Good afternoon trustees,
I am grateful to be with you today as we reach the conclusion of another academic year, and, for me, a second full year as Provost of the University of Oregon. In so many ways, this year has been filled with success.
- We’ve made significant progress on our Oregon Rising goals, including improved student graduation rates and retention indicators moving in the right direction, the development of our career communities framework, and the completion of a campuswide employee engagement survey.
- The ongoing work to build both trust and the institutional structures and habits to allow our administrative and faculty leaders to work together to navigate these challenging times for higher education.
- The appointment of two new exceptional deans, after competitive national searches, from within our institution — eloquent testimony to the pipeline of leadership talent we are cultivating here.
- The creation of smoother pathways to University of Oregon academic programs and degrees for community college students from around the state.
And yet, the difficult enrollment and budget challenges we face threaten to overshadow that progress and good work. To be back in this position, less than a year after the painful process we went through last summer, is...sobering. As a community, we continue to grapple with the reality of this ongoing disruptive period in higher education, even as we come together to celebrate the end of the year in a way that our students and our committed faculty and staff deserve.
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As President Scholz laid out, this is the start of a six-month process and community dialogue about the budget: to close our immediate gap and, more importantly, to endeavor to set the university on a course that avoids this becoming a disheartening and debilitating annual exercise.
To rise to this challenge, we need to cultivate real and enduring solidarity among leaders across campus, regardless of position or title.
The word “solidarity” is, of course, loaded with connotations, but at its core solidarity carries a sense of mutual obligation and joint responsibility. In his book, Inciting Joy, Ross Gay calls us toward "unboundaried solidarity" — a solidarity that doesn't stop at the boundaries of self-interest but extends across all layers of the academic community that shapes university life.
Over the past year, we have worked assiduously with leaders of our university Senate to establish the institutional habits and structures that support the shared leadership we will need to meet this moment.
Senate President Dyana Mason has been a true partner in this effort. Since this is Dyana’s final board meeting in her role as President, let me take a moment here to thank her directly. Dyana, you have led with openness and candor during an intense period of change. Always clear-eyed about the challenges we face, you have remained committed to this university as a shared endeavor, not a stage for competing interests, but a community of common purpose. I am grateful for the grace and wisdom you have brought to your role as Senate President and know your leadership will continue to enrich the life of the university for years to come.
After months of discussions, the Senate formally approved the Academic Modifications Advisory Committee (AMAC) process, just last week. I am grateful to Senate Vice President Edward Davis for his intrepid efforts to shepherd it through — absorbing input from all directions and never losing sight of what the policy needed to become.
It is, of course, a product of compromise. But however imperfect, the AMAC process builds on the formative efforts we made last summer to create the conditions for the Senate to provide meaningful feedback on the difficult decisions we need to make.
New habits, especially those that depend on trust, take time to develop. They take root in the persistent efforts we’ve made over the year to attend to the details, to revise and compromise, and to find a way forward together. The path ahead will be difficult. To navigate it, we will need to draw on and deepen that trust.
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In 1996, Toni Morrison gave remarks at Princeton University’s 250th anniversary entitled “The Place of the Idea; The Idea of the Place.” As we at the University of Oregon turn our attention to our 150th anniversary this year, I found the juxtaposition she establishes compelling.
“The Place of the Idea” speaks to the central importance of the idea that animates the life of the university: to pursue truth wherever it leads.
“The Idea of the Place,” however, speaks to the responsibility the university has to evolve and change as it pushes the boundaries of knowledge.
Morrison puts it this way:
The idea of the place is visionary, is change, throbs with life and leans toward the edge. The idea of the place is burrowing into the heart of a theory, of a concept, casting its gaze toward the limitlessness of the universe, not merely moving toward the future but in certain instances driving it.
The idea of the place despises those forces in academic institutions so fearful of independent thought, so alarmed by challenge they prefer oblivion, irrelevance rather than shoulder the hard responsibilities of change.
Reading that address reminded me again that universities have always been crucibles of change — they have always embodied the transformative possibilities of the education and research they pursue — and this is part of what makes them so enduring…and so vital to the life of democracy.
We need to make good on the promise of the “idea of the place” — the idea of the University of Oregon as a vital catalyst for a better future here in Eugene, in Oregon, across the nation and the world. And to do this we must shoulder together the hard responsibilities of change.
Two ideas beat at the heart of the University of Oregon as a public research university: to educate the whole person and to advance research that pushes the boundaries of knowledge and enriches society.
Our undergraduate education experience needs to be truly compelling. It needs to speak to the heart of a new generation of students committed to pursuing textured and meaningful lives in the face of technologies that flatten experience and a culture that isolates us.
We also must be more disciplined in our research endeavor, with true, intentional focus on those areas in which we can truly push the boundaries of what is known or respond to the most urgent questions of our time.
Exploring and refining these ideas begin to point us in a specific direction; they root us in a particular place, and they help move us from a posture of fear, which is closed in upon itself, to an open posture of hope.
As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han suggests, when the prevailing mood is fear, we become closed off to one another. Our attention is narrowed to self-protection and survival. And the future becomes a threat to be managed.
A mood of hope, by contrast, opens us outward, toward one another, toward futures filled with possibilities even if we cannot yet see them clearly.
“Hope,” Han writes, “is eloquent. It narrates.”
“Hope,” he says, “builds a bridge across the impassable, the abyss.” (pg 39-41).
Let our idea of this place, of the University of Oregon as public research university disciplined and focused on its core purpose, be the bridge we build together during this difficult time of transition and change.
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So, let me end today on a hopeful note. I’m delighted that, later this afternoon, we will be joined by three of our outstanding faculty members, who will present to you on their research.
- Ariel Williamson, an Assistant Professor at The Ballmer Institute for Children's Behavioral Health and in the Department of Psychology.
- Sarah Wald, an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and English in the College of Arts and Sciences.
- And Ramon Alvarado, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy who is part of our Data Science Initiative.
These three colleagues embody what Morrison meant by “the idea of the place” — the restless, forward-leaning commitment to inquiry that justifies everything a university aspires to be.
Thank you.