Good morning.

I have a lot to cover in 20 minutes so I’m going to dive right in.

My job is a fascinating mix of the immediate and thinking about how we can be great in the future. Each day presents new issues to contend with, though my team and I try to never lose sight of our mission. 

We just passed the two-year anniversary of my selection by the board to serve as the 19th president of the University of Oregon. Thank you. I continue to be honored and excited with the opportunities before us. 

Treetops

Before getting into the heart of my remarks, I’m pleased to announce the UO has finalized the sale of Treetops, one of Eugene’s most historic residences. 

Treetops is being purchased by Bill and Leslie Cornog. We are excited about their strong commitment to the historic preservation of Treetops and their ability to fully restore and maintain the property. Their plans include preserving the home’s original architecture and historic landscaping, including its heritage oaks, while making thoughtful improvements that enhance the property without compromising its historic character. 

They will also prioritize the use of Oregon-sourced materials and Oregon-based contractors and labor during the restoration process, benefiting the local economy.

As part of their vision for Treetops, the Cornogs plan to use the property as a venue to display art from past and present Oregon artists, including paintings and both indoor and outdoor sculptures, reinforcing the home’s role as a cultural landmark. I appreciate the commitment that the Cornogs are making to renovate and preserve this wonderful property.

Here-and-now

I’m going to break the rest of this report into two, first speaking to the here-and-now before moving to the bigger picture of Oregon Rising, our strategic plan. 

There are three primary immediate intertwined challenges. 

We are, in important ways, a tuition-driven institution. Hence, enrollment patterns have a profound influence on our budget. Two and a half years ago we had 450 more out-of-state students in our first-year class than we had last year and this year, despite a significant investment in our scholarship programs. Enrollment variability could be a harbinger of a changing college landscape, or it could be a temporary, perhaps FAFSA-driven, downtick. Either way, enrollment uncertainty is a complicating factor when assessing the university’s finances. 

On state funding, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek recommended a budget with a 2.8% increase in FY 2026 for higher education funding. This level of funding would be substantially below the cost to maintain current spending levels, given cost increases in pensions and labor contracts. Later today you’ll hear our recommendations for tuition increases for next year. Our financial future depends on our ability to continue attracting students from outside Oregon, something I know you all understand well.

Recently the State of Oregon Economist Carl Riccadonna published the quarterly economic and revenue forecast for the state. In his report he wrote it is “valuable to give hard thought to how the state funds higher education and how to attract talent. Graduates often don’t travel far from where they finish their degrees and pipelines are developed between institutions of learning and workplaces.” Companies also form partnerships with research labs at colleges. 

Attracting students from outside Oregon benefits Oregon. [Pause]

A second here and now consideration is our union negotiations. We value our faculty and our student workers. We very much want to reach a fair, fiscally responsible outcome in our negotiations, so we can all focus again on our core mission: serving our students, advancing knowledge and enhancing understanding of what it means to be human, and helping the University of Oregon be the best it can be.

The third set of immediate issues are largely coming from Washington D.C. Daily, it seems, new twists are announced. I’ve said consistently we must resist the temptation to spend energy and resources chasing each new development, only to have the terrain shift under our feet days later. 

Internally we have our great governmental and community relations team working with local, state and federal delegations, and a short-term advisory group that is also vetting developments that could affect the UO. Externally we aren’t alone in navigating these challenges. We are in close touch with our peers in the AAU, the APLU and our Big Ten colleagues. I have been networking with AAU presidents and have met with members of Oregon’s congressional delegation. 

We closely monitor rumors about substantial cuts to Medicaid or cuts in federal funding to states to provide law enforcement or transportation infrastructure. If those cuts happen, we could face considerable risk of funding cuts to higher education. 

And the significant reduction in the workforce of the Department of Education announced last week could affect how our students receive financial aid and other federal resources. 

On top of this are executive orders and the prospect of research funding freezes and reduced support for critical research infrastructure.

Universities and the federal government have a long-standing and successful partnership that grew out of World War II. The government relies on universities to conduct research in the national interest. The government identifies critical priorities to meet specific national goals such as curing cancer, extending the length and quality of life, fostering economic growth, and strengthening national defense. 

This is achieved by a rigorous process, where the country’s brightest scientists compete to meet designated priorities. Awards are generally made through expert review panels. The process has been remarkably successful, making American science and higher education the envy of the world.

The incredible research we do here at the UO and at the other leading research institutions in this country is a foundational part of the country’s leadership around the world. There’s a reason that students and scholars from around the world want to come to the United States. We are witnessing a dire moment for our research enterprise as funding agencies are scaled back or eliminated and expert review panels are canceled or suspended.

We have also seen a blizzard of executive orders from the President, including ones that:

• Bar gender-affirming care for transgender people under the age of 19
• Target DEI programs
• And redouble immigration enforcement.

With the advice of General Counsel Kevin Reed and his team, we believe that the University Health Services can continue to provide care for UO students who seek it. But the EO leaves portions of our population very uneasy. It’s easy to see why. Our efforts are aided by the state of Oregon, which provides broad protections for individuals seeking gender-affirming care and protections for those who provide such care.

There are similar difficult, unresolved issues with immigration, particularly with our DACA/Dreamer students. We are working hard to monitor these issues and work with higher education colleagues and political leaders to support our students and community. We are also reaching out directly to affected students to provide support and care, as they often hold genuine fears for their loved ones. 

We remain committed to serving all our students, including those from rural areas, first-generation, veterans, or students from traditionally underserved populations. Universities benefit from staff, students and faculty with diverse perspectives and lived experiences. We will continue to do everything we can to support all in the university community while, of course, also following the law.

Let me take a second here to pause and acknowledge the weight of what I just talked about. I hope I conveyed what I feel strongly: we are on top of what’s going on. At the same time, the confluence of challenges we are now navigating are unlike any I have seen in my 30+ years in higher education. 

It will take all members of the UO community, students, staff, faculty, trustees, alumni, and other who care about the university pulling together to help us meet this moment.

Oregon Rising

A goal of every university President is to leave their institution in a better place than when they came. Our effort to achieve this goal is reflected in Oregon Rising.

I’m not going to give you an update on the entire plan. We have quarterly Board meetings that provide regular opportunities for updates. But let me tell you about several areas of progress.

• Recall our career goal: we want to ensure every student is able to make a successful transition from the UO to whatever they choose to do next. I was thrilled to discover that we have roughly 220 students, not athletes, employed in our athletic department. We of course have one of the best, most innovative athletic programs in the country. These student employees are getting incredible experiences, whether in sports medicine, analytics, sports business or coaching, right here on campus. They are getting great experiences that help will launch them for life after university.
   
• And on the research enterprise,
  • We are thrilled with the exciting work addressing America’s crisis in child and adolescent behavioral health at UO Portland’s Ballmer Institute. And we are excited about the opportunity with the state to fund a new child and behavioral health building on our Portland campus.
    • And by the way, I’m excited we will get to celebrate the official grand opening of Portland with all of you May 29.
  • Building 2 of the Knight Campus is going to be open by the end of this calendar year. Knight campus scholars and students continue their amazing work. Research conducted by the Knight Campus is nationally recognized and enables us to successfully compete with the likes of Cal Tech, Stanford, Harvard and MIT to bring top scientists to the state of Oregon. 

Since I last spoke to you all, there has also been great work done on our flourishing goal. We have defined more clearly what this means and identified domains to help us further refine and create purpose on this goal.

The five domains of flourishing we adopted are: 

• Wellbeing
• Growth
• Community
• Resilience
• Purpose

We are making progress in our goal to have a flourishing campus:

• Measurement—We will use a battery of questions developed and validated by Gallup to measure flourishing in our next campus-wide employee climate survey.
• Courses—We are successfully expanding access to a terrific, impactful course, the Neuroscience and Psychology of Happiness; and will seek to do so with another course, the Art and Science of Human Flourishing. We also hope to make these available online for staff, faculty and students who may be interested.
• Employee development and engagement:
  • We also have rolled out a set of coaching resources.
  • We have some great work happening in our departments—where improvements to the employee experience and job satisfaction can be best felt. Examples include piloting new orientation and onboarding (or “everboarding”) programs and team-wide participation in “Crucial Conversations,” a specific workplace communication training; and
  • We are increasing coordination and clarity about the resources available to help supervisors, and indeed all employees, informally resolve minor workplace conflicts.
• Infrastructure for students:
  • Our vice president for Student Life, Angela Chong, has already implemented a key change in her first seven months at UO. In the fall, we brought back student health services into Student Life. Angela has also restructured her units in alignment with our strategic plan. For example: health services, PE and Recreation and our rec center, counseling services, and our substance abuse and violence prevention programs are now all in the same structure, reporting to our very experienced new health services executive director, Margaret Trout, who joined us from UC Davis in January.
• Enhancing business practices:
  • We are expanding the development of electronic payroll forms and optimizing workflow to increase transparency, efficiency, and accuracy in every step of the payroll process.
  • Our travel and personal reimbursement processes are being streamlined to reduce timelines and burden on end-users and support staff.

All of that will make us better and I’m happy with where we are headed on this goal.

I also want to briefly mention our efforts to enhance pathways to timely graduation. As you may recall, the focus of this goal is identifying and addressing everything that hinders a student’s success, whether that be financial struggles, advising breakdowns, or curriculum complexity. There are several ways we are attacking this:

• We are moving from a coalition of the willing to creating institutional habits that will last well beyond this year. In this spirit, we are working to ensure our academic advisors are strongly encouraging our students to take 15 credits their first term and continue to do so. It’s proven that starting with a full course load as a freshman sharply increases a student’s on-time graduation rate.
• We also want every student to meet with an advisor, ideally in their first term and regularly thereafter.
• And we are bringing back a standard that existed prior to COVID: students will leave their IntroDucktion weekend over the summer with their first schedule. 

Closing

I’d like to end with some of the wins we’ve experienced so far this year.

• I am also proud that our 4-year graduation rates have increased nearly 3 percentage points, to almost 60 percent, in the past year.
• We are continuing to see an increase in exposure because of our move to the Big Ten. At the start of the school year, we were in the bottom tier of the 71 AAU universities in the country in terms of social media follower growth and middle of the pack in engagement rates. Specifically, we were 63 out of 71 in the growth of followers. We are now #2 out of 71. We were 31 out of 71 in engagement rate. We are now 6 out of 71 in engagement rates.
• We’ve seen millions of impressions on our content and enjoyed a boost in our overall awareness. I bring these numbers up because we are constantly thinking about how we can leverage increased visibility to advance the mission of our university and draw attention to the academic enterprise and wonderful things we do here.
• I also want to celebrate the team and people I’m surrounded by. Our first-year colleagues Provost Chris Long, VP for Student Life Angela Chong, and Board Secretary Kody Kelleher have done phenomenal jobs. And we’re closing in on hiring a new VP for enrollment—a critical position to address our financial concerns around out-of-state students. As I enter the spring term of my second year, I feel grateful that I get to work with an incredible team.
• A quick shout out as well to our women’s track and field team winning another indoor national championship over the weekend and to our men’s and women’s basketball teams earning bids to the NCAA Tournament.

Given the considerable challenges we face, being surrounded by great people is going to be even more important. I remain unchanged in my initial assessment that Oregon is a remarkable place.

A favorite, often-repeated phrase is that the upside of the University of Oregon is breathtaking. Despite the headwinds, we will continue to meet the moment and achieve that breathtaking upside.

Thank you.