Southern Oregon University’s Board of Trustees has tasked SOU President Rick Bailey with recommending $5 million in budget cuts by the next board meeting on July 31 — $1.8 million more than previously anticipated to account for significantly low reserves in its $84 million budget for fiscal year 2025-26.

Bailey held a virtual press conference Monday afternoon following a Trustee meeting on Friday to answer questions about the now-pending cuts. Bailey must present a draft action plan to trustees outlining how the $5 million in cuts will be made —  the board has already authorized the amount, so a vote on the plan isn’t needed, according to Bailey. All programs and positions are on the table for cuts, Bailey told Ashland.news in a previous interview.

“To say that we are acting with urgency is a realistic statement,” Bailey told reporters.

Bailey said it is possible that some of the cuts may be implemented before July 31 due to the time constraints the university is currently experiencing.

He emphasized intentionality as the university works through how it will communicate with faculty and staff about reductions.

“In my three and a half years here, we have eliminated over 13% of our full time positions … and with the challenge ahead of us, it looks like we are probably going to have to eliminate another 5 to 7% of our positions,” Bailey said. “The system has to change, the model has to change.”

“We can’t continue to cut our way to some type of success,” he added.

Bailey said he believes the way the current service level for a public university is engineered is “inherently flawed.”

“Because of the ways in which over time … our state has disinvested in public universities, that current service level calculation makes no sense anymore and that’s because now well over two-thirds of our revenues don’t come from the state, they come from students and it’s in the form of tuition and fees,” Bailey said.

Bailey said it is premature to know what programs or positions would be cut, but it will be more than the equivalent of 35 FTE positions previously reported by Ashland.news.

“If we do nothing new, just do what we did last year, we would have to raise tuition somewhere between 12 and 14%, just to do what we did last year,” Bailey told reporters. “And we’re not going to do that — We’re not going to put more and more on the backs of our students, so what that did is create this deficit.”

Bailey said the deficit sits at $3.2 million, but because of the way the funding model works through out the year, “if we achieve those $3.2 million in savings at the end of June 30, we would have less than a day’s worth of operating capital in our reserves.”

“We can’t function like that,” Bailey said, “no university can function like that. So the board said rightly, ‘hey, you actually need to go a little deeper than that so you can provide yourself enough reserves to continue to move forward,’ so that’s why the board made the $5 million decision.”

Bailey made a call-to-action for the state to prioritize public universities, which he sees as a problem-solver for many of the state’s complex issues, such as housing, behavioral health, and early childhood development.

“Our state legislators have an impossible task,” Bailey said. “There are so many different things that they have to fund.

“So we have a choice as a state. We can either continue to respond to crises in real time or we can start to say, ‘how do we actually start to make these crises go away?’ And the way to do that is to be willing to take longer-term investments and the … economic prosperity engines that make that happen are universities.

“We are the ones who are producing business leaders and inventors and scientists and health care providers and teachers and all of the things that help the states’ economy grow,” he added.

Reductions will include some travel expenses as Bailey is not traveling to Guanajuato this summer as he usually does to meet with those affiliated with the sister university there, Universidad de Guanajuato.

“I love Guanajuato and I love our partnership, but I also know we need to be very mindful of what trips we make and how we’re spending,” Bailey said.

“This summer’s all going to be dedicated to helping us navigate the budget crisis.”

More info
To read the Southern Oregon University Board of Trustees Resolution on the Fiscal Year 2025-2026 Budget and Draft Plan of Action, click here

Reach Ashland.news reporter Holly Dillemuth at hollyd@ashland.news. This story first appeared at Ashland.news.