A new plan from Deloitte Consulting to stabilize Southern Oregon University calls for cutting academic programs, outsourcing administrative operations and leasing campus buildings to generate revenue.
Deloitte released its full plan Monday, warning the university must make drastic cuts to remain viable or risk winding down.
The report expands on last week’s preview, including greater emphasis on philanthropic support.
It also specifies academic programs to cut, including creative writing and music. Some of them — gender, sexuality and women's studies and international studies — were already being phased out under the university's resiliency plan approved in September, which cut more than $10 million over four years.
Deloitte's report also proposes consolidating or reconfiguring other programs, such as outdoor adventure leadership, economics and physics.
These changes would affect nearly 400 students, who might leave the university, choose a different program or find a pathway to complete their degree at SOU.
Deloitte’s Megan Cluver said at a presentation Monday that most of the institution’s programs are shrinking, many of them operate at a deficit and student enrollment is concentrated in a few areas.
"This suggests that a sustainable path forward requires greater concentration around programs that students choose at scale, programs that serve workforce needs and that can operate at more sustainable margins," she said.
Ahead of the plan's release, Faculty Senate Chair Dennis Slattery said in an interview Friday that he worried about the scope of the cuts, wondering if they would make SOU "too small to succeed."
"It's like we're being set up to fail," he said.
In addition to the 2025 reductions, the university also cut more than 80 full-time-equivalent positions in 2023.
Monday's report included only a passing reference to Jefferson Public Radio, stating that the university should evaluate auxiliary programs based on their financial performance and alignment with the university's mission, and, as appropriate, consider "divestiture, outsourcing, or spin-off models."
Last week's preview included $300,000 in cuts to JPR.
SOU President Rick Bailey addressed the campus community at Monday's meeting
"We are really being called to transform," he said. "We have to embrace that, especially knowing that we love this university."
The report attributes many of SOU's financial pressures to external factors, including shifts in federal funding and fewer students enrolling in college. It also notes Oregon ranks 46th in state funding per four-year student.
The university must develop a long-term plan for fiscal sustainability to receive $15 million in emergency funding from the state legislature.
That timeline leaves little room to balance short-term, emergency action with long-term planning.
"Revenue initiatives are critical to the future of SOU, but they generally take longer to design, to launch and to realize than expense reductions, and many require investment or execution capacity that SOU may not have today," Cluver said. "That means cost-cutting and operational discipline have to do the heavy lifting in the short term."
All university changes must be completed by June 2027.
"This has just been too short a time period to do an adequate deep dive into this complexity of problems that we face," Slattery said.
This proposal is not final. SOU’s Board of Trustees will hold a public listening session Tuesday and is scheduled to vote on the plan Friday.
A community coalition is organizing a public forum Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Medford public library to discuss the university's future.
Meanwhile, a student petition says the student body has "lost all faith in our decision-making administrators to center us and our education." It calls on the Higher Education Coordinating Commission to audit the school's administrative positions in order to reduce what it describes as "administrative bloat."
JPR is licensed to Southern Oregon University, but our newsroom operates independently. Guided by our journalistic standards and ethics, we cover the university like any other organization in the region. No university official reviewed or edited this story before it was published.
