President Ed Ray unveiled a new vision for Oregon State University on Thursday that combines massive growth with a narrower focus and a major academic realignment in a bid to become a top-10 land grant institution.

By 2025, Ray told the Faculty Senate in his annual State of the University address, OSU should expand its enrollment from 21,000 today to as many as 35,000 students while increasing its complement of tenured and tenure-track faculty from 783 to between 1,300 and 1,500.

The Cascades Campus in Bend is targeted for even more rapid growth, from 600 students to as many as 4,000 in the next 15 years.

At the same time, Ray said, OSU needs to recruit more minority students and faculty, more international students and more high-achieving in-state students.

Ray wants the university to double its research funding from $252 million last year to at least $500 million by 2025 while expanding its share of industry-sponsored research. And, he told the faculty, he expects to do all this in a climate of increasingly shaky state financial support.

"Achieving this profile by 2025 will be a daunting task under the best of circumstances," he acknowledged, "and I think we can all agree that our circumstances are unlikely to be the best for the foreseeable future."

Rather than turning to the state or raising tuition to increase revenues, Ray plans to turn to private donors, more than doubling the university's annual fundraising. The Campaign for OSU, which started in 2004, has raised $534 million toward its $625 million goal, including $82 million last year. Ray wants to up the ante to as much as $225 million a year.

Doing that, he said, "will require at least one and perhaps two additional campaigns in the next 15 years."

Cost-cutting is also part of the plan. The university has already begun streamlining its administrative structure, consolidating some tasks traditionally done by departments or colleges into a smaller number of "business centers." Up to 50 jobs will be eliminated in the process, Ray said.

Even as OSU's enrollment grows, Ray said, the university needs to cut back the variety of its course offerings in order to sharpen its focus on the things it does best.

Without offering specifics, he said OSU will be "eliminating low-enrollment sections, courses, majors and minors at every level ... even as we increase sections in key bottleneck courses in areas such as chemistry, mathematics and education."

In order to concentrate on what he called "signature areas of excellence," Ray announced a plan to consolidate the university's 11 colleges into four new divisions:

• Earth Systems Science (including the colleges of Agricultural Sciences, Forestry and Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences).

• Health Sciences (colleges of Health and Human Sciences, Pharmacy and Veterinary Medicine).

• Business and Engineering (colleges of Business and Engineering).

• Arts and Sciences (colleges of Liberal Arts, Science and Education).

Ray invited the faculty to help shape the academic realignment. But he warned that the consolidation he has in mind will mean cutting some teaching jobs even as the university begins to add staff in key areas.

"We expect to eliminate as many as 300 positions at the university over the course of the next two years," Ray said. "Every effort will be made to accomplish this through vacancies, but it is not realistic to think that no one will lose his or her job."

In a question-and-answer session after the speech, several faculty members raised concerns about the president's ambitious growth targets and plans to narrow academic offerings.

But Ray said both were necessary if OSU is to become one of the nation's top public universities. Growth, he argued, will create the "critical mass" needed to achieve great things. But growth alone is not enough, he said. OSU must also create a distinctive identity for itself if it wants to compete with the most prestigious research institutions.

"We've got to place our bets. We've got to decide what are we best at, what do we have the potential to be a leader in," he said.

"We're not going to follow the pack. We're going to try to get to the future before they do."

After the meeting, Faculty Senate President Paul Doescher said the campus is divided about Ray's vision of the future.

"There are some faculty that are embracing the change, there are some faculty that are skeptical, and there are some that are waiting and watching and debating this change. But ultimately it's the president's decision," Doescher said.

"I think a lot of people are at the point where they know change is coming. They just want to know what that change is going to be so they can move forward."

Bennett Hall can be reached at 758-9529 or bennett.hall@lee.net.

Related

• Letter: Corvallis residents should oppose Ray's vision for ‘mega-OSU' (Oct. 14)
• Editorial: Treat OSU growth plan as real possibility (Oct. 21)