President Todd Wolfson issued the following statement today. You can learn more at strengthenuo.org.
In an unprecedented time, with the president of the United States waging war on higher education, we must stand up and fight to protect and strengthen our institutions. Administrators at the University of Oregon are doing the opposite—unilaterally imposing drastic and sudden changes that will damage the institution for decades to come. Based on a projected budget deficit announced late in the spring term, administrators plan to slash multiple departments and programs and fire both tenured and tenure-track faculty.
Several things stand out:
- The claim of financial necessity is thin. The draconian actions the administration is contemplating are appropriate only when a severe financial crisis fundamentally compromises the academic integrity of the institution as a whole and cannot be alleviated by less drastic means. As the AAUP noted in the 2013 report The Role of the Faculty in Conditions of Financial Exigency, “An institution’s desire to shift priorities is not the same as a fiscal crisis.”
- The specific cuts reflect a misunderstanding of the essential reasons for the existence of the university. Cuts in teaching and research should always be a last resort, after budgets for administration, athletics, and other nonacademic programs.
- The decision-making process is inadequate. When academic programming does need to be reduced, there should always be early, careful, and meaningful faculty involvement. It is primarily the responsibility of the faculty—who have the subject matter expertise and front-line experience— to determine where within programs reductions should be made. The University of Oregon faculty collective bargaining agreement explicitly requires that the president must follow "university procedures providing for faculty . . . input.” And regardless of their specific role, all workers who stand to be adversely affected should have the right to be heard.
We call upon the UO administration to immediately drop its plan to eliminate whole programs and lay off faculty, and instead pursue solutions that put students, faculty, and education first.