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Thanksgiving message from President Schill

Dear University of Oregon colleagues,

As I think about Thanksgiving this year, I am flooded with conflicting emotions. Like many of you, my plans to visit family and friends have been canceled, one more unfortunate change in a difficult year. Since many, if not most, of our students will leave Eugene to return home, our campus and much of our university neighborhood will have an empty feeling that will carry through the winter break. I worry about our community and our nation and pray that the hopeful vaccine experimental results reported in the news over the past couple weeks will mean a safe and effective way for us to curb the pandemic and allow us to get back to some approximation of normalcy.

But most of all, I am grateful and full of optimism for our future. Our community has come together better than we could have hoped for back in March when the contours of the pandemic first became apparent. Our faculty members once again demonstrated their devotion to our students by turning on a dime to convert traditional in-person teaching into remote or online education. Our students rose to the challenge with resilience; the vast majority have stayed with us and those I have spoken with are making the best of a sometimes difficult situation. Our classified staff and officers of administration displayed flexibility, understanding, and courage as they kept our campus open and safe. Our administrators worked weeks and months without taking a day off to help us manage an ever-changing environment. And, our alumni and supporters gave generously to support our students, donating close to $1 million to our student hardship fund.

I am also optimistic for our nation. While the election results reflect a nation that remains very divided, I am buoyed by the early statements of President-Elect Biden and Vice President-Elect Harris. While our university comprises people of all parties and ideological perspectives, we are united by our commitments to research and science, to equity and inclusion, and to honesty and the pursuit of knowledge. I am hopeful that our nation—and our university—will return to these ideals even as we may disagree about how to put them into practice. I am also incredibly optimistic about our university. Although I am biased, I believe that we have made tremendous progress over the past six to seven years and I believe that progress will only accelerate in the future. In the years before I came to Eugene, the UO successfully led the effort to disband the Oregon University System and establish our own institutional board, which effectively freed us to chart our own path toward excellence. Our faculty union and my predecessor negotiated our first collective bargaining agreement that gave our career faculty substantially greater job security and compensation. We launched an extraordinary and unprecedented fundraising campaign that, to date, has raised close to $2.5 billion to fund scholarships, academic initiatives, new buildings, endowed professorships, and much more. And most importantly, we reaffirmed our commitment to academic excellence by focusing our resources on research and student success, an effort that was recognized and praised last year by the Association of American Universities.

Next month, we will celebrate the opening of the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, the biggest change to our academic and research program in decades. The Knight Campus is committed to the principle of science advancing society—transforming basic scientific knowledge into interventions, technologies, innovations, and cures to improve the human condition. The Knight’s $500 million gift remains the single largest donation ever to a public university and a wonderful vote of confidence in Phil’s beloved alma mater. I invite each of you to join us for the virtual opening on December 2.

Importantly, the Knight Campus didn’t just come out of the head of a donor or president. Instead, the concept was organically developed by and for our faculty, who had long viewed the absence of applied science as holding the university and our students back. Similarly, over the next year we will see groups of faculty work with Provost Patrick Phillips to develop ideas for other new academic initiatives that will propel us forward in spite of the pandemic and our uncertain budgetary climate. These initiatives will include broad interdisciplinary efforts on the environment, sports and human performance, racial disparities, and innovation. I anticipate that each will be fed by philanthropy. It is important to me that all parts of the university see themselves playing a role in these efforts.

I am also hopeful and confident that our progress in creating a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive campus will accelerate next year. We have already done a lot of work in this area in terms of increasing our representation of students of color and providing new and enhanced curricular and co-curricular opportunities. But we need to do more. We need to hire more faculty and staff of color, and we need to create an environment in which they can flourish. We need to continue to increase access to our university and we need to make sure that all groups of students—regardless of race, socioeconomic status, or other characteristic—feel a part of our university and succeed. This is the moment for us to make progress on all of these fronts: the nation is focused; our students demand it; our University Senate is committed to making progress; and so is our university administration and board of trustees. Shame on us if we don’t meet the challenge.

One thing I have learned from my time here at the University of Oregon is that we tend to be a skeptical bunch. I am sure some of you think I am blowing hot air. How can Mike talk about progress and new initiatives in the face of a pandemic that is sickening or killing our citizens, eviscerating our economy, and generating budgetary problems for the university that will take years for us to dig out of? The answer to that question is that we owe it to our students, to our state, and to posterity to continually strive to produce knowledge and transmit that knowledge to the next generation. That is why we are part of this community. That is why we work here. It isn’t just our job; it is our calling and mission. A university that stands still forsakes its mission, because knowledge doesn’t have a finite end and human progress knows no bounds.In closing, I want to wish each of you a good holiday. I am thankful that I am your president and that I am part of this community. While we might not engage with each other in the way I most like—face-to-face and arm-in-arm—I want each of you to know how grateful I am that you are part of our university family.

Sincerely, Michael H. Schill
President and Professor of Law

10 Comments

  1. Presumptive Idiot 11/23/2020

    Brevity is a virtue. Perhaps an overpaid PR flack could summarize these in the future.

  2. Less cynical than some 11/23/2020

    UOM: I’m sorry, your comment has been deleted for violating the UOM policy against making fun of people on the basis of their names, physical appearance, or other things they cannot control.

  3. Eternal Skeptic 11/23/2020

    “…generating budgetary problems for the university that will take years for us to dig out of…”

    And thus the seed is planted for all kinds of fun from J-Hall that can go on and on and on! I can practically taste the spreadsheetery.

  4. bored after one paragraph 11/23/2020

    His messages are always just so long. And every paragraph starts with a sentence with ‘I’ in it.

    • uomatters Post author | 11/24/2020

      Say what you will about our President Schill, but at least he didn’t write 22 paragraphs, or bury a faculty Covid death announcement at the end, as this community college president did:
      .
      “College Update & Happy Thanksgiving!”
      .
      The news arrived on Friday, nested deep in an email that landed during a Faculty Council Zoom meeting. Only after someone had reached the 22nd paragraph did professors learn what had happened, and when they did, a few began to cry.
      .
      “To date, we are aware of one Collin College student who has passed away from complications from Covid-19 and, as of last week, one faculty member,” H. Neil Matkin, president of the community-college district in Texas, wrote. The student’s death had been reported in late October, but the announcement that a colleague had died came as a fresh blow. In the same paragraph, near the bottom of the email, Matkin also disclosed that a staff member was hospitalized.
      .
      https://www.chronicle.com/article/one-of-us-a-presidents-message-stuns-faculty-after-their-colleague-dies-of-covid-19?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in

    • Anonomatopoeia 12/02/2020

      You know, I don’t think everything he does is great, and I have significant concerns about many of the things, but I will say that I personally hate the trend to expect emails be bullet points or similar (a trend which is all about businessifying the academic culture, a trend which I also hate and which is also the driver of so many of the “transform” and “centralize” processes going on around us), and so I appreciate that he writes in sentences and paragraphs that ask me to read words that have relatively specific meanings. I am old and have in my office copies of campus communications and memoranda from the days of yore, and it is a true fact, y’all, that we used to all be expected to be comfortable with reading 1200 words every few weeks or so without feeling overburdened.

      (also two of these seven paragraphs do not start with a sentence containing the word I. Just sayin’.)

  5. moss defender 12/01/2020

    So there will be a “virtual” opening of the new Nike research facility ? It is widely known that very little is known about what will occur in the buildings and who (if anyone) will benefit. Over ten years ago I warned Eugene to expect a Nike “shadow campus” for research to pop up and divert state dollars and that it would be a very secretive elite sports related project and that research involving humans as test subjects might take place there. Is there any interest at all on this campus to at least attempt to piece together what to expect from this billion dollar (boondoggle) supposedly academic facility ? I have noticed the dog ate my homework type media geniuses parrot a few press releases by UO about it as they go about zombie like news gathering (fake). If you think this is a academic facility please explain. If you think this is a sports research facility (or corporate research) I would like to read that too. Will there be nueromarketing research conducted there ? Will any of the research there help lead towards the creation of a designer baby ? These are reasonable questions and the lack of interest and disclosure of details about such a expensive and sprawling project is quite disturbing. Lastly what is the most recent estimate of deferred maintenance costs on the main campus ? How about the athletic dept. estimated amounts of deferred maintenance ?

    • Dog 12/01/2020

      yes at the opening they will unveil a virtual designer baby …

  6. moss defender 12/03/2020

    note my wording “help lead to the creation of” the bottom line is any secretive life sciences research may help to perfect towards that goal….I do not think it is a stretch to suggest that wealthy parents may someday prefer to pay up to be promised a healthy baby that will grow to 7.5 or 8m feet tall ensuring a lucrative NBA career…..sure it suggests artificial limbs now-is production of a whole person later that far fetched….University of Penn was making super mice (got stronger and bigger with no exercise) and the claim was it would help elderly with degenerating muscles reality was the weight lifting extremists have been hassling the researchers to try to score some ever since…anyway laugh away skeptics are all the same people I bet as those in disbelief about the CIA research in the Riverfront Research Park I pointed out here a while back…if I had said years ago (btw I did) someday Alberto Salazars cutting edge Oregon Project will someday be caught up in a hi tech controversial sports doping legal situation I am certain you would have been in disbelief about that too…nueroengineering starts with s goal like repairing a brain after a injury it LEADS towards goals like the transhumanist movement that aspires to weave silicon computing power into the human brain…basically the Terminator movie tech

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