Letters to the Editor

University of Puget Sound is not immune to the financial and enrollment realities facing higher education nationally, and as campus leaders we have a responsibility to maintain the academic and financial health of the university. For this reason, I charged the AAAPR Committee with providing their recommendations for how best to balance the academic priorities and financial reality of the institution given the current $10 million structural budget deficit. I thoughtfully considered their recommendations in light of our strategic plan goals, shared their report with the campus community for additional...

At the October 2022 meeting of the Board of Trustees, the Board voted on the President’s recommendations to move the university towards financial equilibrium by the end of Fiscal Year 2026. General bullet points were shared with the university community. The plan was not. Faculty requested to see the full report and supporting documents that were provided by the President and ultimately approved by the Board. To date, the President has not shared those documents with the faculty. This is a departure from the transparency and collaborative process the president...

From Monica DeHart, Nancy Bristow, Robin Jacobson, and Siddharth Ramakrishnan; all are previous members of the AAAPRC. In the hopes of clarifying the work and recommendations of the AAAPRC, we would note that our committee was charged with closing the university’s $10 million deficit by Fiscal Year 2025. Therefore, our recommendations to reduce 35 FTE faculty and consolidate programs were in response to that call, rather than an independent finding about what would be good for the health of our liberal arts institution. That proposal sought both to help bridge...

On Friday, Oct. 7, through Monday, Oct. 12, ASUPS will open electronic polls for its fall 2022 election. Independent of preference for individual candidates, the relative importance is high for students at this university. Undergraduate students will vote to elect ten of their peers to the ASUPS Senate, a body responsible for allocating over $500,000 of annual student funds (levied via the student government fee) and representing the student voice on a range of issues brought forth by the ASUPS Cabinet and other groups in the University’s shared governance system....

  On Tuesday December 6th, 2016 the University of Puget Sound Community received an email from a group of faculty members that was “in response to a flyer that was distributed anonymously on our campus” which the email acknowledged was being sent out in an “unusual way” as not all the faculty endorsed the letter. However, there were clearly enough people who felt that there was an exigency that required sending an email out to students despite not having a consensus. It is this exigency I would like to address....