About

A Note from the Founder

This is a library about the lands America set aside, beginning in 1785, to underwrite the education of its children. There are about 46 million acres of these lands still in trust today, held by twenty-three states for the benefit of public schools. The trust is one of the oldest fiduciary commitments in American law and the largest by acreage. Most Americans have never heard of it. That is part of why the Library exists.

I should explain how I came to build it, because if a stranger is reading this and wondering whether to trust the work, the most honest thing I can offer is the path that brought me here. None of it was planned. The thread only became visible to me late.

I have believed for most of my adult life that gathering and organizing information is perhaps the most powerful thing a human being can do. Executives and managers make decisions, but their decisions are only as good as the information they have. This conviction is not a slogan; it is the practical lesson of forty years of work, and it is the reason for this Library.

In the late-1970s I was the division finance manager of the Information Display Systems Division at Tektronix when we built the Tektronix 4051 — one of the first standalone graphical desktop computers, two years before the Apple II. None of us in management really understood what we had. We watched two young men in a California garage outcompete us, and the company that held the first graphical personal computer lost the future to people who could see what we could not. I have carried that lesson ever since: the people who hold a transformative thing are usually the people most likely to misread its importance. It is not a moral failing on their part. It is a structural property of being inside the institution that owns the asset.

Nine years later, on a WordStar text editor and a dot-matrix printer, I wrote Computing Today — the first college textbook to treat the personal computer as a discipline worthy of serious study rather than as a lab appliance. The work took eight months at twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and Houghton Mifflin published it in 1984. In its pages I borrowed a phrase from the 1950s mainframe era — garbage in, gospel out, a variant of the old GIGO warning — and applied it to a new generation of users who were about to be fooled by nicely-formatted output that was confidently wrong. I was warning, in 1984, about the same failure mode that AI hallucinations now embody at much larger scale. The themes have been continuous in my work. Only the stakes have grown.

I earned a PhD in Information Systems somewhere along the way, joined the College of Business at Oregon State University, and taught and wrote there for more than twenty-five years. My research kept returning to one stubborn question: how do mathematical models handle uncertainty, and how do they mislead the people who rely on them? I never wrote my way to elegant prose. What I learned to do, with reasonable consistency, was explain difficult things in plain language to readers who were smart but new to the material. That habit, more than any other, is the habit I have brought to this Library.

About five years ago I began to study Oregon's management of its school trust lands, and I have spent most of my time on it since. What I found disturbed me more than I expected. The State of Oregon has been failing its trust duties for decades — but the part that haunted me was not the failure itself. It was the lying by omission that surrounded the failure. The trust beneficiaries — the schoolchildren — were not told what was being done in their name. The records that would have told the story were not assembled. The framing on which the public depended for orientation was misleading by what it left out. I have come to believe, after a great deal of reading and a great deal of conversation with people who know this field, that the school trust scandal is, at its root, a failure of information. The state was stealing from children, and at the same time it was lying to them by omission about what it was doing. I found the lies harder to forgive than the thefts.

If gathering and organizing information is the most powerful thing a human being can do, then the counter-move to a failure of information, at the scale of fifty states and two and a half centuries, has to be a library. That is what this is.

I have to be honest about one more thing, because a visitor who notices what has been built here will reasonably wonder how it was possible. The Library, the three book-length manuscripts that anchor it, and the institutional architecture around them were assembled in roughly three weeks, from mid-April to mid-May 2026. That pace is not the work of one retired professor with a stack of paper notes. It was made possible by a working partnership with frontier AI — the cognitive technology that arrived in 2025 and 2026 and that finally let two retired scholars reach across all fifty states in the time we still have to do the work. I supply the intent, the judgment, the lineage, and the moral instinct that comes from a lifetime inside institutions that have drifted. The AI partner supplies persistent memory, exhaustive search, parallel processing, and structured drafting at velocity. Neither of us could have built this alone. I name the partnership openly because the Library's argument requires it. One of the points this Library makes is that the perpetual trusts being designed now — for the climate, for the unborn, for the AI era ahead of us — will need to engineer cognitive partnership of this kind at civic scale. Our small-scale practice of it here is part of the case.

What the Library is for: it is a place where any citizen, journalist, legislator, trustee, donor, teacher, parent, or future trust architect can come and find — gathered, organized, cited, and free — what is known about America's school trust lands and what their two-hundred-and-forty-year record teaches about how perpetual institutions hold or fail to hold. If you find something here useful, take it. If you find something wrong, tell me where I have messed up, and don't pull any punches.

— Dave Sullivan
Founder, America's School Trust Library
Oregon, May 2026