File photo of the exterior the Klamath Falls campus of the Oregon Institute of Technology. Faculty leaders and student government at OIT are expressing opposition to the board of trustees, in light of a five-year extension for the college's president.
Donald Orr / OPB
Oregon Institute of Technology student and faculty leadership groups this week expressed disapproval in university leadership following a decision by the OIT Board of Trustees to extend the university president’s employment contract for five years.
In a rare move, the Associated Students of OIT, Oregon Tech’s student government, has unanimously passed a resolution of “no confidence” in OIT’s Board of Trustees. OIT’s Faculty Senate Executive Committee also drafted an open “letter of concern” this past weekend accusing the board of “disregard” for issues raised by the university community, which extends from its main campus in Klamath Falls to its Portland-area presence in Wilsonville.
Among both the student and faculty groups’ concerns was the board’s decision earlier this month to extend current university president Nagi Naganathan’s contract. Both student and faculty leadership groups have repeatedly voiced disapproval of Naganathan’s leadership over the past year.
“[W]e believe this decision to have been ill-considered and is the most recent and egregious piece of evidence that the Board of Trustees as a body has not taken seriously their fiduciary responsibility to the university community,” Oregon Tech’s Faculty Senate Executive Committee wrote in its open letter.
The executive committee said among other issues, faculty have raised doubts about Naganathan’s fitness to lead due to “his lack of respect for shared governance.”
The faculty senate last year voted that they had no confidence in Naganathan’s leadership and called for his resignation. That vote took place shortly before OIT’s faculty union led the first strike by a public university faculty in Oregon history.
“In the aftermath of these events, we continue to face issues under Dr. Naganathan’s leadership: significant faculty and staff attrition, falling student retention and enrollment, numerous budgetary uncertainties, and a precipitous decline in morale across the university,” the faculty senate’s executive committee wrote.
Falling student enrollment and tight budgets are challenges in higher education across the country, particularly at Oregon’s smaller universities and colleges, as the pandemic continues to affect campus communities.
Faculty, students point to incomplete reports related to president’s performance
The Associated Students of OIT, or ASOIT, wrote a letter this week following its own vote of no confidence in the board of trustees. The ASOIT wrote that it believes the board disregarded the pending results of a comprehensive review of Naganathan before renewing his contract.
According to board policy, OIT’s president will undergo a periodic “comprehensive evaluation” usually every four to five years.
Naganathan became OIT’s president in 2017 and is coming up on the end of his fifth year.
As part of that evaluation process, the board contracted with Casagrande Consulting to perform Naganathan’s comprehensive review. ASOIT pointed out that the company had not yet completed that review when the board chose to renew Naganathan’s five-year contract.
The OIT Board also began the process last year of conducting a “climate survey” to address ongoing tensions between administration and students and staff. The final results have not been released, but ModernThink — the company OIT contracted with to conduct it — discussed preliminary findings during a board meeting in April. Those findings identified that a lack of confidence in Naganathan’s leadership is “widespread and deeply held” across the campus community.
“Ultimately, it is clear that the significant and costly efforts to gather community input were not meaningfully used to inform the decision to extend the president’s contract,” the faculty senate’s executive committee wrote.
OIT’s Board Chair, Jessica Gomez, told OPB in a statement that the board is taking steps, including that campus climate assessment, to address the concerns of stakeholders.
“Importantly, Oregon Tech is already actively engaged in addressing preliminary information from the assessment, and will continue to address campus climate issues once that assessment is finalized,” Gomez said. “While it is understandable that these actions may not seem to be coming fast enough to some stakeholders, they are underway and progressing.”
Board ethics, governor’s race also part of critique of trustees
According to the Oregon Student Association, a nonprofit organization advocating for college and university students across the state, tension between campus groups and university leadership isn’t unusual. The Board of Trustees system has only been functioning in Oregon for the past decade or so, but in that time OSA says there have been numerous instances of friction between student governments and university boards.
That includes students at Western Oregon University who expressed concerns over process barriers with the university board when working to create a center for students of color. WOU ultimately approved and funded the new Freedom Center. Leaders with Oregon State University’s student government were also in vocal opposition of that university’s last permanent president, F. King Alexander, as he was accused of mishandling sexual misconduct reports at his previous institution. Alexander ultimately resigned last year under pressure.
But, Oregon Student Association’s interim executive director Evelyn Kocher told OPB she’s not aware of any previous explicit votes of no confidence conducted by student governments before this one by ASOIT.
Along with concerns directly related to Naganathan, the Associated Students of OIT have questioned the ethics of some of the board’s recent decisions. In its letter, the ASOIT accused the board of appointing for board positions “apparent internal recommendations of friends rather than experienced community members.”
The student government also questioned decisions related to Board Chair Gomez, who recently lost her bid for the Republican nomination for Oregon governor. The ASOIT pointed out that the university released a press release about the board lowering a tuition increase which mentioned Gomez’s name six times. That release came out just days before the primary election last month.
“The students of Oregon Tech are deeply concerned about the failure of leadership from our Board of Trustees,” the ASOIT wrote. “The Associated Students of Oregon Tech call upon the Board to do better, and we call upon the community at large to hold the Board accountable for their deficiencies in leadership.”