The following are President Gottfredson’s prepared remarks for presentation to the University Senate on Wednesday, November 13, 2013. The text is not a verbatim transcript of remarks presented.

I’m glad to be here today, and I’d like to thank the Provost for filling in for me last month when I was unable to be here.

I have had many extremely positive and productive meetings over the last few months with the Faculty Advisory Committee, the Senate chair, and smaller workgroups and committees, and I’m glad to be here today with all of you—a lot has happened since we last met.

Before I get into some updates on that, I want to acknowledge some of the people who have been instrumental to our recent progress: The Senate leadership—President Kyr and President Paris—and the Faculty Advisory Committee have been great partners, and will continue to be. My regular meetings with these people are essential to the process and success of our shared mission, and the positive outcomes we’re seeing are a tribute to the collaborative work we’ve done.

It was hard work, and many people spent long hours here, in Portland, and in Salem making it happen. Your active participation has brought us today to a position of strength, ready to move forward in a bold way. Thank you.

So, we begin this academic year from a position of remarkable strength. Some examples:

• SB 270 legislation passed and signed, and an outstanding group of board nominees awaits confirmation later this month.
• The first collective bargaining agreement with faculty in the university’s history was reached, and we will be working together to implement that agreement this year. This is a great achievement—thanks to everyone who participated in this process.
• We have added many tenure-related faculty—although we need to add more.
• We are on the right trajectory in terms of selectivity and student quality measurements—this year’s incoming class is the most academically prepared, with the highest average GPA, in the university’s history—and also the most diverse in terms of ethnicity and socioeconomic background. So we are on the right track in terms of both of the pillars of public education that I consider most essential—access and quality.
• There is great demand for a spot at the UO—an indicator of our quality, and a tribute to our faculty.
• We are in the midst of a building boom at the center of our campus—Straub, the EMU, the Science Commons, the Student Rec Center. Thanks to the state legislature and our philanthropic supporters for making these improvements possible.
• We are planning for a strategic capital campaign, the largest in the university’s history.
• We are moving in the right direction. The most significant development affecting the outlook for our future is the passage of SB 270, creating our independent board. Long term, it will likely prove to be the most significant shift in decades, because it provides us with a path toward refinancing the university to sustain our public mission.

I just returned from the APLU meetings in Washington, D.C., where I had the opportunity to present on a panel with several other presidents and provosts, and the president of the AAU, looking at evolving funding models for public research universities.

What we accomplished together here in Oregon is a model others across the country are now looking to—the combination of freedoms and authorities offered by this legislation is perhaps unique in the country. Those details are on the Board of Trustees website.

So, what’s next? Well, as I said in my Investiture speech last spring, we have a path forward. And we’re moving forward with certainty, clarity, and rapidity.

We need an independent governing board with the right authorities—got it.

We need that board to have the right composition, for the Governor to appoint the right people. We worked along with the Governor and he appointed an outstanding board, couldn’t be better.

We need a strategic view of our resource needs. Well, we have an academic plan that many, many people worked on. It’s not brand new, but by and large, it’s great. The academic plan focuses on being among the best public research universities in the country—which we are. It calls for us to compare ourselves with our AAU peers—which have been doing—all along, and recently.

We are now engaging in a Strategic Planning Process, which will involve extensive input and collaboration with our new Board of Trustees and our faculty, staff, campus leadership, University Senate, and others, to define our strategic priorities, to animate the academic plan, to make the best use of the tools we’ve been provided, and to devise the best possible path forward to achieve them.

Last week the Provost posted a benchmarking report focused on our AAU comparators and OUS indicators, and also the materials contained in an orientation binder for the new Board that provides a large amount of information and additional metrics about the operation of the University.

As the Provost and I said in our email to faculty and staff last week, we are comparing ourselves to the top public research universities in the country—the AAU publics—it is a group we are a member of, and we deserve to be there. It is the number one goal of our academic plan.

We deserve to be in this elite peer group because of the outstanding quality of our university. Our faculty indicators in this report are strong: awards, publications, productivity, per capita grant awards—if you pull out medicine and engineering and look at the comparisons, of course we belong in this group. And that’s wholly a testament to the quality of our faculty and staff, and the work you do.

What these benchmarks highlight, is where we lag in resources, financing—money. We are poorly supported by the state, and we have a low endowment. We do an outstanding job with what we have—better than anybody else, actually—but we simply need more money to advance on some of these metrics.

So this informs the focus of our fundraising campaign, a strategic comprehensive campaign, which I’ll talk about in more detail momentarily. First, I’d like to continue with some details on the planning process the Provost is leading, which is also informed by this information.

Over the next few months, the Provost’s Office will be scheduling workshops and forums to engage faculty and staff in evaluating metrics, discussing the academic plan, and helping us to set strategic objectives for the future of the campus. 

We will be engaging questions about the right size of the university and key aspects of planning such as budget model and facilities planning for the campus.  In addition, as we prepare to move into the public phase of an ambitious comprehensive campaign, we have been working with the Deans and will engage with the entire campus to plan for seeking strategic investments from our supporters.

As we prepare to work with our new board, we need to hear from faculty and the entire campus community about what is important to us, to them, and how they see the future of the UO.  We will be holding campus-wide forums in December and January to make sure that everyone has a chance to be heard and to have input into the planning process.

Our strategic planning and our fundraising campaign will certainly focus on three central goals for the university that support our mission: excellence, access, and financial stability.

So what do we need to achieve these goals?

We need more faculty for a campus of our size. We have added 73 net tenure related faculty in the last five years.  However, to return to the tenure related faculty / student ratio that we had before the recent surge of students, we need to add about 60 more tenure related faculty.  Given budget pressures, estimates are that we will likely only be able to add about 30 to 40 faculty without an additional infusion of resources. Planning for focusing our philanthropic and legislative efforts on these positions is occurring with Deans at the schools and colleges level.  Specific hiring goals would depend upon philanthropic support and school needs. But we also had too few faculty before the surge in enrollment, so one of our key objectives must be to grow faculty numbers.

We need much better graduate student support. This will allow our faculty to be competitive with our peers in terms of research. It is clear that we need more competitive graduate awards to attract the top graduate students to our campus. So we will get this support.

We need more financial aid for undergraduate students, to ensure the very best students in Oregon attend this university, not elsewhere.

We need new facilities for teaching and research.

We need a large increase in our endowment. We will double it. We will double it again. This is essential to ensure we have the resources to support faculty and students on an ongoing basis, sustainably, over time. It’s where we’re going to put our shoulder to the wheel.

We are developing a strategy, as described in our academic plan, working in partnership with the schools and colleges, to target key programs with new resources and then move throughout the university in a comprehensive manner. This will require widespread support and partnership with the Provost and Deans, and this process will be led by the Provost.

So, let’s go get it.

We are currently, and have been for the last three years, in the quiet phase of a strategic comprehensive campaign. In this phase, we are raising money, and we value every single gift, large and small, but as we’re doing that we’re also staging for the public phase of the campaign that will be exceptional, historic. We’re working on logistics, hiring staff with key hires being made to support the campaign in the schools and colleges—we’re getting ready.

In recent campaigns among our peers—again, public AAU universities—about five percent of the donors give 90 percent of the funds. We’re right now talking to these prospective donors to find out what their priorities are and how they align with our core academic mission.

We know these prospective donors are engaged with the university, they’re passionate about it. They’ve been closely following our progress on SB 270, and now that it is resolved, they’re eager to continue the discussions about how their passions and interests align with our academic plan.

In conversations I’m having and the Deans are having with donors and with academic leadership, we’re talking about how we’re updating our budget model—which I’ll talk about in a moment—and looking together at our academic plan, how the strategic planning process the Provost is leading will result in a strategic plan that aligns our budget model with our capital needs and our academic plan.

The public phase will be built on the momentum we are building now, and it will clearly support the academic mission across the campus and focus intently on our priorities. The foundations of this campaign will be rooted around our core mission of access and excellence, faculty research, Oregon students, graduate students, and academic support that aligns with the indicators the AAU benchmarking reveals.

I’ve been asked, so shouldn’t we just privatize? Not in my mind, no, absolutely not. That’s not our mission. And our mission remains unchanged.  As I’ve indicated many times, we will never, ever, ever give up on the state. And I do believe it will improve—there was an uptick in state support this year, and state support for our facilities. But the state will not, cannot, provide everything we need. We know we must develop a sustainable model of support, and to that end we are launching this very ambitious campaign, which we will achieve—certainly in excess of a billion dollars, likely much more. The key is building our endowment. And with this portfolio approach, of state support, fees, bonding, and philanthropy, we can do it.

So, I mentioned that a review of our budget model is among the things we’ve been working on as part of the strategic planning process and campaign planning process.

Over the past year, I have received a lot of feedback from faculty about the academic budget model. They’ve expressed concerns that it does not adequately support our focus on research, graduate education, and new initiatives. Based on this feedback, I’ve asked Associate Vice President Shelton and Vice President Moffitt to lead discussions about putting a new version of the budget model in place for FY15, to have conversations about this.

While we have not yet finalized the details, some of the major changes under consideration include: 

• Do we continue the “taxation” model?
• Should we split the funding into two buckets: activity-based funding (e.g., based on SCH and other criteria) and strategic funding?
• Should we combine the academic budget model strategic decisions with the current budget process for other units that receive general funds?

Any change should enable us to make better strategic decisions about resource alignment across the schools and colleges and between academic and administrative areas. It should also help us better address our common interests in supporting graduate education and research. These are the most common questions that have been raised to me.

The Provost is appointing an advisory group of faculty, students, and staff that will provide advice and counsel on the FY15 budget allocations. Consistent with last year, he will be asking many members of the Senate Budget Committee to serve on this advisory group. It will be somewhat larger, including more faculty and students.

A companion project involves space planning. A few years ago the Provost created the Space Advisory Group (“SAG”), an advisory group to the Provost that provides advice and counsel on issues related to space on campus. This group meets weekly and focuses on proactive space planning, as well as addressing critical space emergencies. Over the past year, the group met individually with each Dean and Vice President to understand current and anticipated space needs. Based on this information, as well as information about classroom issues (supplied by Academic Infrastructure Committee) and information about anticipated new tenure-track hires (supplied by Deans), the SAG is analyzing our current facilities infrastructure gap (e.g., how many more classrooms, how many more offices, etc.). We will use this information to inform requests to the legislature for bonding support, requests to donors for capital support, and our future revenue bond plan.

There are a few more issues of interest to the Senate I’d like to mention.

Last week I had a very productive meeting with the Senate Workgroup on Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech, and I appreciate that they are committed to working together to get this right, because it is so important. I see that the chair of that group, Professor Dreiling, has introduced a motion that clears the Senate’s procedural deck on this matter. Academic freedom is a core value, central to our academic tradition—we can’t fulfill our mission without it. Academic freedom is among the characteristics unique to a university, it underlies everything we do, and we want to strengthen this statement in every way possible. So, our group has jointly committed to that, and I look forward to our progress. We have a strong statement now—let’s make it better.

Athletic funding—as I’ve noted previously, I appreciate the Senate resolution on funding relationships. We are working on it. I applaud the aspiration to not only have an athletics program that is self-sufficient, but one that could contribute to the general support of the campus as circumstances allow. We must abide by commitments to our existing formal agreements. It is a complex matter, and not something we will do without careful consideration of the factors involved. The interdependence is important. We have met a couple of times with Senate leadership on this issue, and with the help of the Vice President for Finance and the Athletic Director, we are working on some principles. It’s a worthy goal, and I support it in concept—these discussions are continuing.

Finally, a few quick updates on searches:

Alec Murphy is chairing the Provost search committee; he reports that a short list is nearly complete, and notes that my goal of completing this search by the end of this term is a bit too ambitious—but we should have candidates here on campus in January. We have great candidates, it’s an exciting process and I’m grateful to the search committee for their work on this incredibly important process.

Professor Carol Silverman is chairing the ombudsperson search. This is a position that came from Senate recommendations and will report to the President. Finalists have been identified and will be here soon.

I appreciate that the Provost has underway two important searches: The College of Education Dean search is being chaired by Law School Dean Michael Moffit, and the Dean of Libraries search is being chaired by Vice Provost Barbara Altmann. Both committees have met and are working on job descriptions with plans to bring candidates in winter.

As I said last May, it’s an exciting time for us. Our path is clear. We have amazing supporters, a great faculty, and superb student body. We will astonish people with our campaign!