Southern Oregon University’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously Friday to begin crafting its own strategy for fiscal stability.
The board agreed to use Deloitte Consulting's report as a recommendation but stopped short of adopting the state-commissioned report, which called for approximately $20 million in cuts and warned the university could face closure without major changes.
University leaders now have about a month to develop a long-term financial plan required to secure $15 million in state emergency funding.
The board made no final decisions about which programs would be cut or what restructuring would take place.
Community members had pushed back on Deloitte's recommendations, which included cutting academic programs such as music and gender, sexuality and women's studies.
Board Chair Sheila Clough clarified at the outset of the meeting the role of Deloitte's guidance.
"We are not taking a vote on a consultant’s plan," she said. "Today, we're taking a vote and acknowledging a plan, recognizing the critical state this university is in and committing to the urgency of setting our own plan, setting the stage for this university to be strong into the future."
According to the board's resolution, the university administration must develop a plan to put SOU in a healthy financial position and ensure its long-term viability. The resolution also calls for the university president to create a nonvoting university transformation advisory committee composed of students, faculty, staff and trustees to collect and distribute information, advise university leaders and communicate updates to the campus community.
The resolution did not specify what the university’s final plan could include or which programs could be eliminated.
During the meeting, student body president Sophia Smith asked the board for "clarity and finality."
"We need to see the end of this cat-and-mouse funding game that we've been playing for years," she said, getting choked up. "There has to be a financial reset for this university. We cannot take any more pain from the programmatic cuts that have haunted this campus. We cannot endure more."
Trustees acknowledged SOU has suffered a series of fiscal crises in recent years, leading to a loss of trust and confidence in both the board and the institution.
Faculty Senate Chair Dennis Slattery, an accountant, said the institution's calculations must be completely accurate.
"I'm sorry to point the finger at finance, but people’s lives and livelihoods depend on our numbers being right. Our numbers have been highly suspect," he said. "We simply must make getting this exactly right the highest priority."
Trustee Daniel Santos agreed.
"The risk is we get it wrong again. We get the wrong data. That’s the really big risk," he said. "We've been overly optimistic on our revenues, and we've been overly optimistic on our ability to maintain costs. And we've not done this once, twice."
In a press conference after the meeting, SOU President Rick Bailey defended the university's vice president of finance.
"We have a team that is doing exactly what we need the institution to do," he said. "We are in a better fiscal awareness than we've ever been."
The vitality and implementation plans must be completed within about a month before the board considers them on June 18.
Trustee Matt Stephenson warned that failing to quickly create and execute a plan could leave the university with no option other than closure.
"If we don’t take decisive action on one of these other paths, this is the default that will happen," he said. "It is the alternative if we don't do one of these other options, and not just choose a different option, but execute it very well."
Deloitte claimed SOU must follow its recommendations exactly or else face winding down.
Bailey said the coming weeks will involve assessing Deloitte's report and all other options, including external partnerships.
"What are the things in that recommendation that we should actually copy, like wholesale, do exactly what they say? What are some things that really probably should be evaluated?" he said in the press conference. "Those are things that we've got to figure out, and we've got to figure those out pretty fast."
Once the plan is in place, it must be implemented by June 2027.
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.
