing is that Knight wants to be heavily involved with the new board, and will probably structure his giving to the UO so as to be involved. Oregon's alumni (not just Knight) are also pretty invested in making the AD a success - they see the AD as a window by which the UO can become more of a nationally-recognized institution rather than a small, regional state university.
The only "resentment" of the AD comes from the usual Marxist faculty members in the social sciences. Think Sociology, Geography and Women's Studies. I think their criticisms have merit as long as they are focused on making the University as a whole better, but most see them as envious of an AD that has recieved lavish funding during an era of educational cutbacks at the University as a whole and they are just envious.
UO has a similar problem as UW and many other public universities in that a smaller and smaller proportion of the University's funding is coming from the state government. Recent years state funding has been around 5%, which is less than half of what our better-politically-connected country cousins in Corvallis have been getting. The anomaly has been bridged largely with California undergraduate out-of-state tuition - "UC Eugene" money, which is part of the reason why the athletic focus helps keep Oregon in the public eye in the Golden State.
Someone linked an internal study recently commissioned by UO that showed how crappy we look compared to what are really our "aspirational peers," schools like UCLA, UW, Illinois, Virginia, North Carolina. Of that group, Oregon is close to Kansas, and well behind the rest. That is part of the Knight-led push to make Oregon a better school. The first task of the new board of regents is to start moving the University in that direction, and athletics are part of the program.
