I don’t use the word “remarkable” lightly. We have more Oregon students in our first-year class than we’ve ever had. We also saw a large increase in Hispanic/Latina/Latino students, which contributed to this being our most diverse class in the history of the university.
Four of our students were selected as national finalists for prestigious awards: two for the Rhodes Scholarship, one for the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, and one for both the Schwarzman Scholars program and the Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship. Being selected as a national finalist for these awards is a great honor and a wonderful testament to our students and the UO.
We continue to gain recognition for Innovation. Recently, The Princeton Review ranked our undergraduate entrepreneurship program No. 23 in the country, and our MBA program was ranked No. 6 by Poets & Quants. Across the university our scholarship and research are creating positive impact in the state, region, and country.
We opened the Portland campus which provides a collegiate setting in charming Northeast Portland for students, staff and faculty in the College of Design, College of Education, the Lundquist College of Business, the School of Journalism and Communications, the School of Law, and the Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health. And stepping back, we collectively taught 343,556 credit hours, helping our students achieve their dream of a college or graduate degree.
This has also been an extremely successful fall in our athletics programs. Our women’s cross-country team recently finished an outstanding season, placing fifth at the NCAA Championships and winning the school’s first conference championship as a member of the Big Ten. The women’s volleyball team is on to the Sweet 16 for a third consecutive year after a fantastic regular season, and the football team is headed to the Rose Bowl after winning the Big Ten championship. And the men’s and women’s basketball teams are off to wonderful starts.
I want to also thank campus colleagues for the rollout of our strategic plan, Oregon Rising. The amount of work people have done to make this plan a reality is gratifying. We have shared for months the core tenets of what will guide our work. The plan’s foundational goals reflect our mission and will allow our people and the university to realize the breathtaking opportunity here.
Again this year, all units are encouraged to observe—as operations allow—a “quiet period” between the December 25 and January 1 holidays. We encourage leaders to maintain only essential work. Reducing operations will allow employees who take time off to relax and recharge and allow those who are working to have more time to focus with a little lighter workload or fewer interruptions. We want to support well-being in our work and personal lives and recognize our employees’ diligent commitment.
In closing, thank you for your continued efforts and dedication. I wish you a wonderful end to the fall term, a restful holiday season, and a great beginning to 2025.
President
I thought this was a well-written note. I also like how it was clearly written by Karl himself, too. I read it and I hear his voice. Before there was chat gpt there were human speech writers. I doubt either was used (without significant writing/editing by Karl). We can be skeptical about a lot, but this note feels authentic and that, to me, is refreshing.
Yeah it’s almost like he doesn’t need to piss away $115K on a new Senior Director of Executive Communications, but he is: https://careers.uoregon.edu/en-us/job/534734/senior-director-of-executive-communications
I was puzzled by the MBA ranking statement, finding it hard to believe we’re #6, so I looked at the Poets and Quants web page which certainly doesn’t have us in the top 10: https://poetsandquants.com/2024/12/03/poetsquants-2024-mba-ranking/
I wrote to the President, who nicely replied that “We were referring to the MBA *for entrepreneurship* rankings from Poets & Quants and the new rankings for 2025” and that they’ll make that clear in the future.
In fairness, given past behavior, Columbia University probably bribed people for their top-10 overall ranking.
I applaud your defamatory remark about a university I briefly attended, before dropping out to work in the Wyoming oil fields.