Lower undergraduate enrollment in recent years has led to reduced tuition revenue, and subsequently, the need to enforce cost-cutting measures across the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) campus. Anticipated cuts on the academic side of campus have contributed to growing dissatisfaction among faculty and staff regarding current compensation practices.
A Mossy Log article published last September reported that LC had hoped to enroll 625 first-year students this academic year. Instead, only 485 first-year students enrolled in LC, compared to 553 first-year students the year prior. This is in part due to Federal Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) delays last spring.
It remains unclear whether the delayed rollout of the 2025-26 FAFSA will lead to a smaller incoming class this fall and continued CAS budget cuts that threaten faculty salaries and support staff wages. LC is anticipating that CAS will face a $3.7 million deficit for FY25 (Fiscal Year 2025) due to low enrollment and the increased central costs resulting from inflation — which include utilities, custodial services, insurance and food costs associated with residential students.
The primary source of financial stress for the school is decreased net tuition revenue, stemming largely from low enrollment in recent years and increased financial aid packages. As of Nov. 5 2024, students on average pay only 38.6% of full tuition. Additionally, with the largest class on campus (the class of 2025, or the so-called Classzilla) about to graduate, tuition revenue is expected to fall further.
In early March, the Budget Advisory Committee (BAC), comprised of nine members (faculty, staff and one student representative), sent a Compensation Survey to the CAS faculty and CAS forum email listservs to solicit opinions on current compensation practices. The survey was open March 4-18, and its results shed light upon widespread discontent among CAS faculty and staff members regarding wages, budget cuts, workloads and morale.
The Compensation Survey was accompanied by a Cost Savings Survey, whose data, as of April 8, had not yet been analyzed by the Budget Advisory Committee Working Group (BACWG). The Cost Savings Survey was open March 17-21 and sought feedback on a wide variety of proposed cost-cutting measures, ranging from reducing sabbatical pay, to disincentivizing small class sizes to faculty and staff attrition. Several of these long-term cost-cutting measures were proposed at the BACWG “Unhappy Hour” meeting on Feb. 11, 2025, which was open to faculty, staff and other community members.
Some proposals suggested increasing professors’ teaching loads from five classes per academic year to six. Others would count classes consisting of eight students or fewer as equivalent to teaching half of a class, requiring professors to take on additional work to reach the quota.
Cost-saving measures proposed at budget meetings over the past few months ranged from changes to sabbatical policies, which would see professors receiving reduced pay on sabbatical relative to current policy, to curriculum changes such as eliminating the CORE Numbers requirement for first years or adjusting the foreign language requirement. Proposals for reductions to departmental operating budgets and conference travel budgets surfaced, as did suggestions about reducing support and administrative staff. One proposal suggested decreasing the amount of support staff and contingent faculty positions, whereas others floated the idea of faculty and staff attrition (in which positions left vacant by retirement or resignation would remain unfilled), as well as offering early retirement packages to incentivize staff and faculty to leave their positions.
The committee has been clear throughout the process that all proposals are preliminary and that no formal recommendations have been made, nor has any course of action yet been decided upon. The results and analysis from the Cost Savings Survey will be presented at the next BAC meeting on May 1.
In the most recent BAC report from April 1, the committee presents a comprehensive summary and analysis of the findings from the Compensation Survey, which garnered 148 responses from a wide cross-section of both faculty and support staff working this academic year. This academic year, there are 133 faculty members and approximately 150 support staff employees employed across the CAS. Roughly one-third of the responses to the Compensation Survey came from staff, while two-thirds came from faculty. The most common length of service reported by survey respondents was more than 15 years.
The first question on the Compensation Survey asked respondents how satisfied they were with LC compensation on a scale of 1-10. The mean response was 4.5, with a standard deviation of 2.3. This means that on average, respondents reported feeling a satisfaction level of 4.5 out of 10, and that most responses fell between 2.2 and 6.7 on the scale. It is worth noting that only about 50% of staff and faculty submitted responses, so it is possible that those experiencing more discontentment were more likely to fill out the survey, skewing the data due to self-selection bias.
Anonymous quotes from the survey, along with data analysis charts, were included in the April 1 BAC report, which depicted the range of sentiments felt among staff and faculty regarding the school’s current compensation practices.
One respondent, an associate professor, described their reliance on supplemental income, contract work and extreme budgeting.
“Overall, I used to be an excellent liberal arts college professor, love my job, and invest in the college. Now I’m a mediocre college professor, feel grief for losing my academic career, and I am in the process of leaving. I used to be proud of the way I served students. Now I’m embarrassed by my lack of service, but I need to take care of myself,” they wrote.
A different associate professor expressed frustration with their workload.
“They don’t actually care about me – I am overworked. This is not the dream I thought I was pursuing,” they wrote.
Another associate professor offered a more positive critique, but did note that salaries have lagged behind cost of living adjustments (COLAs) that account for inflation.
“I’ve been very lucky (and worked very hard) to have a tenured position. Because we live quite cheaply, I have been able to save enough and LC has contributed enough for a minimal retirement. Overall LC’s compensation has increased my well-being an adequate amount,” they wrote. “I do have fears for the future as inflation increases… Salaries are flat and do not keep up with COLA … we are getting further and further behind.”
Another anonymous respondent expressed concern about their ability to keep up with rising costs.
“Stagnant. Hurtful. Fear-inducing. If my current housing changes, will I be able to afford housing in Portland?” they wrote.
In an interview with The Mossy Log, co-chair of BAC and Professor of History Elliott Young clarified the role of BAC in discussions with the school about where to enact cost-cutting measures.
“The role of the Budget Advisory Committee is to advise the Dean on the budget as it relates to CAS in general, but in particular, the academic part of CAS. So we look into everything from revenues, expenses, compensation for faculty and staff and make recommendations,” Young said. “We have no decision-making power, but we can at least communicate to the faculty what we’ve learned and make recommendations.”
The BACWG was created by CAS Dean Bruce Suttmeier and tasked with finding specific areas where cuts can be made, to then present to faculty and administration for feedback. The BACWG similarly has no decision-making power. Young explained that although initially, BACWG was asked to find ways to make $1 million in cuts for next year’s budget, the school shifted away from that number because it was able to secure funding for Fiscal Year 2025 (FY25).
“Initially, the charge was to find a million dollars in cuts from the academic part of the CAS budget. The million-dollar number changed at a certain point, and they said, ‘Don’t focus on the million dollars, what we need to do is find long-term structural cuts to the deficit,’” Young said. “The size of how much we have to cut, it’s not exactly clear, but we know that our revenues have been decreasing, principally because net tuition revenue has gone down dramatically.”
Young explained that over the last five years, faculty and staff have faced a 9.1% reduction in inflation-adjusted or “real” wages. This means that a staff member who was hired in 2009 with a salary of $60,000 now makes a salary of just $54,655 in 2009 dollars.
“We understand we need to find the money from somewhere, but we don’t think that continuing to cut faculty and staff wages is viable,” Young said.
According to Young, at a recent faculty meeting where President Robin Holmes-Sullivan was in attendance, Holmes-Sullivan was asked why over the past few years, faculty and staff have not received any merit increases, while executives continue to receive significant raises. Executive compensation is listed on the school’s Form 990 (which can be found on ProPublica) which is a public tax form filed by all non-profit organizations, including LC.
“Looking back a few years, at the same time as our salaries, our real wages were being cut, you see $17,000, $20,000 raises for the top earners at the college,” Young said. “The President said that the 990 forms are not transparent. In other words, they include benefits and that it doesn’t really reflect the true wage increases, so that’s still a question. The other thing she said was that even when they get the same salary pool, they can get merit increases. So at the same time there’s faculty and staff that have not had any merit increases, it appears that the upper administration are still getting merit increases.”
Young clarified that despite the frustration this dynamic causes, he did not see executive salaries as contributing significantly to the budget issues.
“The budget problems are principally because of declining net tuition revenue. But I think that in terms of the moral economy at the college, people who are faculty and staff and who are sacrificing over a decade in their salaries want to see the people who are earning two-hundred, five-hundred-thousand dollars sharing in the pain.”
The most recent public data relating to executive salary compensation was from LC’s FY2023 Form 990, which included information about executives’ compensation and the breakdown of the institutions’ functional expenses. The college is in the process of filing its 2024 Form 990, and does not know when the form will be made public, though the filing deadline for FY24 is April 15, 2025. The 2023 Form 990 shows the total compensation for executive officials as ranging from $89,352 to $346,574. Meanwhile, faculty yearly salaries at LC in 2025 range from $41,933 to $122,381, with the lower end reflecting non-full time faculty with term, and the higher end of the faculty salaries representing senior, tenure-track professors.
Young noted that contingent faculty are feeling uneasy about budget cuts and fair compensation. Faculty with tenure and faculty with term, he said, were told at the beginning of the process that they would not be contemplated in cuts, though they continue to advocate for reasonable COLAs, merit increases and benefits. Both contingent and non-contingent faculty have expressed concern about the potential impact of these cuts to their workloads without adequate compensation, as they pick up duties left behind by attritional staff and faculty.
“The contingent faculty, I think, is feeling incredibly vulnerable. And those people who are tenured, I don’t think are feeling like they’re gonna lose their jobs, but are feeling like ‘How could we continue to earn less and less money and be expected to do more and more work?’” Young said.
He also touched on the overall low morale, emphasizing the tricky balance BAC must attempt to strike between the cost cutting assigned to them and maintaining faculty and staff morale so as to not worsen the situation.
“I think morale is at the lowest point I’ve seen it in the 26, 27 years that I’ve been here,” he said. “We feel on the BAC that the morale will have an impact on the educational mission and on students, that people … won’t have the bandwidth to provide the kind of attention to students that is the hallmark of Lewis & Clark … If people are stretched too thin, they won’t be able to do that.”
In the Compensation Survey results, a significant number of staff and faculty respondents expressed that they were actively looking for another job or considering leaving, Young pointed out that in the current political climate, jobs in academia offer less stability.
“It comes at a time when there are these massive attacks against higher education where positions are being reduced all over,” Young said. “So it’s not easy for people to move from one academic job to another academic job. Some people are contemplating moving out of academia and into the private sector.”
Young expressed a desire for the school to be more transparent about a timeline for generating more revenue.
“We can’t cut our way to solving this problem,” Young said. “The president has said that. We’ve all said that. It all hinges on being able to generate more revenue.”
Although both faculty and staff have expressed concern about COLA, undercompensation and job security, their protections differ from one another. Faculty are paid in yearly salaries, whereas administrative support staff are paid hourly, with benefits, with three-year contracts negotiated through their union, the Lewis & Clark College Support Staff Association (LCCSSA).
Chel Pennock, president of LCCSSA, explained how anticipated budget cuts are impacting morale among support staff, which includes clerical, secretarial, print shop, administration offices, Campus Safety and laboratory technician employees across the three campuses. Pennock drew a distinction between administrative staff and administrative support staff. The former generally are made up of salaried management positions, whereas the latter are represented by LCCSSA. Administrative support staff are hourly employees with contracts and benefits, whose wages, according to the current contract’s wage table, range from $20.05 to $45.84 an hour. Assuming a 40-hour work week with no time off, this translates to annual salaries of between $41,704 and $95,347.
“Elliott and those guys were tasked in their Budget Advisory Committee with basically throwing out all the ideas where they could find savings, because of Classzilla graduating, and losing funding from that, and then such low enrollment for the freshmen we have right now,” Pennock said. “That shortage carries through for four years, you know. And so they were tasked, and it was basically like, ‘No idea is a bad idea,’ or ‘Every idea is a bad idea.’”
Pennock explained that while none of the ideas for cost-cutting were ideal, or desirable, support staff were disheartened to hear that one suggestion proposed at a faculty meeting included reducing the amount of support staff.
“One of their (ideas) was reducing admin staff, but they weren’t clear in their discussions if they were talking about managers, admin staff or support staff,” she said. “Sometimes they did say support staff and there were some places where they did target us, and say, ‘Well, we could cut from this many down to this many, or as people leave, not hire more, and then just move those duties to others.’”
Pennock shared that these discussions took place among faculty, and that support staff were not invited to participate in conversations about potentially harmful cuts to their positions and wages.
“There was no LCCSSA representation invited to those discussions, so they were having these discussions and then finally these reports come out, and it’s like ‘Wait, what?’” Pennock said. “The CAS support staff, they were really hurt that these people that they support were targeting their jobs. Morale’s down there, too. It’s been hard.”
Pennock added that LCCSSA reached out to BAC, and that in the weeks since, a significant amount of support and acknowledgment for keeping support staff was expressed in BAC meetings.
“We called out to them and said, ‘Hey, we really need a distinction when you’re talking about support staff versus admin staff, and what you’re talking of cutting,’” Pennock said. “We did hear a lot of support in some of their meetings that they had later, and people going, ‘No, you can’t take them. We need them. They do all these things for us. They help with all the budget things, and their P-cards, and their travel expenses, and ordering supplies and supervising the student workers, and copying tests for them. They manage the email accounts for the department, help with the symposia.’”
Pennock clarified that although the BAC is tasked with suggesting possible cost-cutting measures to the administration, the decision will ultimately come from higher up.
“These were all ideas that were thrown out. Ultimately, they don’t have the decision. The decision is gonna come from way above,” she said.
Pennock explained that LCCSSA’s current three-year contract ends on May 31, and that its executive board is currently preparing to negotiate the next three-year contract.
“My hope is that we can negotiate suitable cost of living increases for our next contract,” Pennock said. “We are getting ready to go into negotiations with management to start our next three years of the contract, and so our goal is to protect our wages, raises and positions to the extent that we can.”
On behalf of LC administration, Vice President of Communications Lori Friedman provided comments to The Mossy Log via email, addressing questions about the administration’s use of funds, plans to generate more revenue and how administration is being impacted by CAS’s structural deficit. ProPublica reports that LC had a net income of $17.1 million for the 2023 fiscal year. Friedman explained that those funds cannot be used to offset the $1 million that was set as a target for faculty cuts, because donors and granting agencies dictate how funds will be allocated.
“The College is not able to use these types of funds beyond what the donors or granting agencies have designated the funds for,” Friedman wrote. “The CAS operating budget is primarily funded by fees from tuition, room & board as well as an annual allocation from the endowment (the allocation amount is set by the Board) and annual fund giving.”
Friedman shared that LC is expecting a deficit of $3.7 million for FY25.
“CAS generated $2.9 million more than expenses for FY23,” she wrote. “For FY24, CAS generated $1.2 million less than expenses. Given expected enrollment and financial aid, we are forecasting that CAS will generate $3.7 million less than expenses for FY25.”
Friedman ascribed declining revenue, and therefore CAS’s structural deficit, to the school’s decision to increase financial aid in recent years.
“Increases in financial aid can be attributed to rising costs and inflation, as well as a desire to make a Lewis & Clark College education as accessible as possible,” Friedman wrote.
In response to a question about whether or not staff members at the administrative and executive levels are experiencing salary cuts, Friedman said that all CAS employees are being asked to reduce costs, including exempt, or managerial, non-unionized staff.
“All divisions of CAS and Common Services are being asked to reduce costs,” she said. “All exempt CAS and Common Services staff as well as the Executive Council are foregoing increases to compensation in FY26. To meet cost reduction targets in next year’s budget, the alternative would have been to reduce faculty and staff positions.”
Administrative and executive salaries in 2024 will be disclosed in the FY24 Form 990. Friedman noted that the form lists total compensation, which includes salary, 403b retirement contributions and health care contributions in a single figure and stated that she did not know when the information would be publicly available, but that the school was working to meet the April 15 federal tax deadline. When asked directly about the administration’s time frame for generating new revenues, as well as taking care of its staff and faculty long term, in terms of reasonable workloads, COLAs and job security, Friedman provided the following statement:
“The aim of The President’s Strategic Imperatives, Big Ideas planning, and the upcoming comprehensive fundraising campaign is focused on generating new revenues and putting the College on a more stable, sustainable financial foundation. This is an effort initiated by the President but I’ll point out that it involves numerous faculty and staff, since ensuring the College’s future must be a collective effort. The College is evaluating opportunities for revenue growth including expansion of summer conference & event programming, as well as expanded academic offerings during the summer.”
The BAC report from April 1 stated that “the biggest cost increases have occurred in ‘central’ costs, which have increased from 45.4% of the total CAS budget in FY15 to 48.6% in FY24,” and that “notable increases have occurred in depreciation, utilities, custodial services, insurance, and food costs associated with residential students.” Friedman explained that this is because revenue from residential students is vital for generating CAS revenue.
“The revenue from on-campus residential students is a key component of the CAS operating budget. A reduction in residential students would result in less funding for the college overall. The College is focused on ensuring high occupancy. There are no plans to make material changes to the residential experience of on campus students,” said Friedman.
According to Friedman, the faculty committee is still using $1 million as a target for savings opportunities, though Young and fellow BAC co-chair and Associate Professor of Economics Cliff Bekar, expressed a different sentiment. Young shared that they were explicitly told by Dean of the College Bruce Suttmeier that this year’s cuts should not focus on the $1 million since the college had already identified savings of $1.2 million for FY 26, and that the BACWG’s proposed cuts, for which there was no designated dollar amount, would only be implemented for FY 27.
“The faculty committee is charged with looking at and recommending medium- and long-term saving opportunities in the CAS academic budget,” Friedman said. “The amount of $1 million was set as a target for those savings. They are still using that as a guide for multi-year savings.”
It is not yet clear what cuts will be made, though it is generally agreed among the faculty, staff and administration that the school will need to generate a significant amount of revenue to maintain the college’ current operations, programs and staffing.
On Dec. 10, 2024, Bekar, in an interview with The Mossy Log, spoke to the difficulty of the college’s financial position and the task assigned to the BACWG of making cuts from the academic side of CAS.
“At this point, what we’re doing is taking the position that there are no such things as bad ideas,” Bekar said. “So we’re analyzing and modeling almost any possibility.”
At that time, Bekar also highlighted that this is challenging work that will cause significant impacts to many at the college. He emphasized the care the committee is taking to attempt to minimize the pain faced by students, staff and faculty.
“It’s not like there’s a lot of easy cuts to make,” said Bekar. “All the cuts at this point involve real pain for real people.”
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