Those are the rumors. The union’s message is here. Here’s all Scholz is willing to say publicly:
Dear colleagues,
At the end of last academic year, we promised to continue to communicate with you about the budget process and the work being done to redress our structural budget deficit. Since our town hall last spring, administrative leaders have been working to identify reduction plans in line with meeting a 4 percent average reduction target for administrative units. The deans, in consultation with the Office of the Provost, have similarly been identifying reductions in the schools and colleges to reach 2.5 percent average reductions. All units, administrative and academic, have also been asked to eliminate any pre-existing budget deficits and to fully implement balanced budgets by FY2027. Some units have taken important steps in closing deficits over the summer.
While there remains much to be done before we announce specific actions, we want to provide a timeline and the process by which we will resolve the structural gap in our finances.
Here is the planned sequence of events for the coming weeks:
- August 11-29: Deans and Vice Presidents provided recommendations to the president and provost for consideration. Appropriate steps that align with institutional guidelines and procedures will conclude before Labor Day. This will allow for those directly affected to be informed as soon as possible. Please note that the School of Law, which operates on a semester system, is following an earlier timeline.
- Week of September 7: Another message will be sent to the campus community outlining specific plans of action. Employees affected directly by the budget reductions will be notified of their job status.
We will make budget reductions in a strategic way, guided by the necessity of addressing the structural deficit and the principles and priorities outlined in the Oregon Rising strategic plan, while remaining true to the core mission of the university. We are committed to meaningful consultation throughout this process and are working through established structures and leadership teams in schools, colleges, administrative portfolios and with the University Senate Task Force on Budget Reductions. We are working to balance the importance of consultation with the need for confidentiality.
Across higher education—and here at our university—a mix of influences shape our finances: rising compensation and PERS costs, increasing competition for students from other institutions, state appropriations below the rate of cost growth, and continuing uncertainty around federal actions. This confluence of factors has created a situation in which our expenses are rising faster than our revenue. You can find more detailed information about the context and causes of our structural budget deficit at strengtheninguo.uoregon.edu.
We recognize this is a difficult period of uncertainty for our entire community. The decisions we must make are painful and they will have a real human impact. We are committed to approaching these challenges with honesty, respect, and a focus on the long-term health of the university. While the road ahead will not be easy, the hard decisions we are taking support the mission of the university and will sustain it for generations to come.
Sincerely,
Karl Scholz
President
Christopher P. Long
Provost and Senior Vice President
More from the union here: https://newsletter.uauoregon.org/after-accepting-a-25-million-gift-uo-lays-off-faculty-in-new-schnitzer-school-fear-of-larger-cuts-in-fall/
How many teaching and research positions would be saved by not demolishing Hamilton Hall, which is costing $10 million? How much would be saved by the community, by not removing these 400 units of already paid-for, essentially free housing … in the midst of a severe affordability crisis? If provided to student workers, for example, this would put downward pressure on rents in Eugene, and make available hundreds of affordable units here. This would make our dollars go further, and reduce commute traffic from edge-of-town rentals. The new UO housing replacing Hamilton is expensive, doing nothing positive for affordability in town. As part of the demolition, and other work on campus, the administration is also murdering mature trees, in the midst of a climate crisis, when we know mature trees are far more helpful to our climate goals than young ones. And, of course, the school doesn’t need all these well-paid, madly mismanaging executive administrators. How much research and teaching depth would their salaries pay for?
Much like the athletics talk, going after housing is a red herring. Dorms are bonded and paid for independently of the rest of the university budget. As an auxiliary they are required by law to independently balance their own books (not that the university couldn’t bail them out in that direction, but flow from housing to the university would be dicey). The bonds are paid directly by housing fees and not via the general fund of the UO. So money from Hamilton can not be reinvested in the main campus. In fact, the dorm investments are probably keeping the UO whole since out of state enrollment is a major issue right now, and very few families were going to pay a quarter million dollars to live in converted WW2 housing (which is what a lot of the dorms were before being torn down). Such is life in the modern university system.
What’s the collateral for those bonds. Do you think it’s the building? You think it works like a home mortgage, where the bank takes back the house if you default in your loan?
Ahhhhhhhh……no. The bond investor can be anyone or any institutional investor, and they have no need for a UOwe dorm. The collateral is the student loans which pay debt service. UC faculty wondered why, despite massive increases in tuition, almost none of it ended up in the classroom. The published a monograph entitled, THEY PLEDGED YOUR TUITION, which broke down this scam. Administrators are in the pockets of Wall Street bond palaces and institutional investors., and because student loans are guaranteed by the Feds, and Department of Education acts like the leg breaker to get those loans paid, it’s a risk free investment for the already too wealthy. Why do you think unis and community colleges have been on a nonstop frenzy to build the useless, non academic junk?
Not sure who “you” refers to here, but I fully understand how it works. While the basis for your concern is valid, your facts are not correct. Tuition does not pay for dorms at all. People bond the dorms not by foreclosure risk, as you say, but for two reasons: (1) there is a stable and essentially guaranteed source of income to pay back the bonds and (2) if things go south, the bonds are ultimately covered by the full faith and credit of the university, and ultimately the state. So I guess you could say that there is a risk to tuition, but this is not the reason that tuition has gone up. Other building projects that you refer to have usually been backed by student fees. Many universities back academic building projects via other sources of income, including tuition, but the UO does not do that because it can not afford to. Instead, unlike many states, Oregon actually still invests its own bonding capacity in capital construction (e.g., Huestis and Friendly), although they really don’t want to do that any more. But it is not without cost. First, there is the bond rating risk overall. Covid almost destroyed the residence models at universities. Universities were able to convince Congress of this fact, which helped to motivate the partial nation-wide bailout of universities. The other cost is that the dorm bonds do count against the total university bonding capacity, so if we wanted to borrow to build new buildings, our capacity is limited and the money is more expensive. But to the broader point, student fees and housing costs do tend to end up in student loans, and so the under investment in education by the state, as well as other inflated institutional costs that rightly upsets chatlie, nevertheless hurts students. But there is not need for a fiscal conspiracy theory to understand the issue, as the facts don’t align with the proposed motivation.
Thanks for this fact-based comment.
More from the union here on grievances, arbitration, and Scholz’s attempt to keep basic info from the union – https://newsletter.uauoregon.org/fighting-back-against-the-spring-and-fall-layoffs
I miss Mike Schill.
I miss Paul Olum.
Comment of the year.
He’ll be available soon: https://www.northwestern.edu/leadership-notes/2025/president-michael-schill-announces-resignation.html
Somehow Schill and Phillips didn’t fire or cut pay for faculty or staff despite tens of millions in losses durning the pandemic. This is about more than money. I’ve never met an economist that doesn’t take a negative frame on everything, and that definitely includes uomatters and the current dean of the business school, who is advising the president, and who believes he knows what needs to be done to “fix” CAS. This is the beginning of a spiral almost certainly. Gottfredson 2.0.
The current dean of the business school was architect of CAS shared services and specifically its disastrous and incredibly costly implementation, for which he is on record stating that it’s best to ‘rip off the bandaid.’ See any similarities with the current ‘process,’ which is likely to result in expensive lawsuits and irreversible reputational harm if it moves forward?
Schill was a self righteous %@$&*! but he did let you know where and what he stood for, even if it was in lawyer speak. Can anyone, anyone, tell me what Scholz actually cares about, besides keeping his head down? Actually curious.
It doesn’t add up. The university’s budget was stable and now all of a sudden it’s collapsing? Due to factors that were known well in advance (PERS, COLAs, state appropriations, demographics) or that might not even be real factors (“uncertainty” around federal actions)? It seems clear what’s really going on here: UO is joining the list of institutions taking advantage of a permission structure created by Trump for breaking taboos — in this case, by destroying tenure at a 150-year-old university.
Hey Pres, how many people does UOwe employ in advertising, marketing, public relations? Doesn’t seem to be working, unless academics is third in line behind making Wall Street bond palaces happy, and brand promotion…