Jayanth Banavar, University of Oregon provost, hosted a town hall meeting on April 22 that drew a concerned crowd. The event, held at the EMU, detailed the university’s current budgetary landscape amidst cuts and rising tuition.
“It’s a very difficult situation we are facing,” Banavar addressed the crowd. “It’s been very tense for all of us, we’ve been working around the clock.” He described the 11.6 million dollar reductions to the University announced in March.
Jamie Moffitt, Vice President for Finance and Administration, co-hosted the town hall and led the audience through a rundown of where the university stands financially, calling the budget decision situation a “challenging process.”
“I’m going to show you a lot of numbers, but the numbers affect people and I do realize that,” Moffitt said.
She focused on the Education and General Fund budget, the approximately $541 million budget with the most tuition and state money and which funds the most campus activity.
“For the last three years, we have been roughly balanced,” Moffitt said. “And by balanced I mean enough money’s coming in to pay the bills going out.”
But this year she said that issues with low enrollment, especially a significant decline in international student matriculation, have contributed to a deficit.
“When we think about next year, we now have two issues to deal with next year: we need to figure out how to make up this deficit, and we have costs that are increasing next year,” she said.
Costs Moffitt highlighted include increases in salaries and wages and payments to the state-mandated retirement program.
Moffitt said that with costs increasing, the university is looking at a gap of around $34 million to cover.
“This is by far the biggest number we’ve ever faced in the eight years I’ve been involved in this,” she said.
To meet this challenge, the university has to take actions such as raising tuition, seeking more state funding, focusing on campus expansion to boost enrollment and implementing cuts, Moffitt explained.
Many audience members expressed concern over the direction the administration was taking in setting the budget and tuition, especially with certain projects the university funds.
One attendee asked whether tuition would be used most to cover the cost of building debt. Moffitt replied that only the EMU and the Student Rec Center would be paid that way. “Whatever service it is, whatever entity it is, it’s their facility they are paying for.”
Another participant, a graduate student, questioned why administrative pay has increased while tuition rises as well.
Banavar stated that Schill’s salary was a market value, and, “There may be many [universities] whose presidents get less than he does, there may be many whose presidents get more than he does,” Banavar said. “This is something that’s really determined by the market and by the Board of Trustees.”
Banavar could not answer whether Schill would take a decrease from his salary.
“All I know is that he did make a very generous scholarship donation, which I thought was very nice,” Banavar said.
At one point, former BOT member Kurt Wilcox expressed concern over funding cuts to the university museums, the Oregon Bach Festival and the Learning Education and Research Center, as well as high administrative pay, with applause from the crowd.
“I’m very concerned about proportionality here,” Wilcox said, “I think all the extension programs I’ve mentioned are valuable programs.”
Banavar promised to mention the matter to Schill and said that the finances for those were reduced by the provost’s office to focus more on programs that directly impacted and facilitated student success.
“If we did not cut certain things, we’d have to cut other things,” he said. “We’re trying to protect our schools and colleges and make sure that the aggregate of the cuts was as small as we could afford, because that was directly impacting our students.”
