The Museum of Natural and Cultural History, tucked behind the University of Oregon Law School, receives a little over half its operating budget from the university.
As budget cuts swept across campus in the fall, the museum’s capacity and behind the scenes operations were more impacted than the public facing parts of the museum. The museum, which opened in its current iteration in 1935, gives students a wide variety of unique opportunities such as education and job training, Lexie Briggs, marketing director for the museum, said.
“We have thousands of students who come through and do all kinds of learning experiences,” Briggs said. “(For example,) you’re in a geology class, so you come to the museum and you look at the rocks and the history of the geological formations of Oregon and fill out some worksheets (for) intensive studies.”
The museum’s operational budget that comes from the university goes toward curation, exhibits and education.
“It funds everything that you think of the museum doing in any way; your experience probably comes from that funding,” Briggs said. “The things that don’t come from that funding are very specific grant-based projects that don’t get a ton of publicity or archaeology, that happen as a result of state projects.”
To the casual viewer, Briggs said, the impact of the cuts won’t be visible, but will be felt behind the scenes. In 2025, the museum hosted several large exhibits, including one called “Hostile Terrain 94,” in which several hundred UO students filled out and placed over 4,000 toe tags and death markers for human remains found in the Soroan desert in Arizona on an interactive map. While the museum
will continue to put on large interactive exhibits in 2026, Briggs said, aiming for “big pie in the sky” projects will be more difficult.
“What we are running into (with the budget cuts) is not necessarily any changes to our curation, or our ability to work on artifacts and put things on display, but really about capacity and how much we can get done as a museum,” Briggs said.
Despite the cuts, Briggs said the museum will continue to “push for new things” and continue to provide UO students, researchers and faculty with unique opportunities.
“Hopefully the budget cuts that we are experiencing aren’t as visible to the outside and we are still doing the core things that we do best and keep that going,” Briggs said.
