UO to cut 60 employees this fall, including some faculty members

This story has been updated.

The University of Oregon will lay off 60 employees this fall, including career faculty members, as part of a fiscal-year budget reduction of $29.2 million, officials announced Monday, Sept. 8.

Provost Christopher Long and Jamie Moffitt, senior vice president for finance and administration and chief financial officer, told Lookout Eugene-Springfield that neither tenured nor tenure-track faculty will be laid off, and no degree programs will be cut.

Officials are cutting a total of 117 jobs that are or had been filled, which includes the 57 jobs eliminated during the university’s first round of cuts in the spring. Moffitt said 42 of those 117 positions are officers of administration. Forty-nine are classified staff, six are “other staff,” and the remaining 20 are nontenure-track faculty, she said.

The university is also cutting 59 vacant positions. Fourteen of those were tenure-track faculty positions.

Forty-two employees in the College of Arts and Sciences received layoff notices in June, including 11 faculty members. It was unclear if the 20 faculty layoffs announced Monday include the faculty members laid off in June.

University of Oregon actions related to employee positions

“We were able to find a pathway through this process to the decisions we’ve made, and those decisions, I think, demonstrate our commitment to the academic mission of the university,” Long said. 

The university announced a $25 million to $30 million projected budget gap for fiscal year 2025-26 in June, after first announcing a $2 million budget gap in early 2025. 

The administration then initiated efforts to cut an average of 2.5% from the budgets of UO’s nine schools and colleges, and reduce budgets for administrative departments by 4%. Officials announced in August that the university would notify employees directly affected by the cuts starting Sept. 8.

Personnel reductions account for $24.9 million of the $29.2 million total budget cut, according to the university. Nonlabor reductions make up the other $4.3 million, representing savings gained through “cost-cutting in supplies and other spending,” according to the university’s release. 

Simmering tensions

The cuts are less severe than the faculty union, United Academics of the University of Oregon, was anticipating.

The union’s executive council said advocacy from faculty, students, community members and legislators brought enough pressure on UO leaders to reconsider what would have been a “devastating decision.”

The council remains dismayed that the university will lose staff and career faculty colleagues, it said in a statement, adding that the process of making budget cuts should have been more collaborative from the beginning.

“This is a powerful demonstration of collective action at work,” the executive council said.

The news follows weeks of simmering tension between faculty and administration due to uncertainty about what positions the layoffs would affect, and concerns about a lack of faculty involvement in the decision-making process.

Jeff Schroeder, an associate professor of religious studies who spoke out against the university’s proposed cuts at a faculty rally late last month, said in an email to Lookout Eugene-Springfield that he is “elated” that no program eliminations, drastic reductions or tenure-related faculty firings are occurring.

“But I am upset that career faculty have been laid off, although it is indeed unclear whether the ‘20’ positions refers only to the June layoffs, which are deeply regrettable and an issue that our faculty union is protesting through grievances,” he said.  

University leaders have said the process for making the reductions, which occurred this summer, has involved consultation with deans, department heads and program leaders, as well as a six-person University Senate task force on budget reductions and the senate Budget Committee.

The union has argued that the process didn’t include sufficient faculty input. In letters, protests and meetings, faculty have said discussions between deans and department heads have been largely one-sided and secretive, with leadership sometimes presenting plans that had already been decided.

“We tried to create a process that got as much information out, but that also led to, sometimes a lot of speculation about what might happen before decisions were actually made,” Moffitt said.

The union previously asserted that layoffs were “rumored to include” about 25 tenured and tenure-track faculty and the elimination of entire programs like religious studies; Russian, East European and Eurasian studies; German and Scandinavian; and classics.

Though administrators on Monday ruled out these claims, it remains unclear what share of the eliminations will come from the College of Arts and Sciences, which houses these programs, as opposed to other colleges. Faculty have said that the humanities are unfairly facing the brunt of the eliminations.

Long told the Chronicle of Higher Education last week that some feedback during conversations between deans and department heads “substantively changed” original proposals for cuts, including reductions instead of eliminations, though he couldn’t share publicly how the proposals specifically changed.

Moffitt said officials are not implementing pay cuts to any university employees, including administrators. The university tries to pay competitive salaries across all its employee groups, she said.

“Sometimes schools or units will do temporary actions like hiring freeze for a little while or travel freeze,” Moffitt said. “We’re not looking at those types of actions or temporary pay cuts, because the problem we have is recurring, and we need to take actions that will reduce our expenses going forward to make sure that we have enough money to pay for all those expenses.”

The faculty union has criticized the administration’s decision not to consider administrative pay cuts, pointing to the six-figure salaries among UO’s highest ranks. 

The union has also pushed back on the administration’s timeline for the cuts, which it says is rushed and occurring when faculty aren’t on contract or on campus. Long said last week that the university’s trustees “made it clear” that they expected officials to form budget reduction plans by the board’s next meeting Sept. 15-16 in Portland.

“It’s not easy for the individuals who lose their jobs. It’s not easy for the folks who work with the individuals who lose their jobs. And it’s not easy for students and faculty who are going to see reductions in services because we don’t have as many people,” Moffitt said. “It’s a really, really stressful situation.”

Notice of layoff

Haley Davis, an events coordinator with the Division of Graduate Studies, is a classified staff member who received a notice of layoff during a meeting with the vice provost in charge of her unit at 11 a.m. on Monday. Davis has worked in the position for a year.

The layoff will become effective Oct. 8. Before that date, Davis said she will run two major events for the university’s Week of Welcome for 100 attendees and 450 attendees, respectively.

“I’m not personally being targeted for my performance or for my behavior,” Davis said. “It’s my role being eliminated, and it’s a pity, because my role is face-to-face support and interaction with graduate students.”

Under the collective bargaining agreement for the union that represents classified staff, SEIU-OPEU, Davis said she can either seek to be repositioned or exercise a “displacement” option, which means taking the job of someone less senior and assuming their responsibilities within two weeks.

She said she intends to stay with the university.

Union grievance

Officials are likely issuing layoffs under Article 25 of the faculty union’s collective bargaining agreement, which allows terminations as a result of program reductions and eliminations for “financial reasons.” However, the same article forbids UO from eliminating or reducing academic programs based on financial exigency, which means an urgent demand. 

The faculty union filed a grievance on Aug. 22, saying the administration was “improperly relying” on Article 25 to resolve what officials have called a structural budget gap, thereby violating their collective bargaining agreement.

“Article 25 only permits program elimination or reduction where the president makes a determination that financial reasons independent from the University’s overall financial picture, and specific to the program in question, warrant its elimination or reduction,” the union wrote.

UO President Karl Scholz has attributed the need for the cuts to insufficient state funding, “overly generous” pension payments and expensive health benefit costs, labor contracts, and competition among universities to grow student enrollment. He said those factors converged when enrollment numbers came in lower than forecast in May. 

Those reasons have also raised eyebrows among faculty members, in part because UO welcomed the second-largest incoming class ever in 2024 and has brought in substantial fundraising. 

Members of the University Senate are discussing a vote of no confidence in members of UO’s administration, which would likely occur sometime after the senate convenes for the academic year on Sept. 24.

UO employs more than 10,000 people, making it one of the largest employers in the state along with health care provider Providence and tech company Intel. That number includes about 2,000 faculty, according to the university.

Universities across the country are facing budget shortfalls, some much larger than UO’s. The university and the faculty union have both compiled their own lists of examples.

Many of the universities facing budget challenges have so far instituted initial measures like hiring freezes and layoffs of temporary employees.

Employee category	Filled positions eliminated	Vacant positions eliminated	2025 total actions
Officers of administration	42	21	63
Classified staff	49	21	70
Tenure-related faculty	0	14	14
Career faculty	20	0	20
Other	6	3	9
Total	117	59	176