President Scholz gave the following remarks to the board of trustees at the fall board meeting on Monday, September 28, 2026.
Good afternoon. It is good to be here. Before I get started, I want to recognize Bethany Jenkins, our new Vice President for Research and Innovation, who is here for her first Board meeting. Bethany, it is great to have you here.
There is a special feeling on campus in the first weeks of fall. The residence halls are full, our classrooms are busy, and first-year students are still figuring out where everything is. This year that feeling carries some extra significance, because this is the year we begin celebrating 150 years of the University of Oregon. Many of you were at Hayward Field last night for our convocation and celebration. It was a wonderful evening.
As we start this academic year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “two truths” that I and many others at the university are contending with and needing to hold at once.
One truth is that we face budget challenges, and the work to meet them will be hard on people across the university. The other is that the University of Oregon has a bright future, and in recent weeks we have seen remarkable evidence of it. This morning I want to spend time on each.
The first truth: our budget
Let’s begin with our budget and what we are doing about it. We are not making a set of cuts and then asking what kind of university we want to be. We are starting with a vision of where we want to go. The Office of the Provost has posted a working vision document that builds on Oregon Rising, posted on the provost’s website. Chris will speak to it in more depth and share a link to it with you in a moment. It grows from the two principles I shared with the campus community in May:
- We will elevate and invest in research strengths that meet the needs of our communities and industry, attract the best talent, and set this university apart.
- We will invest in the quality of the student experience and make the University of Oregon a destination of choice for more students.
The document describes a public research university built for human connection: research ambition concentrated in the areas where we can lead, strong graduate programs, and an undergraduate education that leads to meaningful work and fulfilling lives. We intend for this to be a working draft, meant to be shaped in conversation with our community. Its central idea is one I believe deeply: we cannot be all things. Concentrating on what we do best is not a retreat from ambition, it is how we can be ambitious.
You have already been given a detailed budget report by Jamie Moffitt and her team this morning. What I want to give you is a clear view of where we are in the process, what comes next, and when.
In May, we shared that we need to adjust our budget by roughly $65 million in order to address our structural deficit. The main driver is a new enrollment reality. Out-of-state enrollment has come in below projections two years running, and we are planning around that as the new normal rather than hoping it reverses. We chose to meet the full adjustment through one deliberate process rather than cutting a little every year, which prolongs uncertainty and hardship.
This summer was about understanding our options before making choices.
- Every dean and vice president modeled what various reductions of the Education & General Fund would mean for their areas. They then walked Chris, Jamie and me through the implications. Those are scenarios, not proposals. No unit has been handed a final number.
- On the administrative side, we are looking hard at how we do our work, including human resources, business processes, and purchasing, where shared efficiencies might lighten the need to cut elsewhere.
- On the academic side, our deans and the University Senate’s Academic Modification Advisory Committee (or the “AMAC”) are advising the provost as ideas take shape.
In the meantime, the hiring and pay action freeze and the limits on non-essential travel we enacted in May remain in place. Those steps give us room to make good decisions rather than fast ones.
Here is the road ahead.
- Through October, options will continue to be refined with deans, vice presidents, and advisory groups.
- In late October, proposed academic changes will be shared publicly. I want to stress again, these will be proposals, not decisions.
- In November, faculty, staff, students, and the public will get a chance to weigh in.
- Then in December, proposals will be finalized and we’ll report our budget decisions to this board.
Some of these decisions will affect positions. Where that happens, we will follow our contracts and policies, seeking to treat every colleague with respect. As I said, we will not know the full picture until December.
We will make better decisions with thoughtful input. It’s also important the people believe the process was fair and that they had the opportunity to provide feedback. That is why this work runs through many hands: the Senate and the AMAC, our deans and vice presidents, unit leaders, and faculty and staff. Anybody can share ideas directly with an email to “budgetideas@uoregon.edu”—and we have received a handful already. This Board had, at one point, encouraged us to move even more quickly, and I want to thank the Board for giving us the understanding and time to not be rushed in coming to these decisions.
In the meantime, we have launched a new set of webpages on my website—to follow budget process, timeline, and news if you are interested. We will continue to share a link to this as a reminder in the weekly “Workplace” message that goes out to faculty and staff.
This fall will not be easy. People will advocate for what they care about—as they should. The work and conversations will lead to better decisions.
The second truth: a bright future
All of this leads me to the second truth, a bright future, because that future is already coming into view.
Last week, Phil and Penny Knight committed $1 billion—the largest gift ever given to a comprehensive public university—with the intent to establish a college of engineering at the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact. It is a staggering investment in the future of the University of Oregon.
A decade ago, the Knight Campus was envisioned by a group of faculty seeking to address a fundamental challenge for society – how to move discoveries in the lab more quickly to benefit humanity. The discipline of engineering was one of the ways to do this, complementing the many existing strengths in science, business, and communication at the UO. Today the Knight Campus has graduated its first engineers and helped start more than a dozen companies. The new college will build on that work to educate the engineers and applied scientists Oregon’s economy needs. The credit belongs to the faculty, staff, and students who earned the Knights’ confidence, and to Phil and Penny’s extraordinary generosity.
And I also would be remiss to not mention another amazing gift from the Ballmer Group of $125 million that we received in mid-August that will go toward expanding child behavioral health training in three other states and building the Catalyst Center for Youth Behavioral Health on our Portland Campus.
The good work reaches well beyond those headlines. The Oregon Hazards Lab’s camera network supported firefighters and communities through a punishing fire season. The National Science Foundation selected the UO as one of five pilot sites for its National Quantum Virtual Laboratory. The other four sites are Yale, Michigan, UCLA and Ohio State.
There is a tremendous amount of inspiring teaching and learning everywhere you look across our university. This spring, architecture students designed an expansion of the Eugene Airport in a studio taught by three of our alumni, then presented their work to the airport's director. In the School of Music and Dance, students are learning in a fully equipped recording studio, building their creative voices and their careers at the same time. Media scholar Maxwell Foxman is helping people rethink how we judge images when AI can make almost anything look real. At the Lundquist College of Business, faculty are making sure students master the fundamentals while learning to use AI with sound judgment.
Outstanding work is happening in every corner of campus.
Closing
As I said at the top, this fall marks our 150th. An anniversary is a reminder that we have been through hard seasons before and kept teaching, kept discovering, kept serving this state. That is what we will do now, with our eyes on the next 150 years.
My North Star when I took this job was to leave the university stronger when I left than when I arrived. I think about that aspiration every day. We are building the foundations for a stronger UO 10 and 20 years from now. That is a truth. And we have difficult decisions to make now that are, in some respects, among the hardest that any university has to make. We will make these necessary decisions.
These two truths can seem at times as if they can’t be brought together, like two opposing magnets. But there is connective tissue: the work ahead is hard, and people across this university will feel it. The future is also bright, and those same people are the reason. I am grateful to them, and to everyone whose work makes the university the special place that it is.
Thank you.