Good afternoon colleagues,
I am grateful to be present with you today and to listen and learn more about the challenges you and your teams are facing during this very difficult time. I also want to express my gratitude to Anshuman Razdan and his team in OVPRI for the work you have been doing all year to proactively communicate information and provide guidance to our research teams – even in this highly volatile situation.
Sixty years ago, when Congress created the National Endowment for the Humanities, it wrote this passage in the founding legislation:
Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.
This demand of democracy itself is being systematically dismantled as we speak.
While the UO senior leadership and I are being intentional and strategic about how we respond publicly to what is unfolding, please understand that we are unflinching in our commitment to democracy’s demand for an education rooted in research and animated by wisdom—and we are outraged by what we are experiencing.
This federal administration is shredding the long-standing compact between universities and the federal government that has provided billions of dollars in research funding since World War II to the nation’s leading universities.
It is abandoning the bold ideals Congress once upheld — ideals that made the United States a global beacon in science, technology, the humanities, and the arts. It is abandoning our shared commitment to a vibrant democracy. Research is at the heart of both our institution’s educational mission and its role as a public good for society. We are proud — fiercely proud — of the transformative power of the research we do here at the University of Oregon, and we understand the terrible implications of it being dismantled so haphazardly and irresponsibly.
I was just on the phone with a colleague who lost her NEH grant, and I felt the ache of her loss and the loss of what her research makes possible.
While we are doing what we can to respond to the impacts of these decisions, we must acknowledge a hard truth: this is a scale of potential loss that lies beyond the power of any one institution to bridge. That is why we stand in solidarity with our peers — across the Big Ten, the AAU, and the nation — to coordinate and protect our institutions from this shameless attack on higher education as an endeavor.
Even in this difficult period, let us remain true to our shared values, to our commitment to care deeply for one another, and to our common purpose.
I believe this moment of shared anxiety can also be a moment of shared resolve — a chance to gather, to resist, and to protect this university as a sacred place for free inquiry, for intellectual humility, and for responsible dialogue. If democracy itself demands wisdom and vision from its citizens, the work you all do each day to advance the research mission of our university is the very work of preserving and enriching democracy itself.
Thank you.