I was on the faculty at UO from 1996 to 2023, so I experienced this creeping (and sometimes galloping) bloat, which was mostly coupled (with a welcome hiatus during Lariviere's presidency) with whining about how it was just impossible to pay UO faculty members salaries comparable to similar universities. There was just no money available, see?
Some administrators (often but not always ones who were formerly faculty members) are competent and make life better for students and faculty and staff. Many, instead, spend their time in ways that make things worse, creating obstacles to effective use of our time on teaching and research. The middle ground of useless (having no discernible positive OR negative impact) still comes with an (often bloated) salary.
Seems analogous to those obstructive, meddling layers of management Peacehealth wanted to add with Apollo MD to the detriment of doctors, nurses, and other productive staff whose direct work is serving patients.
I was staff in an academic dept at UO for 30 years and could see what you are describing, but I was unable to articulate what exactly I was “intuiting.” Is there a resource where hopeful soon to be students can research finding the “best bang for your buck” in their region?
1. Protect the core mission by prioritizing spending on instruction and high‑impact student support. Require all other administrative units to justify their existence against clear institutional goals.
2. Replace across‑the‑board cuts with data‑driven, multi‑year reductions that eliminate low‑value administrative functions, middle‑management layers, and duplicative offices.
3. Use strict central position control and a “no automatic backfill” rule for non‑faculty roles. Use vacancies and buyouts rather than relying on large, sudden layoffs.
4. Require administrative units to regularly demonstrate measurable value in terms of compliance, efficiency, or student and research outcomes.
5. MOST IMPORTANT - Engage shared governance and communicate transparently how administrative reductions will be used to avoid deeper program cuts and tuition hikes, building internal and public support for a sustained rebalancing away from administrative bloat.
You can see the administrative creep across all types of public agencies. This is true at police departments. This is true for k-12 education and yes it is definitely true for higher education. Part of this administrative hiring is not always the high paid deans that you hear about out of it is increased hiring for placement and career services to try to improve career outcomes. Has that really worked? Not really. Theyd be better off hiring more faculty so students have smaller classes and better learning which then fixes the placement issues.
Lane Community College (LCC) in Eugene Oregon let go of many excellent faculty this year while giving the president of the college a 10% raise. That is not what the local community wants - salary increases for already overpaid bureaucrats. Taxpayers and students want faculty retention, especially when they are highly qualified and excellent teachers.
The problem is that voters are ignorant and lazy so they routinely vote however they are instructed by their social media/corporate overlords. I've talked to college students who complain about rent increases but always vote YES on bond measures for their local college. When I ask them if they know what a bond measure is and how educational bonds are funded in their local community, they don't understand the ramifications of their vote.
These voters have an amazing computer in their pocket and could look up what a bond measure is, but they are far too busy gaming and doom scrolling to find the next thing their social media tells them to get mad about, which is usually Trump or their stereotype of conservatives. If they understood government financing, they'd realize that a bond measure is a property tax which will likely result in higher rental costs.
Most voters won't even notice their local community college president demanded a 10% increase while faculty were being cut. Worse, LCC added new dean-level bureaucrats this year. The identity-group departments, that is, those employees who facilitate special resources for people with a special identity, added more expensive bureaucrats. What a waste of tax money. You can't challenge these drains on tax resources without being called either something-phobic or racist, two of the most common insults the Left uses against anyone who can still use their brain.
Apparently you can't fix stupid, even if the voters are in college.
Yes, it’s a very fair and important question to ask: Are undergraduate students benefitting from the research at a Carnegie R1 Institution? I would encourage you to pose this question to the Provost and the VP for Research and Innovation (VPRI), as well as the President. I trust they would welcome it.
Of course, we’d have to agree to define the term “benefitting” and how we’d assess said benefits, including the metrics we'd use. However, at minimum, we’d want to count the number of undergraduate students who are directly involved with faculty research and their level of active engagement (i.e., member of a research team, hours/week spent in a lab or research setting, co-authors on publications, tuition waiver for research engagement, wage earners, preparation/support for graduate school).
You note that one of your kids is engaged in such undergraduate research at a different university which may be an exception to the undergraduate research experience at the UO, and I don't doubt it.
I recall there used to be a significant campus-wide undergraduate research effort that the VPRI’s Office (or Provost?) initiated annually and concluded with a poster session celebrating the undergraduates’ research during the spring term.
As another example, Purdue University had a major campus-wide undergraduate research enterprise that supported URT’s—Undergraduate Research Trainees—and “David Ross" Research Fellows. Faculty applied for URTs to assist them in their programs of research. I obtained an URT each year when I was there. I brought that idea to the UO and started a similar undergraduate research program called the URF—Undergraduate Research Fellowship. Interestingly, I persuaded the VPRI at the time to return my “indirect costs” on a grant I received from the David Packard Foundation to kick start it. I eventually utilized funds from the research center I started at the UO to support 2-3 URFs per year for 20 years (1998-2018) to engage in research across disciplines. The program paid the URF's tuition for a year.
Importantly, through the URF program I gained an appreciation for the undergraduate research enterprise at the UO in a full range of disciplines (e.g., physics, biology, chemistry, English) that I otherwise would not have accessed. Unfortunately, research in disciplines tends to be a vertical and monastic effort (Yes, “silo-ish”) and more effort is required to expose the research to the public and transfer it into the undergraduate and graduate curricula at the UO.
It’s hard to quibble with your call to “controlling tuition without shorting the research mission” at the UO. I’m sure we have much to learn from our colleagues at OSU, Purdue, and elsewhere.
Again, thank you for your public service, keen attention to these matters and ongoing public engagement. I appreciate it.
1. Although you note that “This is not about educational quality or institutional mission” (p. 1), comparing the tuition of LCC with the UO is silly.
a. It suffers from the well-worn cliché of comparing apples with grapes (fruits, for sure, but apples are pomes and grapes are a type of berry; both differ in fiber, sugar, glycemic content, etc).
b. The UO is a Carnegie RI research university and one of only two PNW members of the AAU—publishing research is not an option but a requirement. LCC faculty focus primarily on teaching and professional development.
c. Thus, students (undergraduates and certainly graduate students) who attend the UO do so to gain access to that research knowledge.
2. Gaining clean and definitive “staffing data” from public institutions, especially universities, is not easy and I’m not persuaded that the HECC has these (clean and definitive) data. In fact, they probably don’t.
a. The staffing data at any R1 university are likely to be complex within each category (e.g., university administrator, instructor, Professor, Research Associate, Dean) representing a “categorical mistake”—overly broad for precise counting purposes.
b. An “administrator” (i.e., HECC defined as “personnel who hold authority to make financial, academic, curricular or operational decisions”) at the UO can readily hold multiple administration and instructional positions at the same time (For example: Associate Dean for Research + Tenure Professor + Principal Investigator + Faculty Instructor for multiple graduate classes + Director of multiple grants + Program Director for multiple undergraduate and graduate students). Not all administrators are exclusively administrators.
c. Thus, a faculty position is potentially a “Gordian Knot” and not a dichotomous category (administrator vs instructor). Many, if not most, administration positions are, for all practical purpose, “nested” categories with a mix of administrative and instructional duties.
3. I’m not persuaded that using the standard ratio of faculty or non-faculty to student metric is accurate as an indicator of instructional quality.
a. For example, a professor (tenure track) who teaches an undergraduate course that enrolls 250-300 students represents a very important difference from a professor who teaches a doctoral seminar that enrolls 15 students.
b. Both may be reasonable or unreasonable faculty-to-student ratio depending on the focus and purpose of the courses and the proposed outcomes. A “clinical” student-to-teacher ratio required to meet a national certification standard represents a more meaningful and important standard than a non-clinical ratio in which student performance criteria are less stringent.
4. Footnote: Side-by-side pictures of the LCC downtown building and the “luxury Autzen Stadium Skybox” is also silly and gratuitous. It also weakens your typically solid and data-based rational approach. The Skybox is not a funding issue related to instructional quality per se, because the UO Athletic Department is an independent fiscal entity with its separate budget, fundraising process, and authority.
5. As an aside, I read and share your columns regularly because I think they are thoughtful and generally on the mark. Obviously, I have a few quibbles with this one as noted above. However, I look forward to continuing to read your column—for free—and offer these comments as background for consideration.
I served on the UO faculty as an administrator, researcher, creator & director of a research center and a tenured professor for 30 years. I have been retired from the UO for 8 years. The general principles of your piece are notable (i.e., managing administrative bloat, increasing instructional quality) but getting the "right" data to support your argument may be more difficult. Thank you and all the best.
Hi Professor - Some fair criticisms. If we're focusing on the benefit to students, I think it's also fair to ask if they're really benefiting from the research mission. I haven't seen any notable undergraduate research happening when I teach there, contrary to the experience of one of my kids at a different university. Is it fair to ask them to subsidize a system they don't directly benefit from? Is their experience at UO necessarily better than, say, the experience of undergraduates at WOU, SOU, EOU, or OIT? I would note that the last was recently recognized as being the best "value added" public university in the country. OSU has done a better job at controlling tuition without shorting the research mission. It is difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons, but I think there's a lot of evidence that UO hasn't focused on controlling costs as much as it should have. As it faces budget cuts, I worry that the decisions will be made primarily by faculty focused primarily on research and administrators/non-instructional staff focused on keeping their jobs. Thanks for the thoughtful engagement.
Can someone tell me if the UO athletic program spending and revenue is included in the statistics in the article, or is it separate from the educational program?
Hi Debi - To the extent that those are administrators, yes. I didn't find a way to disaggregate that. However, I would note that athletics "pays its own way" at UO, in contrast to most schools.
When I was chief of staff at Sacred Heart hospital in 1998-2000 I proposed at the monthly board meeting that the hospital keep track of the number of administrators compared to patients seen or another comparable metric. There was no one to second my motion. Perhaps it's some irrefutable law of "Not for profit" bureaucracies.
I was on the faculty at UO from 1996 to 2023, so I experienced this creeping (and sometimes galloping) bloat, which was mostly coupled (with a welcome hiatus during Lariviere's presidency) with whining about how it was just impossible to pay UO faculty members salaries comparable to similar universities. There was just no money available, see?
Some administrators (often but not always ones who were formerly faculty members) are competent and make life better for students and faculty and staff. Many, instead, spend their time in ways that make things worse, creating obstacles to effective use of our time on teaching and research. The middle ground of useless (having no discernible positive OR negative impact) still comes with an (often bloated) salary.
Seems analogous to those obstructive, meddling layers of management Peacehealth wanted to add with Apollo MD to the detriment of doctors, nurses, and other productive staff whose direct work is serving patients.
I was staff in an academic dept at UO for 30 years and could see what you are describing, but I was unable to articulate what exactly I was “intuiting.” Is there a resource where hopeful soon to be students can research finding the “best bang for your buck” in their region?
Good question! My two cents -
1. Protect the core mission by prioritizing spending on instruction and high‑impact student support. Require all other administrative units to justify their existence against clear institutional goals.
2. Replace across‑the‑board cuts with data‑driven, multi‑year reductions that eliminate low‑value administrative functions, middle‑management layers, and duplicative offices.
3. Use strict central position control and a “no automatic backfill” rule for non‑faculty roles. Use vacancies and buyouts rather than relying on large, sudden layoffs.
4. Require administrative units to regularly demonstrate measurable value in terms of compliance, efficiency, or student and research outcomes.
5. MOST IMPORTANT - Engage shared governance and communicate transparently how administrative reductions will be used to avoid deeper program cuts and tuition hikes, building internal and public support for a sustained rebalancing away from administrative bloat.
You can see the administrative creep across all types of public agencies. This is true at police departments. This is true for k-12 education and yes it is definitely true for higher education. Part of this administrative hiring is not always the high paid deans that you hear about out of it is increased hiring for placement and career services to try to improve career outcomes. Has that really worked? Not really. Theyd be better off hiring more faculty so students have smaller classes and better learning which then fixes the placement issues.
Lane Community College (LCC) in Eugene Oregon let go of many excellent faculty this year while giving the president of the college a 10% raise. That is not what the local community wants - salary increases for already overpaid bureaucrats. Taxpayers and students want faculty retention, especially when they are highly qualified and excellent teachers.
The problem is that voters are ignorant and lazy so they routinely vote however they are instructed by their social media/corporate overlords. I've talked to college students who complain about rent increases but always vote YES on bond measures for their local college. When I ask them if they know what a bond measure is and how educational bonds are funded in their local community, they don't understand the ramifications of their vote.
These voters have an amazing computer in their pocket and could look up what a bond measure is, but they are far too busy gaming and doom scrolling to find the next thing their social media tells them to get mad about, which is usually Trump or their stereotype of conservatives. If they understood government financing, they'd realize that a bond measure is a property tax which will likely result in higher rental costs.
Most voters won't even notice their local community college president demanded a 10% increase while faculty were being cut. Worse, LCC added new dean-level bureaucrats this year. The identity-group departments, that is, those employees who facilitate special resources for people with a special identity, added more expensive bureaucrats. What a waste of tax money. You can't challenge these drains on tax resources without being called either something-phobic or racist, two of the most common insults the Left uses against anyone who can still use their brain.
Apparently you can't fix stupid, even if the voters are in college.
Yes, it’s a very fair and important question to ask: Are undergraduate students benefitting from the research at a Carnegie R1 Institution? I would encourage you to pose this question to the Provost and the VP for Research and Innovation (VPRI), as well as the President. I trust they would welcome it.
Of course, we’d have to agree to define the term “benefitting” and how we’d assess said benefits, including the metrics we'd use. However, at minimum, we’d want to count the number of undergraduate students who are directly involved with faculty research and their level of active engagement (i.e., member of a research team, hours/week spent in a lab or research setting, co-authors on publications, tuition waiver for research engagement, wage earners, preparation/support for graduate school).
You note that one of your kids is engaged in such undergraduate research at a different university which may be an exception to the undergraduate research experience at the UO, and I don't doubt it.
I recall there used to be a significant campus-wide undergraduate research effort that the VPRI’s Office (or Provost?) initiated annually and concluded with a poster session celebrating the undergraduates’ research during the spring term.
As another example, Purdue University had a major campus-wide undergraduate research enterprise that supported URT’s—Undergraduate Research Trainees—and “David Ross" Research Fellows. Faculty applied for URTs to assist them in their programs of research. I obtained an URT each year when I was there. I brought that idea to the UO and started a similar undergraduate research program called the URF—Undergraduate Research Fellowship. Interestingly, I persuaded the VPRI at the time to return my “indirect costs” on a grant I received from the David Packard Foundation to kick start it. I eventually utilized funds from the research center I started at the UO to support 2-3 URFs per year for 20 years (1998-2018) to engage in research across disciplines. The program paid the URF's tuition for a year.
Importantly, through the URF program I gained an appreciation for the undergraduate research enterprise at the UO in a full range of disciplines (e.g., physics, biology, chemistry, English) that I otherwise would not have accessed. Unfortunately, research in disciplines tends to be a vertical and monastic effort (Yes, “silo-ish”) and more effort is required to expose the research to the public and transfer it into the undergraduate and graduate curricula at the UO.
It’s hard to quibble with your call to “controlling tuition without shorting the research mission” at the UO. I’m sure we have much to learn from our colleagues at OSU, Purdue, and elsewhere.
Again, thank you for your public service, keen attention to these matters and ongoing public engagement. I appreciate it.
1. Although you note that “This is not about educational quality or institutional mission” (p. 1), comparing the tuition of LCC with the UO is silly.
a. It suffers from the well-worn cliché of comparing apples with grapes (fruits, for sure, but apples are pomes and grapes are a type of berry; both differ in fiber, sugar, glycemic content, etc).
b. The UO is a Carnegie RI research university and one of only two PNW members of the AAU—publishing research is not an option but a requirement. LCC faculty focus primarily on teaching and professional development.
c. Thus, students (undergraduates and certainly graduate students) who attend the UO do so to gain access to that research knowledge.
2. Gaining clean and definitive “staffing data” from public institutions, especially universities, is not easy and I’m not persuaded that the HECC has these (clean and definitive) data. In fact, they probably don’t.
a. The staffing data at any R1 university are likely to be complex within each category (e.g., university administrator, instructor, Professor, Research Associate, Dean) representing a “categorical mistake”—overly broad for precise counting purposes.
b. An “administrator” (i.e., HECC defined as “personnel who hold authority to make financial, academic, curricular or operational decisions”) at the UO can readily hold multiple administration and instructional positions at the same time (For example: Associate Dean for Research + Tenure Professor + Principal Investigator + Faculty Instructor for multiple graduate classes + Director of multiple grants + Program Director for multiple undergraduate and graduate students). Not all administrators are exclusively administrators.
c. Thus, a faculty position is potentially a “Gordian Knot” and not a dichotomous category (administrator vs instructor). Many, if not most, administration positions are, for all practical purpose, “nested” categories with a mix of administrative and instructional duties.
3. I’m not persuaded that using the standard ratio of faculty or non-faculty to student metric is accurate as an indicator of instructional quality.
a. For example, a professor (tenure track) who teaches an undergraduate course that enrolls 250-300 students represents a very important difference from a professor who teaches a doctoral seminar that enrolls 15 students.
b. Both may be reasonable or unreasonable faculty-to-student ratio depending on the focus and purpose of the courses and the proposed outcomes. A “clinical” student-to-teacher ratio required to meet a national certification standard represents a more meaningful and important standard than a non-clinical ratio in which student performance criteria are less stringent.
4. Footnote: Side-by-side pictures of the LCC downtown building and the “luxury Autzen Stadium Skybox” is also silly and gratuitous. It also weakens your typically solid and data-based rational approach. The Skybox is not a funding issue related to instructional quality per se, because the UO Athletic Department is an independent fiscal entity with its separate budget, fundraising process, and authority.
5. As an aside, I read and share your columns regularly because I think they are thoughtful and generally on the mark. Obviously, I have a few quibbles with this one as noted above. However, I look forward to continuing to read your column—for free—and offer these comments as background for consideration.
I served on the UO faculty as an administrator, researcher, creator & director of a research center and a tenured professor for 30 years. I have been retired from the UO for 8 years. The general principles of your piece are notable (i.e., managing administrative bloat, increasing instructional quality) but getting the "right" data to support your argument may be more difficult. Thank you and all the best.
Hi Professor - Some fair criticisms. If we're focusing on the benefit to students, I think it's also fair to ask if they're really benefiting from the research mission. I haven't seen any notable undergraduate research happening when I teach there, contrary to the experience of one of my kids at a different university. Is it fair to ask them to subsidize a system they don't directly benefit from? Is their experience at UO necessarily better than, say, the experience of undergraduates at WOU, SOU, EOU, or OIT? I would note that the last was recently recognized as being the best "value added" public university in the country. OSU has done a better job at controlling tuition without shorting the research mission. It is difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons, but I think there's a lot of evidence that UO hasn't focused on controlling costs as much as it should have. As it faces budget cuts, I worry that the decisions will be made primarily by faculty focused primarily on research and administrators/non-instructional staff focused on keeping their jobs. Thanks for the thoughtful engagement.
Can someone tell me if the UO athletic program spending and revenue is included in the statistics in the article, or is it separate from the educational program?
Hi Debi - To the extent that those are administrators, yes. I didn't find a way to disaggregate that. However, I would note that athletics "pays its own way" at UO, in contrast to most schools.
Thank you for clearing that up for me.
When I was chief of staff at Sacred Heart hospital in 1998-2000 I proposed at the monthly board meeting that the hospital keep track of the number of administrators compared to patients seen or another comparable metric. There was no one to second my motion. Perhaps it's some irrefutable law of "Not for profit" bureaucracies.
Lee Michels M.D. 541 225-7717