The UO Has Plenty of Money

That’s the big take away from a presentation put on by Professor Howard Bunsis, the Treasurer of the American Association of University Professors.

Using the UO’s own data, Professor Bunsis laid out where the university’s money comes from (tuition and grants), what they do with it (spend it on administration), and how much they have (a lot).

Professor Bunsis gave the presentation as part of an event organized by the United Academics and it is chock full of useful information.

For our purposes, the big fact that he presented is that the UO has about $89 million in unrestricted reserves. That’s $89 million that they could use to raise our wages, eliminate our fees, improve our office conditions and improve our health care.

So far, the UO hasn’t said much in bargaining about money, other than to politely demur when we suggested that they had plenty of it. Based on past experience, we anticipate that they will try to say that while the university may have money, the pot of money that they use for GTFs is very tiny and shrinking all the time.

You can imagine what our response will be.

Oh, hey, look, the Register-Guard agrees!