Following staffing cuts in June, another round of layoffs is coming at the University of Oregon, with entire departments potentially on the chopping block as the university seeks to address a projected budget deficit.
In a June town hall, University of Oregon (UO) President Karl Scholz announced that the university was facing a significant budget shortfall due to a failure to meet its out-of-state enrollment targets, uncertainty about federal funding levels, and a variety of other costs.
Later that month, UO, whose main campus is in Eugene, laid off more than 40 employees in its College of Arts and Sciences—and now more cuts are on the way as the university faces a projected $25 to $30 million yearly deficit in its education and general fund.
The cuts could be significant, including to the university’s reputation: UO is the state’s flagship university, particularly for the study of the humanities, with more than 20,000 undergraduate students.
While the university has not yet publicly announced who will be affected by its next round of layoffs, United Academics of the University of Oregon, the campus faculty union, has sounded the alarm that a number of humanities departments may be facing elimination in their entirety.
Sources said departments under threat of elimination include religious studies, classics, and language studies including German, Scandinavian, and Russian. Faculty, including those with tenure, may also be laid off in departments including history, women’s studies, gender, and sexuality, physics, and mathematics.
In a statement shared with the Mercury, a UO spokesperson said the university “is in the midst of budget reduction conversations” to address its structural budget deficit and that the process “will not conclude for at least another two weeks.”
“Any reports suggesting that decisions have already been made—including any decisions to close or reduce programs—are inaccurate and premature and may be harmful to many in our community,” the statement reads.
The statement requested that media outlets “refrain from speculative reporting.” But as the budget reduction conversations happen across campus, speculation is nevertheless running rampant among faculty and staff about the futures of their departments and livelihoods.
Maram Epstein, a professor of Chinese literature, said her perception is that the university is proceeding in an irrational manner.
“The university seems to have gone into panic mode—and instead of considering things that we considered during the pandemic such as furloughs, asking people to take voluntary pay cuts, or perhaps involuntary if they’re at the high end of the payscale, they’re not engaging in any kind of creative thinking about how to meet this budget deficit,” Epstein said.
In the June town hall, Provost Christopher Long said furloughs would not be enough to make up for the loss of money from research grants and out-of-state tuition.
Nevertheless, professors in the College of Arts and Sciences have questions about why the university—which was running dozens of new faculty searches in the spring, including for departments now facing cuts—has so suddenly found itself needing to make drastic cuts.
“The interesting thing about that is they say the deficit is between two and three percent, which is certainly not an existential threat, but the cutting of humanities programs is an existential threat to education in Oregon,” Michael Stern, a professor in the department of German and Scandinavian, said.
The university has said employees facing layoffs will be notified during the week of September 7. As that date approaches, some—including tenured faculty who have taught at the university for decades—have been left in the dark as to whether they will still have jobs next year.
“Everything’s been done in the shadows,” Stern said. “I know that my position is threatened, but I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen. I just published a book, so it might be a case of publish and perish.”
Jeff Schroeder, a professor of religious studies, said he expects to have his position eliminated.
“I've dedicated my life to this line of work, as have my colleagues, and this will, very likely, end our academic careers,” he said.
Professors said that while the university has not said so publicly, their sense is that declining enrollments are part of the reason why they expect cuts to be concentrated in the College of Arts and Sciences. The number of humanities majors at colleges and universities has declined over the last several decades, as students have prioritized degrees emphasizing career readiness.
Still, Epstein noted that the university continues to have general education requirements in the humanities—and that the value of humanities study, particularly at a moment when democracy and academic freedom are under threat across the country, is not entirely quantifiable.
That line of thinking was a motivating factor behind the Schnitzer family’s gift of $25 million to the Schnitzer School of Global Studies and Languages earlier this year.
“It makes no sense to me to be cutting back humanities and languages, because these are the courses that force students to think outside the constraints of the culture in which they grew up,” Epstein said, adding that artificial intelligence is threatening to scramble the job market anyway.
The potential reduction in humanities offerings poses larger questions about how the university understands its mission and broader direction.
Schroeder, for one, said he feels the university is using the projected budget deficit as an opportunity to enact a broader restructuring of the university away from the humanities and the liberal arts and toward professional programs and research and development.
“It feels like the [university] is just moving in this direction of trying to train workers, turning the University of Oregon into a factory for workers, and losing sight of their mission to educate the whole person,” he said.
Epstein similarly criticized the university’s spending priorities, characterizing them as out of step with the university’s stated aims and noting that it could make it more difficult for the university to attract both students and top faculty in the future.
“The corporatization of the university in terms of branding, communications outreach, seems to outpace what they are putting into the academic mission,” she said.
If the university does decide to fold some of its humanities departments, it will be following in the footsteps of a number of other state universities who have scaled back their humanities programming in recent years and laid off tenured faculty.
Some of those universities, like Indiana University in Bloomington, have had their hand forced by Republican-controlled state governments. That is not the case in Oregon.
“We’re a blue state—the state is not asking for this, the governor is not asking for this, it's the UO president, provost, and the Board of Trustees that has their vision for how higher education needs to shift,” Schroeder said.
Ahead of its final decisions on layoffs, the university is facing a considerable amount of dissent. The faculty union is arguing the university has not fulfilled its obligation to meaningfully consult the faculty before changing its academic offerings, and faculty members have been in contact with a range of elected officials who represent the Eugene area, including U.S. Rep. Val Hoyle.
Schroeder noted that Gov. Tina Kotek, who has not yet weighed in publicly on the situation, was herself a religious studies major at the University of Oregon and protested against cuts to the department during her time on campus.
Though many students are not yet back on campus, the university’s student government and student workers union have spoken out against the possibility of cuts. There are also rallies planned on campus.
For now, however, faculty and staff have to wait as their fates are determined.
“I love this city,” Schroeder said. “I love this state. I don't want to leave. I want to stay here and fight for the University of Oregon, if at all possible.”
