When the

Tigers win a football game, students and fans grab rolls of toilet paper and rush to where the campus meets the city. There they festoon two large oak trees and just about everything else at the intersection with a blizzard of toilet paper, a tradition known as "Rolling

."

The

students have no such tradition. But if they did, says UO President

, it would involve recycling the paper.

The two universities battling for the

in Glendale, Ariz. on Jan. 10 could hardly come from more different worlds.

They are similar in size and age, endure about 50 inches of rain a year and field top-ranked, undefeated football teams. But in just about every other way, the universities are as different as rural and urban, Deep South and Ecotopia, traditional and progressive, red and blue, Tigers and Ducks.



Poles apart

Auburn University is a land-grant university, more like

than UO, with an emphasis on agriculture, forestry, engineering and science. It has a school of veterinary medicine, a pharmacy program, an honors college and one of the world's top fisheries schools.

In 2002, the university launched the nation's first wireless engineering degree program, thanks in part to a $25 million gift from Samuel Ginn, a university board member and retired chairman and CEO of Vodafone.

The university's grand brick buildings sprawl over an 1,841-acre campus on the edge of Auburn, a Bible Belt town that calls itself "the loveliest village on the plains."

In a state that values land-use planning, the University of Oregon contains its campus within 295 acres in

, which calls itself "a great city for the arts and outdoors."

UO academic programs are strong in liberal arts and sciences programs that include a school of journalism and an honors college. It has a business college, law school and, according to U.S. News and World Report, the top public graduate school of education in the nation. Architectural Record ranks its architecture department tops in sustainable design.

Auburn has a pretty good architectural program, too, Lariviere says. "Not as good as ours," he says, "but it's pretty good, like their football team."

Auburn draws more applicants and is more selective, presumably drawing a higher-achieving student. But after six years, more students leave with degrees from the UO than from Auburn, 70 percent compared to 67 percent.

Lariviere notes that Auburn is not among the 63 leading U.S. and Canadian public research universities invited into the prestigiou

Members include Harvard, Yale and, of course, the UO.



Different students

Roger Thompson knows about Auburn and Oregon students. He spent eight years working for Auburn's arch rival, the

in Tuscaloosa, before joining the UO as vice provost for enrollment management. He says the student who fits well at Auburn University would feel like a duck out of water at the UO, and vice versa.

"Auburn students are far more conservative than UO students," he says.

Auburn fraternity brothers show up at football games in Dockers pants with shirts and ties, and sorority sisters wear sun dresses -- an image that would be hard to find in all of Oregon where the governor-elect prefers jeans.

Both Auburn and its university reflect the rural South's fondness for tradition, hospitality and family values. The university even has

which touts the virtues of self-reliance, hard work, patriotism and "walking humbly with my God."

If you don't embrace those values when you arrive, "it's hard to leave there without them," says Owen Brown, AU foundation board member, former president of the Auburn Alumni Association and former CEO of Sun Microsystems Inc. The creed "seeps into everything you do," he says.

Auburn students soon learn that their commitment to the university is expected to extend beyond four or five years to a lifetime, says

.

"We tend to push the Auburn family," he says.

Don Logan, chairman of the Auburn University Foundation board and former CEO of Time Warner Inc., says he greets members of the Auburn "family" all over the world. "We wear our school on our sleeves," he says.

Auburn was named a "military-friendly university" by G.I. Jobs magazine, a quality likely to elude the UO. On the other hand, the UO was ranked the "most gay-friendly college" in the U.S. by Campus Pride, a college-based gay rights group.

UO students strive to be open and friendly and open-minded, says Amelie Rousseau, 23, president of the student body.

The UO has no creed. Its students challenge norms, Rousseau says. They reflect the progressive values of the urban Pacific Northwest, which prevail even stronger in Eugene. Lariviere says UO students want to promote environmentally sustainable practices and fight for social justice -- to engage the world in their studies.



Uber boosters

Auburn and UO both produced graduates, Bobby Lowder and Phil Knight, who made fortunes and returned as super athletic boosters.

Lowder, 68, graduated from Auburn in 1964 and founded Colonial BancGroup Inc., which grew into a regional banking empire with more than $25 billion in assets. Lowder has given millions to the university's sports programs and has been criticized for getting involved behind the scenes with the hiring and firing of coaches. He has served on the university's board of trustees since Gov. George Wallace appointed him in 1983.

Knight, 72, also has been criticized by some for exerting too much influence. He graduated from UO in 1959 and co-founded

for which he remains board chairman. Three years ago, the billionaire gave the UO $100 million to create an athletics fund. He also has contributed to a $200 million basketball arena, a baseball stadium, track improvements, expansion of Autzen Stadium, a student athlete academic center and a football operations center now under construction.

Today, the two tycoons face diverging fortunes.

Lowder's empire collapsed last year after federal regulators seized it and sold it to BB&T Corp. of North Carolina. The global empire of Nike, on the other hand, recorded $19 billion in revenue and expects rapid growth that could boost revenue to $27 billion by 2015.



Traditions

One day each fall, Auburn students celebrate "Hey Day," when they put on name tags and greet one another with a "hey!" the Southern version of "hi."

UO's activist students look for something more substantive. On the annual University Day each spring, hundreds of them turn out to plant flowers, spread bark dust and spruce up the campus.

"You need to do things that are lasting," Rousseau says.

Choices in mascots also reflect UO students' more realistic bent to the world in contrast to the musings of the Auburn Tigers. There are plenty of ducks in rainy Eugene; no tigers roam the piney woods of Auburn.

The Ducks have a straightforward battle cry: Go Ducks.

The Tigers cry: War Eagle.

Lariviere observes that "when we cheer them on, we cheer on our mascot, not someone else's."

Auburn alumni admit that on its face, their battle cry makes no sense. There are several stories about how the university came up with the cheer, but no one knows for sure. Nevertheless, students and alumni have embraced it. They also say "War Eagle" in greeting and parting the way Hawaiians use "aloha."

Auburn has named the costumed tiger character that shows up at games

. He's been selected the nation's top mascot six times by the Universal Cheerleaders Association.

The Ducks have a character with a remarkable resemblance to Donald Duck. They call him The Oregon Duck.

In a moment of banter, David Housel, Auburn's former athletic director, boasts that at sunset, the sky fills with Auburn's orange and blue, a sure sign that the Tigers find favor with God.

That may be true at dusk, but in the fullness of the day, a yellow sun shines over a landscape where in both Auburn and Eugene the prevailing color is green.