Dear Colleagues,
Our faculty union (United Academics) invites you to fill out a short survey asking about your current levels of trust in our UO administration. We seek to understand how instructional, research, and other faculty members are feeling about UO’s leadership practices over the past calendar year.
Contact the UA staff if you did not receive a link in the email where you typically receive your union's emails. The survey will remain open from January 26 until 5pm on February 20, 2026.
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Who can take the survey: Any faculty member currently represented within UA’s bargaining unit. You do not need to be a current union member to fill out this survey – not only do we welcome your participation, but we also welcome you to join our union!
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Privacy disclosure: You will be asked to provide an email to ensure we do not get multiple submissions from the same person; this info will not be shared or used to identify your responses in any way.
WHAT IS THE SURVEY ABOUT?
In the survey, we ask you to evaluate your college’s dean, the provost, the president, as well as the Board of Trustees. We also ask questions about the UO Senate. It may be confusing to understand the relationship between these various figures and groups. Here is a basic outline of what they’re responsible for:
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In general, it is “executive leadership” (AKA the President, the Provost, and Chief Financial Officer) who are primarily responsible for making major leadership and financial decisions for the university.
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The Board of Trustees have a “fiduciary responsibility” to the university. They make some large decisions, but mostly they review and approve the decisions proposed by executive leadership.
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Deans and unit heads carry out these major decisions. Smaller decisions about how exactly to implement them are often left up to the Dean or unit head.
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The UO Senate, formed mainly by faculty (as well as staff and students) works to “collaborate with the trustees, the president, the administration and various university committees to further the academic mission of UO.”
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To learn more about specific financial responsibilities, you can follow this link and read the section on “Who makes financial decisions at the UO?”
We encourage you to fill it out, and to ask your colleagues (including non-union members) to take it as well. The more responses we receive, the more confident we will be in communicating to the UO administration how faculty are feeling about our leadership during these precarious times.
WHAT WILL UA DO WITH THE DATA?
After collecting the surveys, we plan to issue a report summarizing the responses and publicize it by the end of Winter Term. This survey (and the public report) will be an important step not only in establishing more trust between UO leadership and workers, but also in establishing more democratic processes of shared governance on the challenges that affect all of us.
IS THIS DIFFERENT FROM UO ADMIN’S SURVEY?
Yes. UA’s survey about trust in leadership and the administration’s recently announced survey on faculty engagement are two separate, unrelated surveys. Although UA’s survey has been in the works for several months, we are aware the coincidental timing of the two surveys isn’t ideal. UA’s survey should only take ~15 minutes to complete.
Please encourage your colleagues (especially non-union members) to fill out this trust survey!
In Solidarity,
United Academics Leadership Team