Four University of Oregon campus unions, including the Service Employees International Union, Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation, United Academics of the University of Oregon and UO Student Workers have been collaborating on a resolution alongside the Campus Labor Council that demands for the university’s cooperation with financial transparency.
According to a source that wishes to remain anonymous due to possible repercussions that could cost their position and job at the university, the resolution seeks detailed breakdowns of budgetary expenditures and even justification on administrative salary increases while some staff and faculties experience cuts and hiring freezes.
GTFF member Abigayle Mitchell said the resolution was put together due to combined experiences and factors that involve decisions being made around people’s jobs and livelihood.
“On the GTFF side, we’ve seen some GE (and research) positions being cut. So the immediate context is that people are wondering: why are these decisions being made? How are they being made? What is the actual, financial data behind it? We don’t really have access to that information,” Mitchell said.
The resolution is a result of faculty and students who are seeking answers about the continuous budgetary crisis over the years, such as the reduction of Graduate Employee positions in 2019 due to budget cuts and the 2020 budget cuts that impacted librarians. Because of these, a lot of research about finances has been going on over the years prior to the drafting of the resolution according to the anonymous source.
Mitchell said that despite the lack of clarity and breakdowns, the university has still asserted that they are unable to meet the needs of the collective bargaining that the unions have made over the last three or four years due to financial constraints.
The resolution also targets the UO Foundation, the team that’s responsible for managing the school’s endowments and gifts.
The UO Foundation is a separate legal entity apart from the university and is a nonprofit corporation, hence why it is exempted from public record requests.
The resolution asks cooperation from the UO Foundation in regards to financial transparency, considering that the donations they receive requires a 5% gift fee that is directly transferred to the university and is allocated for the university’s advancement efforts.
“There’s donor anonymity, which we totally understand and would all be protected. The only thing we’re interested in is learning where this money is earmarked. That’s all we care (about.) We don’t care who it comes from. We don’t care what their reason for giving it is. We just want to know where it’s going to go,” Chris Case, an advocate for the resolution as an SEIU member, said.
Case also said that advocating for financial transparency can strengthen the university’s abilities to uphold their mission not just as an educational institution but also as part of the larger community.
“I would hope that folks in the board and in administration would recognize that financial transparency is one of the keys toward fulfilling the mission of this university, because (the school’s) mission is supposed to be stewards of our community (and) stewards of Oregon proper,” Case said.
The resolution also pursues further clarifications on UO’s investments, gift fees reform and advocacy for shared governance. One of the resolution’s goals is to empower the already existing Senate Budget Committee as a representative and advisory committee that holds weight in decision making and processes. Shared governance is a system where administration, faculty, staff and students all have the responsibilities of decision making. This is a type of system practiced in universities like the University of Washington and Brown University — and is something this resolution pursues for the University of Oregon to practice.
The resolution was discussed at the Associated Students of the University of Oregon’s meeting on June 4, where it passed unanimously with the four unions mentioned above as co-sponsors as well as the Climate Justice League, ASUO President Prissila Moreno, ASUO Senate Speaker Quadrian Gill, Department Speaker Erin Luedemann, and Senators Cole Stevenson, Logan Taylor, Jess Fisher and Bella Hoffert-Hay.
Kayla Fisher, an ASUO senate member who took over the position of the senator who formed a working committee for this resolution, said in an interview prior to the June 4 meeting that she was actively engaging and spearheading in discussions with other senate members to co-sponsor and support this resolution.
According to Fisher, the university owes the students transparency since students pay tuition – especially at a time where students are sent emails about tuition raises and budgetary deficiencies from the university.
Board of Trustees chair Steve Holwerda reminded everyone during the June 3 meeting that the union and the university are on the same team despite their differences.
“We appreciate your time, we appreciate everything that you’re doing (and) we do hear you. All of the information – our ENG budget is all up there (and public),” Holwerda said.
According to Holwerda, “Maybe we need to do a better job of keeping that information out there but we want you to believe that (your questions of) how decisions made are understood, what the numbers are and there’s nobody pulling wools from anybody’s eyes. We all are on the same team and we all want the best.”
Charlie • Jun 10, 2025 at 11:00 am
Sorry, but you’re decades too late. UOwe’s business model is predicated on massive student debt underwritten by taxpayers. No oversight existed that demanded elimination of administrative bloat and waste, which drove tuition to unsustainable levels. Tuition was diverted from academics to pay debt service and maintenance for totally unnecessary construction.
The public and students bear a great deal of responsibility for this fiasco. U of Owe used football and a Nike concocted marketing scheme to mask the fact the flagship no longer fulfilled the needs of Oregonians. Students naively believed a college degree was going to float them into continuous upward social mobility, without asking where were the careers necessary to pay their loans. The Reckoning has arrived, in that enrollment is collapsing because the lies we’ve been told are becoming apparent.
This is just the start. It’s gonna get hella worse…