On a Sunday evening in March, nine months ago, I sat on an airport floor in Los Angeles staring at my laptop, attending an online meeting of the University of Oregon’s faculty union, facing the possibility of going on strike the next day. In August, I wrote emails trying to persuade the university administration not to destroy the institution of tenure simply to solve a 5% budget deficit. I never expected to be doing any of these things; 2025 has been an unusual year. Already, my memory of these events grows dim, so I’ll write down what I recall. In part, this is so I can read it and point to it later. In part, it is because these dramas, while specific to the University of Oregon (UO), have causes and consequences that apply more broadly across US universities.
Tenure on the chopping block?
I’ll start with the more recent events. Like many schools, UO is facing budget problems and has a “structural deficit,” meaning that recurring expenses exceed income. In May, the university president and provost announced that significant cuts would be made as a result, with plans developed in Summer and implemented beginning in Fall. At the start of the Summer, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (by far the largest college in the University) announced that quite a few (non-tenured) instructors would be fired, including some exceptionally effective and highly regarded instructors who teach large numbers of students. This, however, was only the first part of budget cuts.
During the Summer of 2025, plans were made. It’s not clear by whom — some combination of the president, provost, and deans — or in consultation with whom — there’s considerable disagreement about whether department heads and others were simply told what was happening or whether their views shaped policy. In any case, in late Summer a plan surfaced featuring drastic measures, likely including closing departments and firing their faculty and, more shockingly, firing tenured faculty in other departments that would not be closed. “A plan surfaced” is intentionally vague; there was no official announcement of this course of action, but multiple well-informed sources stated that this was the case. (I’m basing this on many conversations with a wide range of people.)
The first part of the proposal — closing departments, mainly in the humanities — has precedents elsewhere. I strongly disagree with this path, but a reasonable person might argue for it. The second part — firing tenured faculty — is shocking, and would effectively eliminate tenure in any meaningful sense. Is this even legal?
The short version of the administration’s argument, as best as I can reconstruct it, is that the condition of “financial exigency” justifies sacking tenured faculty. Now let us return to the magnitude of the “crisis” — it’s not that we’re a hundred or more millions of dollars in the red (like some universities are or recently were), or that we’re in danger of imminent collapse, as “exigency” would imply. Rather, our deficit is $25M/year. For scale, our income from the state of Oregon plus student tuition is about $600M/year ($100M + 500M, respectively), so the deficit is less than 5%. The total operating budget of the university, including research grants, is $1.1 billion, so relative to this $25M is less than 2.5%. For this the administration considers getting rid of tenure? Even if the firings targeted only low-performing faculty (who certainly exist, though in small numbers), the obvious implication for any tenured faculty member with any sense would be that their status is meaningless if it can be erased by a few percent budget deficit. Many would leave the university, or perhaps academia altogether, since tenure is part of the compensation for this job. The University of Oregon would likely never again be able to hire excellent, or even moderately good, faculty.
At this point the university president and provost, if they were looking over my shoulder, would protest: we never actually proposed firing tenured faculty; that was just rumor and hearsay. This is a nonsensical objection, both because the administration (at least some subset of it) did propose such things, even if not publicly, and more importantly because the president and provost could have at any point during the summer bluntly stated that such rumors were false and tenure was not on the chopping block. Certainly many people, me included, wrote to them with our concerns. The president and provost are responsible for their silence and atrocious communication. This is also a good place to note that lowering the salaries of our president ($725,000) or provost ($540k plus a $130k/year research budget for the costly subject of philosophy) never came up as responses to our budget crisis.
There’s much more that could be said about the legality of firing tenured faculty in departments that aren’t being closed. I think this would violate our employment contract — see Section 25 here. The faculty union has a good essay about this, discussing the claim of financial exigency. There’s also a sub-section (6) on “Procedures for Faculty Input,” noting that decisions “must be made pursuant to university procedures providing for faculty and other appropriate input and be based on financial or academic considerations that reflect long-range judgments about the academic mission of the university.” I would bet that, if enacted, the firings wouldn’t stand up in court.
Summer ticked by. On August 18, 2025, the president emailed a timeline:
August 11-29: Deans and Vice Presidents provided recommendations to the president and provost for consideration. Appropriate steps that align with institutional guidelines and procedures will conclude before Labor Day.
Week of September 7: Another message will be sent to the campus community outlining specific plans of action. Employees affected directly by the budget reductions will be notified of their job status.
As you can imagine, tension was high. Innumerable hallway conversations ensued, emails within and beyond the university were written and read. I and many others wrote to friends (including administrators) at other universities, making the situation known. On September 4, our problems made it into the widely read Chronicle of Higher Education, in an article titled, “The U. of Oregon Says It’s Involving Faculty in Budget Decisions. Professors Say It’s ‘Fake Shared Governance.’” Link
On September 8, the administration backtracked. The president emailed: “Through careful consultation with deans, department heads and the University Senate, we were able to substantially close our budget deficit without eliminating any degree programs. And while we are cutting 20 filled career faculty positions and 14 unfilled tenure track faculty positions, we are not eliminating any filled tenure track faculty positions.”
And so, at the last minute, disaster was averted. What happened to the budget deficit? It still exists, but now we have the sensible, if not pleasant, plan of handling it gradually through attrition, replacing only a small fraction of retiring or departing faculty for the next few years. Wouldn’t this have been the sensible procedure from the start? (Other than the unimaginable options of lowering the size of the administrative and non-instructional parts of the university.) Here the president and provost will blame the Board of Trustees for insisting on a fast budget resolution. Educating the board, or standing up to it, is part of the president’s job, however. UO has precedent, our excellent former president who did, in fact, stand up to the board; see here. It’s true that he was fired by the board, but he landed on his feet, and part of the justification given for ridiculously high administrative salaries is a willingness to make tough choices and afford the consequences. Perhaps the president and provost blame the deans, and vice versa; it doesn’t really matter.
In which I almost went on strike
Next, the earlier drama. Having already written more than I planned to, I’ll be brief. Since 2012, faculty at the University of Oregon have been unionized. Starting in February, 2024, the union and the faculty debated a new contract, the process stretching for about 13 months largely due to minimal convergence on salaries. The administration argued, in essence, that money is tight and our salaries are fine; the union argued that faculty salaries are about 88% of the average among public “AAU” universities — the collection of research universities that are considered our peers. (Top administrative salaries are about 99% of what they are at our peers, by the way.) An informative post on all this, from a union member, is here.
I was not in favor of the creation of the union, for reasons I won’t bother describing here. Later, I was ambivalent. Recently, I’m in generally in favor of the union. I haven’t grown generally more pro-labor, but I’ve grown more anti-administration for reasons that are reflected in the first part of this post. I don’t care so much about the salary, but I think forcing this as the central issue is the only way to make it clear that ever-expanding administrative positions and declining focus on academics have a cost, and that faculty are valuable. Why, one wonders, do we have far more associate deans and vice provosts than in the past? Why are there multiple administrative positions related to undergraduate research (which have little tangible effect on actual undergraduate research)? Why do we have a “graduate school” with a vice provost and an associate dean of graduate studies in the College of Arts and Sciences?
In any case, bargaining went on for a year. (A timeline is here.) On February 18, 2025, the union declared an impasse on salary issues. Some time before this, members were called upon to authorize a strike, and to commit to strike. This was painful. Striking would necessarily involve not teaching, since teaching is the most visible part of our jobs and its absence leads to pressure on the university. Of course, striking harms students, which is not a pleasant outcome. Less clear was whether striking requires abandoning one’s research group. After a lot of thought, I signed the strike pledge but with an asterisk indicating that I would not withhold my “labor” from my research group; this would harm them and, unlike canceling classes, would be invisible from the perspective of the administration or the outside world. The decision to potentially strike passed by a large margin; 89% of members voted, and 92% voted “yes.” (I should note that not all faculty are union members; some choose not to be, and others are prohibited by the unfortunate structure the union decided on long ago.)
Negotiation continued, including all day bargaining sessions on Thursday, March 27, Friday, March 28, and Saturday, March 29; a labor strike would begin on Monday, March 31, the first day of the Spring term. On Sunday, March 30, the two sides converged. An online union meeting Sunday evening laid out the agreement, and assessed the members’ thoughts. Recall that there was a lot of academia-related turmoil nationwide at this time: the Trump administration had frozen vast amounts of funding, including a wide range of research grants, targeting institutions like Columbia in particular and the overall landscape of higher education more generally. Infighting at UO would look especially bad in this context, which probably spurred the UO administration to cede more ground than had previously seemed likely, and the union to quickly agree. There was a palpable mood of relief at the virtual meeting. (My family had been attending a wedding in LA, which is why I was on an airport terminal floor. Yes, I would have preferred a seat.) A local news story about the drama is here
And so, at the last minute, disaster was averted.
Here’s to a less eventful 2026
Though their effects may be unique, the challenges faced by the University of Oregon are faced by many colleges and universities in the U.S. The federal government continues to threaten research funding; state governments, regardless of ideology, are tightening their purses; enrollment in higher education is expected to decline as its value is increasingly questioned, especially given the exorbitant increases in tuition that universities continue to impose. At UO, for example, tuition for desperately courted non-Oregon-residents is now $46,000 per year. None of these challenges will disappear soon.
Also not unique to UO is a disconnect between the administration and the faculty. There are many causes for this, but one is the transient administrative class that has dominated academia for the past two decades or so that flits from university to university, encouraging short term thinking and making long-term trust-based relationships difficult. I have been faculty at UO since 2006; I have experienced nine presidents, counting a few interim ones.
I hope the University of Oregon has a less stressful 2026. If you’re associated with a university, I hope your institution avoids our problems!
Today’s illustration…
Hills and valleys; pencil. An illustration for a new project I’m working on.
— Raghuveer Parthasarathy, December 23, 2025
The Eighteenth Elephant 