06/15/2021 • President Michael H. Schill sent an Open Mike to the UO community reflecting on the challenges over the past year, thanking the many people who helped keep the university afloat during the pandemic, and looking ahead to what the future holds.

11/23/2020 • President Michael H. Schill sent an Open Mike to campus expressing gratitude for the university's perseverance through the COVID-19 pandemic and optimism for what the future holds for the UO.

01/13/2020 • Conversations I regularly have with students, faculty, staff, donors, and community members often go one of two very different ways. The vast majority of conversations are incredibly positive and optimistic. They are about the excitement of opening the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, hiring new faculty and academic advisors, opening new buildings and residence halls, celebrating the football team’s Rose Bowl win, or making programmatic investments in prevention science, environmental humanities, data analytics, and more. They focus on this transformational time for the university and its bright future.

11/08/2019 • Next week the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. This is important to the University of Oregon because for students on our campus, and at other universities across the country, DACA helps provide a path to higher education and a better life.

10/10/2019 • A few weeks ago, UO’s new Provost Patrick Phillips and I took a walk around campus and talked about some of the things we are both looking forward to at the start of a new academic year.

05/17/2019 • I am the first person to admit that I am not an expert when it comes to social media and the way that information is consumed, created, and shared in our digital-first world. I like to follow friends on Facebook and I fully appreciate that Instagram and Snapchat are among the preferred communications channels of many University of Oregon students, but I am not personally active on social media. In so many ways our society and lives are better for the speed, power, and access that comes from living in the digital age, but there are times when it also comes at a cost. Over the last weekend, we experienced one such moment at the UO, when the rapid circulation of misinformation on social media unnecessarily created a problem—or the perception of a problem—on our campus.

04/11/2019 • Dear Colleagues, Universities today face headwinds from a multitude of sources. In the political sphere, one party castigates us for being ideologically unbalanced and intolerant of free speech and the other for being unaffordable and elitist. Trust in universities is battered by a deluge of criticism and well-publicized scandals involving sexual violence, administrative misfeasance, and admissions improprieties.

10/04/2018 • March 5, 2019 President Michael H. Schill delivered the following remarks at the UO Board of Trustees full board meeting in Eugene: Good morning. Yesterday Jamie gave us a sobering review of the university’s budget situation. While it presents challenges for all of us, it is something that we will manage our way through without harming all of the progress we have achieved over the past four years. That to me is very important.

01/12/2018 • As I write this Open Mike, I feel the earth move under my feet. Before you get concerned that I am singing Carole King songs or having a nightmare about the Cascadia Subduction Zone, you should understand that just outside my office massive trucks and bulldozers are busy breaking ground for the new Willie and Donald Tykeson Hall, the college and careers building.

11/27/2017 • We should all be concerned about tax reform efforts being considered by Congress. Simply put, many of the legislative proposals could substantially impede the ability of universities such as the University of Oregon to deliver an excellent, affordable education to our students.