Good afternoon trustees,
We meet today at the start of what we all expect to be an eventful fall for the University of Oregon.
Many difficult decisions lie ahead of us, after what I am sure will be a robust campus dialogue with strong disagreements about the options we are considering and the choices we ultimately make.
The extended period of not-yet-knowing we are currently navigating is rife with uncertainty and ambiguity for our campus community. But we need to remain focused on the process of our decision-making, which requires patient reflection, the careful weighing of options, and a willingness to live with possibilities that we might not ultimately choose.
There is generative power in this period of uncertainty and collective consideration, if we are willing to approach it with openness and hope, rather than fear.
As I have told this board before, I strongly believe that, if we can position this institution wisely in the slipstream of this moment of deep disruption for higher education, we can move faster and farther toward a strategic vision than we otherwise could.
With that in mind, as President Scholz mentioned, we have created working document, with input from our deans, members of academic leadership, and the Academic Modifications Advisory Committee (AMAC), to describe a vision for the University of Oregon’s academic future.
The document is predicated on the recognition, as Karl has just emphasized, that we cannot be all things to all people; as we navigate the budget challenges we face, the focus of our energies must be disciplined and, practically speaking, that means we will stop investing in some things, even if it is painful.
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The scope and scale of the structural budget deficit we face require us to refine our research focus and orient our PhD programs to a narrower range of research strengths even as we continue to make good on the promise of a broad liberal arts education at the undergraduate level.
The academic vision document, “Toward a Premier R1 Public,” is an effort to outline how this might be accomplished. We have distributed printed copies of the document to the trustees and it is also available on our website by scanning the QR code on the screen.
Research Confluences
Let me begin with the concept research confluences and the simple acknowledgement that the University of Oregon cannot and will no longer attempt to be comprehensive in every field and discipline.
Instead, we will work to concentrate our focus and investments in research areas where we can achieve national distinction and where our strengths, geography, and history provide us with unique advantages.
To this end, we have drawn on and expanded upon the four signature research areas articulated in Oregon Rising, with the express intent to refine and further enhance the strong reputation the University has for cross-disciplinary and disciplinary research and creative activity.
The seven confluences are:
- Brain, Mental Health, Learning, and Prevention
- Biotechnology from Molecules to Therapeutics
- Global Citizenship, Democracy, and Information Ecology
- Materials, Optics, and Emerging Technologies
- Indigenous, Pacific, and Place-Based Arts and Humanities
- Earth, Environment, and Resilience
- Human Health, Performance, and Sport
There is more detail about why we have focused on these confluences and the existing academic programs that we see as advancing them in the vision document itself, which I invite you to review.
The metaphor of “confluences” is intentional. It evokes the way streams and other tributaries converge into larger rivers. At a confluence, distinct currents don't dissolve into one another — they meet, and in meeting, become something more powerful than a single current can be on its own. While the confluences do not intend to encompass the full range of research that is pursued here, they do point to the domains we will seek to strengthen and to the related PhD programs on which our investments will concentrate.
PhD programs
Indeed, the refining of our research focus goes hand-in-hand with a need rethink our approach to doctoral programs, particularly as it relates to teaching.
This is an ethical imperative, first and foremost: We should not graduate more PhDs into a retrenching academic system that cannot support them long-term.
Over the last 5 years, we have averaged 214 PhD graduates a year. These graduate employees currently play a very important role in our undergraduate teaching portfolio.
Teaching apprenticeship will continue to be an important part of our commitment to graduate education, but its primary focus should be to train students to become experts in their field and future scholars. We also want to nurture more distinctive undergraduate experiences for our students, and part of that revolves around finding ways to expand their connection to our professional career and tenure-track faculty.
We therefore aim to consolidate our doctoral programs with three imperatives in mind:
- First, as I mentioned, we should focus on programs that align with our institutional research confluences, providing a set of signature PhD programs that are world class, which will help enhance our research profile.
- Second, to live up to our responsibilities to ensure graduate student placement, we should focus on programs that demonstrate strength in certain key indicators of health, including time to graduation, recruitment success, post-graduation job placement, and the scholarly success of its students.
-And, third, to reduce our overall reliance on graduate student teaching, we will admit only the number of graduate students we are confident we can place and redress the significant loss in teaching capacity by hiring well-qualified, proven career faculty.
People have asked me if reducing the overall number of PhD programs could risk our status in the AAU or as an R1. The short answer is no. The vision here is to strengthen our position as a flagship public research university by refining our focus. The minimum number of PhD students we can graduate a year as a Carnegie R1 institution is 70, so we have some room for refinement in that regard, and a signature set of PhD programs would likely bolster our AAU standing.
Distinctive Undergraduate Experiences
The third vital dimension of the vision document speaks to our efforts to elevate and enhance the undergraduate student experience by making it genuinely distinctive within our liberal arts tradition — rooted in faculty-led research into unresolved mysteries of experience and interactive learning that empowers students to discern who they are and who they might yet become.
In the more competitive recruitment environment that we now face, we must give prospective students specific and compelling reasons to choose us over our competitors. This includes both strong majors and strong programs outside of majors, like the Clark Honors College, the Provost Undergraduate Research Assistantship, or emerging ideas that focus on empowering undergraduates to learn business, design, media, art, culture, and science through their interest in the broad human endeavor of sport.
It will also include meaningful engagement with our emerging “Career Communities,” the new ecosystem of career preparation and alumni and industry engagement that we are launching this fall.
Providing a more captivating undergraduate experience will also enable us to address head-on the sobering fact, as the board’s Academic and Student Affairs Committee heard last week, that we lose almost one in four undergraduate students after their second year here. This is unacceptable and unsustainable. It is the definition of transactional education, and it is anathema to a university that aspires to be designed for human connection.
Together then, this vision weaves three threads into a unified strategy that concentrates our efforts on what we already do well and to focus our investments to make it even stronger. The vision document indicates where we focus our energies.
Timeline and Process
Now let me walk through the timeline of our decision-making process as we consider how to redress the $65 million structural budget deficit and the specific levers we are considering to cut our costs.
Over the summer, all academic and administrative portfolios were asked to model general fund budget reductions of 5%, 10%, and 15%, phased over one or more years.
These scenarios are informing the period of internal consultation and evaluation we are now discussing on the academic side. While conversations are ongoing, we remain on track to present a proposed plan to the public by our deadline of October 28; before bringing a final recommendation to the Board of Trustees at your December meeting.
As you know, the Senate's Academic Modification Advisory Committee, or AMAC, is the new structure that will support faculty consultation in this process. Senate President Davis is here today and will talk to you next about the committee's work.
I am deeply grateful for Edward’s work in creating and refining the AMAC process last year and for his leadership of the committee during this confidential phase.
AMAC has been meeting regularly since June. Our deans are individually presenting their budget reduction plans to the committee for discussion, and the committee has already provided helpful feedback on each dean’s plans for engaging their college communities in their decision-making process. AMAC has also reviewed and provided input on the vision document I outlined today.
As we try to frame AMAC's role and function for our wider community, President Davis has asked us to think of AMAC’s role in budget decision-making in the same way we understand a search committee’s role in hiring decisions: AMAC will provide informed feedback to our central administration on the pros and cons of the budget plans under consideration. They will not, however, approve or vote on the plans that are developed. The input will be critical to us; but, as the board knows, the decisions rest with executive leadership.
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While I want to be cautious about sharing too many specifics about potential budget cuts until our consultation process is complete and decisions are made, I will mention some of the levers we are considering to close our budget deficit on the academic side.
To reflect our more targeted research focus, we are looking at reducing our tenure-track faculty headcount through attrition by using the Tenure Reduction Program or TRP, as well as limiting new tenure-track hiring.
We are also looking at substantially reducing future graduate employee appointments by strategic reductions in program admissions and by closing some graduate programs. We do not plan to lay off current graduate employees; we will focus instead on more targeted future appointments. We are exploring ways we might merge academic programs and units, which can help us reduce the administrative overhead for our schools and colleges. One large-scale strategy we are considering is to bring our arts, design, and architecture programs together into a unified college that would combine the strengths of the College of Design, the School of Music and Dance, and related programs to elevate the arts and design at the University.
This is an area where a cost-saving measure could also present us an opportunity: the conversation about how to unlock the full potential of the creative arts, design, and architecture at the University of Oregon predates our budget challenges. A cohesive, comprehensive college could open new opportunities for coordination and collaboration in cross-disciplinary research and in nurturing a well-rounded undergraduate student experience, as well as more visibility for many of our successful programs in these areas.
Finally, we are exploring faculty workloads across colleges, including a review of our practices around research releases, so we can further focus our faculty’s time on delivering the distinctive undergraduate experience we seek to nurture.
Our work and decision-making in all these areas is data-informed, not data-determined; we will balance key indicators alongside professional judgment, lived experience, and context to discern outcomes that best align with the overall vision. And let me give a brief shout-out to Austin Hocker, our new Director of Data Enablement, whose team is providing us with more refined and comprehensive data than we've ever had before to assist us in this process.
The Lasting Appeal of a Liberal Arts Education
Yet as we move towards a more sustainable strategy — by bringing academic programs together, by reducing faculty and PhD student headcount outside of our areas of research focus, and by considering structural changes to our academic enterprise — it is important to me to emphasize that we are doing this to allow our university to continue to deliver a broad liberal arts education to our undergraduate students.
We have no intention of abandoning the historic roots that support our research and education mission today, nor how this university serves Oregon and the world in many tangible ways, through the research and education we provide.
A few weeks ago, Erik Steiner, the Director of our Infographics Lab, stumbled upon a 1926 University of Oregon Bulletin entitled “The Lasting Appeal of a Liberal Education,” by James H. Gilbert, then the Dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. It described the four-fold purpose of liberal arts education this way: 1/ to gain information about the world and its problems; 2/ to develop a capacity for rational thinking and philosophic understanding; 3/ to fill the creative imagination and refine the aesthetic sense; And 4/ to inspire students to use these developed powers in the service of society.
This document, which sat quietly in the attic of Johnson Hall for decades, gives voice, despite some anachronistic language, to the University of Oregon’s abiding faith in the enduring power of the liberal arts to educate global citizens capable of bringing their wisdom and creative energies to the world.
A century later, in a period of disorienting technological change, when powerful forces seek to constrict the deepest purpose of the university to educate global leaders and conscientious citizens, the importance of a broad undergraduate education in the liberal arts gains in urgency. Our students are entering a world where technology is flattening the texture of human thought and language, dulling curiosity, and robbing us of our capacity to imagine and co-create a future worth wanting.
They will need the discernment that Dean Gilbert described now more than ever: the ability to judge well in a complex, interconnected world, and to say, in their own unique voice, what they have experienced and why it matters.
A liberal arts education has long sought to cultivate these distinctly human capacities, and it is why the liberal arts endeavor must remain a vital part of the apprenticeship in discernment we offer here at the University of Oregon.
Thank you.