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United Academics of the Univeristy of Oregon is the exclusive union representative of faculty at the University of Oregon.  As faculty representatives, stewards, and leaders, we work every day to improve our university and the state of higher education in Oregon. More information can be found at uauoregon.org.

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  • How Administrators Manipulate Budgets to Create Fake Deficits

    Much of this information is from an article in the student newspaper, the Daily Emerald.

    The administration is claiming a deficit because out-of-state enrollment did not meet targets. Let’s look at those targets.

    In 2023 UO admitted 2,491 out-of-state students, presumably after doing everything they could to maximize this number. In 2024 UO admitted 2,536 out-of-state students, a significant increase with a commensurate increase in the educational budget of the university.

    This is great news for UO, so why are they claiming poverty after record-breaking out-of-state enrollments? Well, their target for out-of-state students was 2,984. This target was 18% higher than the actual out-of-state enrollments from the year before.

    How to evaluate this disconnect between reality and projections?

    • Unrealistic expectations
    • Poor management of enrollment
    • The need to appear poor to the state in order to get more money

    The first and third seem the most likely. You see, one of the main jobs of the VP of Finance and Administration is to make the institution appear poor to the state legislature and, to a lesser extent, donors. There is an incentive to obfuscate the true budgetary situation because the state is unlikely to pour more resources into a university whose revenue is growing faster than the economy.

    At the end of the day, you cannot count on budget information provided by the administration, and any claim of deficits must be met with a healthy dose of skepticism. If you look at the real numbers and put in place reasonable enrollment targets, you will see that the administration created their budget based on a pipe-dream, and want faculty, staff, students, parents and the state legislature to pay for their purposefully unrealistic planning.

  • A Choice to Move Resources from the Mission

    The Education and General, or simply E&G budget, is the “bucket” of money which goes to the core mission of the university. This is funded by tuition and state funding. And, while tuition and state appropriations have increased faster than inflation, the percentage of the E&G budget going to faculty salaries has fallen.

    This is a choice.

    This decrease is reflected in higher work loads and lower salaries for faculty. This translates to larger classes, less faculty time per student, and lower metrics in both student and faculty flourishing.

  • Eroding Competitiveness

    The University of Oregon is a member of the American Association of Universities (AAU), a consortium of highly ranked research universities. These are our peers, the institutions with which we compete for faculty, students and research dollars. We compare ourselves only to the public institutions in the AAU, and even still the faculty salaries at the University of Oregon are the very lowest.

    In the last 10 years our faculty salary competitiveness in the AAU has eroded, and the administration intends to erode it even further. This is not sustainable if Oregon wants to maintain its preeminent position as a prestigious, comprehensive, public research university.